Anthony Cordonnier, Global Co-Head of Cyber, Managing Director at reinsurance broker Marsh Re, said a meaningful shift that is beginning to appear is a willingness among some buyers to explore higher cessions at the 1 January 2027 cyber renewals.
In an interview with Reinsurance News around the annual meeting of the reinsurance industry in Monte Carlo, Cordonnier explained that buyers of cyber reinsurance are exploring higher cessions as they reassess whether their current programmes are appropriately sized for the risks they are running.
“The coming renewal therefore feels more substantive than routine, particularly for those that start the dialogue early and use that time to think carefully about structure rather than only pricing,” he said.
At the key 1.1 2027 cyber renewals, Cordonnier noted that buyers with the widest range of options are likely to be those that have invested properly in understanding their exposure and can articulate a coherent underwriting strategy to the market.
“Structure, pricing and counterparty choice all become easier to navigate when that foundation is in place,” he explained. “At the programme level, there is already much more scrutiny on attachments, limits, reinstatements and aggregation, with each being tested more seriously against accumulation scenarios and with event definitions likely to receive closer attention in light of AI-accelerated clustering risk.”
Regarding the key trends shaping the global cyber re/insurance market, Cordonnier emphasised that insurers understand the exposure far better than they did a few years ago, explaining that cedants have a clearer view of their portfolios, and this improvement in shared understanding is now feeding through into structural innovation.
He continued, “In 2026 we placed the first property/cyber combined cat protection, three new risk XL covers, and the first cyber hard retro programme at 1/1, all of which point to a market whose toolkit has broadened materially rather than simply been refined around the edges.
“For buyers with a clear underwriting strategy, the discussion is increasingly about building protection around the risk they are actually carrying, rather than asking them to adapt to structures designed for a much earlier phase of the market. At the same time, cyber consortia are developing, appetite for emerging risks is growing, and the overall direction of travel is towards a market with greater depth, confidence and sophistication.”
Looking ahead, Cordonnier said he sees international cyber markets outside the US as the clearest growth opportunity.
He explained, “Lower penetration, shorter tail profiles and meaningful diversification benefits make them particularly attractive for carriers that are thinking carefully about the balance of their portfolios by geography rather than simply chasing scale in the largest market.
“Coverage is broadening as well. Cyber property damage has moved well beyond niche status and is becoming part of the mainstream discussion, while affirmative war coverage is also starting to come through. Hard retro is opening the door to new entrants that want cyber exposure without competing directly with established players in the same way. Further out, we are working on a cross-line AI occurrence cover aimed at addressing wording ambiguity across whole portfolios rather than only cyber lines, and that feels like an area where the market has a real need for something better developed.”
Meanwhile, the US remains the largest market on both the insurance and reinsurance side, and it is also the most complex and longest-tailed. As a result, carriers are paying close attention to geographic mix and balancing the scale of the US opportunity against the benefits of international diversification.
“At the same time, reinsurers are becoming more differentiated in how they respond to individual clients. Mid-year we placed the lowest ever attaching aggregate stop loss cover for a European cedant, and that kind of outcome tends to come when the market has taken the time to understand the underlying portfolio properly rather than relying on a standardised view of cyber risk,” added Cordonnier.
He also discussed how the rapid advancement and adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the cyber threat landscape.
“Mean time-to-exploit has fallen from 745 days in 2020 to hours in 2026, which gives a good sense of the pace at which the environment is changing. The important point, though, is to be precise about what AI is doing. Rather than creating an entirely new category of attack, it is accelerating familiar tools and tactics, increasing scale, and lowering the technical skill barrier required to use them effectively.
“Defenders are using many of the same capabilities, so the most likely consequence is not necessarily a wholesale step change in severity. From a modelling perspective, the more immediate implication is speed. The larger concern sits around accumulation, because AI-enabled vulnerability discovery increases the chance of fast-moving events affecting widely deployed software or shared infrastructure. When that happens, losses can cluster quickly, even if the downstream consequences such as litigation, forensics and regulatory action still unfold over a much longer timeframe and keep claims development long-tailed.”
In terms of reinsurance broker Marsh Re’s outlook for the cyber capacity supply-demand balance heading into RVS 2026 and beyond, Cordonnier said growth has moderated from levels seen in 2022 and 2023 but remains healthy, while the range of available appetite is broader than it has been at any previous point in the market’s development.
He continued, “Hard retro, risk XL and combined structures are all accessible today, which matters because retro expansion gives new entrants a route into the market without requiring them to compete directly with incumbent players, while also creating room for established reinsurers to grow their own books.
“There are no obvious signs of capacity pulling back. Where a constraint does emerge, it tends to be less about appetite than about how clearly cedants can explain the exposure they want the market to support. Programmes that are well structured, transparent and analytically credible are continuing to find a receptive audience.”
To end, Cordonnier discussed the outlook for the cyber ILS market, noting that investor confidence is improving as modelling gets better and the pricing gap between traditional and non-traditional capital continues to narrow.
“Combined property/cyber structures are especially interesting in that context because the diversification benefits make the risk easier for alternative capital to digest,” he said.
“Pure-play cyber sidecars are more challenging, largely because long-tail development and catastrophe exposure create extended lock-up periods without the investment return profile that helps casualty sidecars work, and without the cleaner loss pattern that property cat investors are used to analysing.
“Multi-line sidecars look more promising,” Cordonnier said. “We have placed several structures where cyber sits as one component within a broader portfolio, and at the moment that is where the investor economics appear to make the most sense.”
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