John Doyle, president and CEO of global insurance and reinsurance brokerage group Marsh, said today that while 2026 is unlikely to be Guy Carpenter’s fastest-growing year, he was “pleased” with the reinsurance brokerage’s first-quarter execution despite current headwinds.
Guy Carpenter Revenue for the first quarter of 2026 was $1.2 billion, up 3% year over year and up 2% on an underlying basis, and Marsh CEO Doyle said on the company’s recent earnings call that the property catastrophe reinsurance market is very soft.
During the call, Doyle was asked whether Guy Carpenter might adopt a 2% underlying growth number in the near term given current pricing dynamics and further weakness at renewal on April 1.
He explained that Guy Carpenter was particularly vulnerable to a softening housing market in the first quarter and was also affected to some extent in the second quarter of the year given renewals in Japan and mid-year Florida.
“What I will say to you is that despite the good headwinds we’re facing right now, I’m very pleased with how we’re executing. Again, these market headwinds are good for our customers, right, so we’re servicing our customers right now. But customer retention is great and we had an excellent new business quarter. So, I’m very pleased with how the team is executing in a challenging market. It’s unlikely to be Guy Carpenter this year. Best growth years so, we’ve been planning and providing guidance for that,” Doyle said.
During the earnings call, Marsh executives also took questions about demand in the current market landscape, with Guy Carpenter President and CEO Dean Klisura emphasizing that the reinsurance broker saw record new business on its platform despite real estate market dynamics and other growth headwinds during the quarter.
“I’m very pleased with the fact that we achieved double-digit new business growth in every region and across our global businesses this quarter,” Klisura said. “As Mark and John noted, we continue to see very strong catastrophe bond markets and overall ILS markets.”
In fact, Guy Carpenter issued a record seven catastrophe bonds in the first quarter of 2026, and Klisura highlighted that approximately $2 billion of new third-party capital has entered the market purely to chase accident insurance, overall account quota shares and other similar instruments.
“I talked about our capital and advisory business, our investment banking business on previous calls, we’ve never had more M&A advisory mandates, and as I mentioned, we’re forming new sidecars to raise capital for MGA, the Lloyd’s platform, the structured credit business and our MGA business,” Klisura said.
“On the last call, we talked about data centers. There were just a couple of headlines out there. There were 50 deals in the market with over $750 million in funding. All of Guy Carpenter’s clients are looking to build more data centers, but they all need additional reinsurance protection. I think the latest element of this … is that clients are now talking about issuing catastrophe bonds and leveraging third-party capital to build more data center businesses. So, I would say, overall, for Guy Carpenter, we have seen a greater diversity of new business opportunities over the years,” he added.
In Doyle’s opening remarks, which highlighted competitive insurance and reinsurance market conditions, Doyle noted that primary commercial insurance rates fell 5% in Q1’26 after falling 4% in Q4’25, according to the Marsh Global Insurance Market Index (which is biased toward large accounts), driven primarily by property.
“Global property insurance rates were down 9% year over year, unchanged from the previous quarter. Global financial and professional insurance rates were down 5%, and cyber insurance rates were also down 5%. Global casualty rates were up 3%, including an 18% increase in U.S. excess casualty rates, reflecting continued pressure in the liability environment. Workers’ compensation was down 1%,” Doyle said.
On the reinsurance front, Doyle outlined renewals in April, stressing that “there is sufficient capacity to support customer demand as reinsurers pursue growth”.
Looking ahead, Doyle said early signs of Florida cat renewals on June 1 “suggest similar market conditions characterized by rate cuts and oversupply as in January and April. There are tentative signs that Florida’s legal reforms will contribute to further risk-adjusted declines.”
“Our clients are benefiting from current market conditions and, as always, we continue to advise them on designing the best risk plan that meets their objectives,” Doyle said.