The Clock You’re Not Watching: How Reinsurance Cycles Shape Program Success

Most program owners think about readiness in terms of product. Is the coverage designed to reinforce my underwriting intent? Will I have enough writing authority to serve my intended market? Do we have a carrier?

But there’s another kind of readiness that is often missed.

The calendar.

If you’re looking to launch or renew a program, your timing needs to align with something you don’t control: reinsurance capital. It’s important for you to understand their calendar and how to align it with your go-to-market timeline.

Reinsurance renewals happen continuously but do cluster around some common dates. January 1 and June 1 are the big ones. That’s when significant global capacity resets. If you’re not ready to be in the market months ahead of those dates, you’re probably too late or too early.

When the renewal seasons hit, reinsurers are triaging hundreds of renewals and submissions, rebalancing and optimizing their own portfolios. If your program isn’t quite ready or even just poorly timed it won’t get the consideration it deserves. Worse, you might end up getting passed over entirely.

The 2022/2023 reinsurance market was marked by significant strain and a sharp hardening of terms across the board. It was considered the hardest market in a generation.

Programs that didn’t start early enough got caught in the bottleneck. Even strong programs faced non-renewals or had to accept higher retentions or unpalatable term changes because reinsurers were maxed out. For programs offering multi-peril programs, navigating both the property and casualty markets simultaneously was beyond challenging.

You can’t compress trust. But you can compress the timeline.

Today, we’re a few years into a stabilized reinsurance market where good opportunities are reviewed opportunistically by reinsurers looking to deploy their capacity behind good underwriters.

The MGAs and program leaders who incorporate reinsurer engagement as part of their go-to-market and not just another item on the launch checklist present with more credibility than those who do not.

These program leaders do the work to present their submissions professionally. They show the work. And they anticipate the questions likely to be posed, and have those answers ready to serve at the appropriate time.

While reinsurers are pricing and modeling the program’s risk, they’re also judging management quality. They are looking at how grounded the underwriting rationale and capital strategy are, and the realistic operational processes in place to manage the day to day. Start the work early so the conversations move quickly.

Design backward from the calendar.

If you’re aiming for a January launch, that’s not a Q4 conversation. It’s a Q2 job. At the latest.

That means:

• Your underwriting model should be developed

• Your product strategy should be locked

• Your submission should be authored

• Your distribution partners tee’d up

• And you should be near operation-ready coming into Q4

If you’re not there and you aren’t quite sure how to start the conversation, then the next step is to get help. More than advice, but execution from experienced and credible professionals.

That’s what Sproutr does. We build with you and design a go-to-market program strategy that is sequenced with third-party timelines. Authoring, guidance, and credible product design that carriers and reinsurers trust.

Want to know if your program is ready?

We offer a free, 2-hour strategy session to assess readiness and map what’s missing. We’ll walk through your goals, your timeline, and what risk takers expect when you show up.

This session gives you a grounded, tactical plan to move forward or the clarity to know you need to wait.

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