Ron DeSantis used his first official visit to Bermuda to tout the island’s role in Florida’s resurgent insurance market, crediting sweeping litigation reforms for attracting record levels of international investment.

The Governor of Florida spoke to John Huff, chief executive of the Association of Bermuda Insurers and Reinsurers, at the PwC Insurance Summit, today.

In a “seaside chat” held at the Hamilton Princess & Beach Club, the Florida Governor said the overhaul of his state’s litigation-driven system had transformed the market and restored stability, leading to a surge of capital flowing in from Bermudian-based reinsurers.

For a ten-year period, Florida insurers paid out $51 billion in claims, Mr Huff said, citing Florida Office of Insurance Regulation data. “Seventy-one per cent of that went to lawyers and adjusters.”

Mr DeSantis described the old system as “basically wired to fail” and set up to “benefit lawsuits, benefit lawyers”.

He explained: “We would have situations where someone would end up getting $50,000 and the lawyer would get $350,000.”

According to Mr DeSantis, Florida once accounted for only 8 per cent of property insurance claims nationwide, yet made up 78 per cent of all litigation related to those claims. “That obviously just didn’t work,” he said.

Mr Huff noted that the post-reform environment has already caught the attention of Bermuda’s major market players. “We even heard last night from one of the global CEOs of a Bermuda company that they’ve increased their investment five-fold since the reforms have come out,” he said.

Bermuda remains one of the world’s top insurance and reinsurance centres, hosting more than 1,100 companies with combined assets exceeding $1.6 trillion. Over 1,200 insurers registered on the island wrote more than $277 billion in gross premiums in 2023, according to official data.

Meanwhile, Florida is the seventh-largest international insurance market, with a gross domestic product exceeding $1.7 trillion, Mr Huff pointed out.

Against that backdrop, Mr DeSantis positioned Florida’s revived market as a prime destination for cross-Atlantic partnerships.

Florida’s reforms, enacted amid rising premiums and widespread insurer withdrawals, are beginning to yield results, according to Mr DeSantis. Homeowners’ insurance rates recorded the lowest increase among all 50 American states in 2024, with several companies announcing rate reductions.

Since the changes took effect, the state’s insurer of last resort, Citizens Property Insurance Corp, has seen its policy count fall from 1.4 million to roughly 300,000 to 400,000 as private companies re-enter the market, with 17 new entrants just last year.

Mr DeSantis said Florida’s strategy also emphasises stronger building codes and resilience investment. Through the “My Safe Florida Home” and “Resilient Florida” programmes, tens of thousands of homeowners have received grants to harden their properties and strengthen infrastructure — initiatives he said are “making a difference”.

For Bermudian-based insurers and reinsurers, the renewed vitality in Florida presents fresh opportunity, Mr DeSantis said. “If you look at what we’ve done on the building code,” he said, “I look at Bermuda, I see the same thing”.

For Bermuda’s reinsurers, Florida’s rebound is proving crucial for long-term capital deployment. One Bermuda executive told Mr Huff that their company has increased its investment five-fold since the reforms. If sustained, the trend could re-establish Florida as a core growth market for Bermudian-domiciled reinsurers, he suggested.

Mr DeSantis emphasised that the reforms were not driven by partisanship. “It’s not a red-blue thing,” he said. “Some of these issues do not lend themselves to good soundbites.”

The broader takeaway for Bermuda’s market, Mr Huff suggested, is that Florida’s experience demonstrates how legal reform and risk mitigation can revive a distressed insurance sector. From the island’s vantage point, the alignment could hardly be timelier, he said.