In a recent Reinsurance News interview, Renaud Guidée, Chief Executive Officer of AXA XL Reinsurance, highlighted how the firm is approaching the Asia Pacific (APAC) region globally while delivering locally, emphasising the region’s strategic importance to the company.
Guidée, speaking with Reinsurance News around the annual Singapore International Reinsurance Conference (SIRC), explained that in order to navigate the extremely diverse and complex APAC operating landscape, AXA XL Re aims to combine its global expertise, financial strength, analytics, and portfolio perspective with close local client and broker relationships.
This amalgamation, according to Guidée, allows the reinsurer to engage and understand every market’s specifics while maintaining consistent underwriting standards and portfolio discipline.
“Asia is not one market. It is a highly diverse region, with different regulatory regimes, competitive conditions, natural catastrophe exposures, levels of insurance maturity and client needs. Our approach is to think globally but deliver locally,” said the CEO.
Guidée underlined that the diversity within APAC is not simply a challenge; it is also one of the region’s strengths.
“It allows us to build a balanced portfolio and support clients across a broad range of markets and classes. At AXA XL Re, our focus is on building long-term, meaningful relationships with clients and brokers, while providing disciplined capacity and technical expertise,” he said.
APAC is home to both mature and emerging insurance markets, and for AXA XL Re, the CEO sees opportunities across the board in what he described as a strategically important and highly diverse region for the company.
“Our focus is on building long-term, meaningful relationships with clients and brokers, while providing disciplined capacity and technical expertise.
“In mature markets, clients are looking for partners who can provide consistent support, technical underwriting insight and strong claims capability through the cycle. In developing markets, there is significant potential as insurance penetration grows, economies expand and local insurers develop their product offerings and risk-management capabilities.
“We are particularly focused on growing with clients that share our commitment to underwriting quality, data transparency, strong claims practices and well-understood risk management strategies. Our ambition is not simply to deploy more capacity; it is to deploy it where we can build sustainable, mutually beneficial relationships over time,” said Guidée.
Across the APAC region, the protection gap is still considerable, and is therefore often a topic of discussion. And while there is a drive to close the gap in the region, it does still lag behind other markets. Guidée explained that although reinsurance has an important part to play, it requires more than just capacity.
“The protection gap in Asia remains significant, particularly for residential property and natural catastrophe risks, but also across commercial and specialty lines. In many markets, insurance penetration remains low; even where insurance is purchased, the limits may not reflect the scale of potential losses.
“Reinsurers have an important role to play. We support clients with capacity, technical underwriting expertise, catastrophe modelling, portfolio analytics and product development. However, reinsurance alone cannot close the gap. Affordability, risk awareness, data quality, distribution and regulatory frameworks all matter. Governments also have a critical role, particularly in residential and disaster protection,” he said.
“Thailand’s recent residential scheme is an encouraging example of public-private collaboration creating a new pool of insured risk, and we expect similar initiatives to emerge elsewhere in the region,” continued Guidée.
As insurers and reinsurers like AXA XL Re work to increase penetration across APAC markets, new risk pools offer potential. For Guidée, property and natural catastrophe protection will remain central, particularly as insured values rise and assets become more concentrated in major metropolitan areas.
“The strongest new risk pools will be created through collaboration between insurers, reinsurers, governments and technology providers, combining accessible products with sound data, transparent risk assessment and appropriate pricing,” he said.
Historical but important exposures from natural catastrophe events will of course always be a focus for carriers operating in APAC, but like many other parts of the world, re/insurers also have to navigate new risks, such as those being presented by advancement of artificial intelligence and notably the infrastructure that supports it.
Guidée told Reinsurance News that “the expansion of data-centre infrastructure across Asia is an important opportunity, but it also creates potentially significant concentrations of risk.”
“Depending on location, these facilities may be exposed to flood, earthquake, typhoon, windstorm and other natural hazards. The exposure is not limited to physical damage. Data centres rely on power, water, cooling, connectivity, transport links and specialist personnel. A natural catastrophe can therefore create substantial business interruption and contingent business interruption losses even where direct property damage is limited.
“As the sector grows, it will be increasingly important to understand the resilience of facilities and their dependencies, and to ensure that coverage is structured and priced appropriately,” added Guidée.
For both emerging and established risks, reinsurance buyers now have access to greater optionality and a broader capital base thanks in part to the evolution of the alternative capital space, which has become an important part of the risk transfer universe. Guidée explained that alternative, or third-party reinsurance capital has an important role to play in Asia.
“Today, its most significant contribution is often through retrocession capacity provided to larger reinsurers, which in turn supports the capacity available to Asian clients. Direct use of insurance-linked securities and catastrophe bonds by Asian cedants is still relatively limited outside Japan, but we expect that to develop over time.
“Traditional reinsurance will remain central to the region’s risk-management framework. But alternative capital can complement it, creating a more diversified and resilient source of protection as Asia’s risks and insurance needs continue to evolve,” he said.
As conference season ends and the market looks to the 2027 renewals, where, absent truly meaningful losses before year-end, the expectation is further softening in many markets and regions, notably in the property universe, we asked Guidée what any market softening means for underwriting discipline, and terms and conditions such as retentions.
“A more competitive market makes our underwriting discipline more important and our underwriting approach remains grounded in our assessment of risk and the needs of our clients and deploying capacity where we see a sustainable balance between risk and return.
“We identify the clients that align with our risk appetite and seek to build deeper, cross-class relationships with them. Where we can add value, we are prepared to provide meaningful capacity,” he said.
“We need to consider underlying changes in exposure, inflation, climate risk, terms and conditions, and the adequacy of retentions.
“We will continue to support core clients consistently, but we will remain disciplined on pricing, structures and attachment points. That discipline is essential to maintaining sustainable capacity and ensuring we can pay claims when clients need us most,” concluded Guidée.
