Bermuda reinsurers are looking to technology and better data as they seek growth opportunities beyond the traditional catastrophe market.

Executives speaking to AM Best TV at the Rendez-Vous de Septembre in Monte Carlo said that delegated underwriting arrangements and the excess and surplus market could offer access to business that would otherwise be difficult to reach, if they can do it right.

Doug Howat, the chief underwriting officer of Convex, said about 20 per cent of the group’s business came from what it classed as high-volume business, most of it delegated through managing general agents and managing general underwriters.

He said the arrangements gave Convex access to business in markets where it did not have a direct presence, as well as specialist underwriting expertise and better policy-administration systems.

However, Mr Howat said the company has limits on the amount it writes through these channels because the process of onboarding and auditing coverholders, overseeing their activity and handling bordereaux data remained “quite clunky”.

Convex is investing in technology to improve the process and gain better insight into the underlying portfolio, he said.

“If we’re able to do that, and also from an underwriting perspective get better insights into that business, which we’d be able to share with our coverholders as well, if we’re able to do that, then I think we’ll look to write more of that business,” Mr Howat said.

Ryan Mather, CEO of Ariel Re, pointed to the continuing shift of business from the admitted insurance market into the excess and surplus sector.

Ariel identified the trend several years ago and developed products that were new to the market, he said. The business has become a source of catastrophe risk for the company’s investors while also providing data that can improve its underwriting models.

“For us, it gives us a new avenue into generating catastrophe risk for our investors that we think is really quite well priced and managed,” Mr Mather said. “As a result of that, we also get a lot of data, which helps us to inform our models.”

Neil Eckert, CEO of Conduit Re, said newer companies could also benefit from having less entrenched tech infrastructure.

Conduit has developed a data lake and is building prototype systems that Mr Eckert said had been created more quickly than through traditional methods. The work could improve both operational efficiency and the quality of the pricing data, he added.

“We don’t have those legacy issues,” Mr Eckert said. “We can extract operational efficiency using some of those things.”