As the market heads into one of the busiest periods and approaches the crucial 1st January renewal season, many Assureds should now be preparing their budgets for 2024 renewals and actively seeking formal terms. The burning question for many will be: What can they expect to happen?

The landscape we find ourselves in is very interesting and finely balanced. We have a property market that is still looking for rises, which you can read more about in our latest property market update here, and a Marine market that has given itself a collective pat on the back for the work from c.2020 onwards. Like any market cycle this is where we see new and returning entrants into the marketplace. We asked a well-known AI system recently what they felt was the capacity in the London cargo market, and they came back with USD3.5 billion, which was an interesting response. We feel that this number may be more the global capacity but London stands in the c. USD1.25bn - USD1.5bn mark overall, approximately c.75% higher than it was 3 years ago.

Markets continue to push to maintain rating as much as possible and many risks are renewing without major changes overall, however, there is a noticeable undercurrent of intensifying competition escalating. We believe that the recent people movement and talent shortage in the market is creating a strange dynamic. New, and some existing, markets have some aggressive targets. Many syndicates and companies are however already running at full capacity which is maintaining the market i.e. the shortage of time to go through the full Underwriting process (modelling, information review, survey review, wording review and then pricing). This means it is falling on a few class leaders. This process can often be slow in the current market and the more time brokers are given provides more options for Assureds. The fact that there are only a few class leaders is maintaining our specialist product and providing longevity for Assureds.

The market has seen a movement away from attritional claims in the past years with increased retentions for Assureds, however medium to large claims are still happening and here inflation has driven an increase in claims values. Increased commodity prices, repair costs, and service costs have all increased claims over the past 12 months, however we do not consider this to be worrying trend overall.