Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Swiss Re's 2025 Full Year Results Media Conference. My name is Elena Lutsenko. I'm Head of Media Relations here, and I'm joined today by our Group CEO, Andreas Berger, and our Group CFO, Anders Malmström. They will give you a very quick overview of our results, then we will be happy to take your questions. With that, Andreas, over to you.
Thank you, Elena, and good morning, or maybe good afternoon to all of you. It's great to have you also in the room. What should I say? It's a good day for Swiss Re stakeholders, for our clients, for our investors, but also for Swiss Re and its employees. 2025 was a very successful year. Again, I repeat it, we had two priorities. Priority number one was to deliver on our group net income target. Priority number two, the second priority was to increase the resilience of the group, the Swiss Re Group, and in order to improve the consistency of our earnings delivery over time. Now, I'm happy to say we achieved both.
We delivered a record group net income of $4.8 billion in 2025, against a target of more than $4.4 billion in 2025. At the same time, we took decisive steps to further strengthen Swiss Re's resilience for future delivery. That's the second priority I mentioned. To give you some examples, we completed the assumption review in our Life & Health Reinsurance business, considerably strengthening our assumptions on underperforming portfolios. In practice, that means we examine how we expect our portfolios to perform, remember that some of these contracts will last for decades, and take a critical look at the assumptions which underpin those expectations. Where necessary, we revise those assumptions to ensure that they reflect our current experience and insights.
This assumption strengthening puts Life and Health Re on a very strong footing now, with clearer visibility on earnings delivery in the future. For Property and Casualty Reinsurance, we added to current and prior year reserves, the money set aside to pay future claims. We continued to also increase our initial loss assumptions well in excess of the economic inflation. On top of that, we continued to apply an uncertainty load on new business across all business units. Effectively, this means that we add an extra margin for prudence when we bring new risks onto our books. The actions we have taken in recent years mean that we have built the highest quality portfolio we have ever had at Swiss Re. We also made good progress on our objective of reducing our operating costs.
Remember, run rate by 2027 is to $300 million against the best baseline of year-end 2024. We achieved more than $100 million of savings in 2025, meaning we're well on track to deliver on that target. Overall, looking back on 2025, we can clearly say that we did what we said we would do. In doing so, we helped our clients, we helped to make our clients and the communities we work with more resilient, too. Swiss Re paid out $39 billion in claims in 2025. These payments covered the breadth of our businesses, from life and health, to property and casualty, as well as large corporates in the large corporate risk space.
This is the reason we do what we do: to support clients and communities through peak risks, and in doing so, to help make the world more resilient. In terms of natural catastrophes, the biggest loss event in 2025 for us came from the devastating wildfires that hit Los Angeles in January. One other event I'd like to mention here is the Hurricane Melissa, which made landfall in Jamaica in October. Combined, those two events led to $813 million in large natural catastrophe claims for our Property & Casualty Reinsurance business. Hurricane Melissa made the headlines for another reason. You might be aware that the government of Jamaica had issued a $150 million catastrophe bond by the World Bank's catastrophe bond program. Swiss Re was a lead arranger and structurer of this bond.
That bond was triggered, meaning that Jamaica quickly could access the $150 million and use that to provide fast relief to affected communities. Those cat bonds are paid out very, very quickly. This is separate to the claims we paid via P&C Re, it shows the breadth of our business and how we can help communities through peak events, not just through reinsurance in a classical form, but also other forms of risk transfer. That takes me to our refreshed strategy, which we announced at our Management Dialogue in December last year, Build to Lead. Our ambition is to make the world more resilient. That didn't change. To be ready, not only to advance our industry, but also to play a leading role in shaping its future and create lasting value.
We will do so through three guiding principles that build on each other, which you can find or see behind me. First, we will amplify our core. Amplify our core by focusing on a leading market position for each of our three core businesses. You saw last week that we announced the acquisition of QBE's Global Trade Credit and Surety business. This is an example of that expansion in action, basically, for Corporate Solutions and its portfolio, diversifying our portfolio and capturing new growth opportunities, in particular, in lines of businesses which are not correlated to the broader reinsurance cycle. We will use the full strength of the group, including our transversal value propositions, such as Alternative Capital Partners and also the Public Sector Solutions team, to create real leverage across the portfolio and deepen our relevance with clients and brokers.
Second, we will advance the reinsurance and insurance industry, because amplifying our core is not enough on its own. We also need to reimagine the value chain overall. We will use AI to enhance and support decisions, simplify processes, and scale expertise. We will also seek to leverage our proprietary data and research, turning it into sharper insights and more targeted solutions for clients, brokers, but also for ourselves. Third, we will achieve more together, because none of this happens without the right people and the right culture. We will attract and develop future-ready talents with the intellect, execution, and vision to deliver on our technical and AI ambitions, and we will foster a culture that drives commercial results substantially and sustainably, but importantly, also responsibly.
Looking ahead, we confirm the financial targets for 2026 we communicated in December. We are targeting a higher group net income of $4.5 billion, reflecting our confidence in the resilience of the business units of the Swiss Re Group, disciplined underwriting, and active cycle management. Decisive actions we have taken over the past two years allow us to launch a $1.5 billion share buyback program, further supporting shareholder returns. Anders, our Group CFO, will give you more details on this later. We remain focused on executing with discipline, delivering distinctive value to our clients, and reinforcing a leading position in key markets.
Our aim is to provide stability and security in uncertain times, and that means taking a long-term approach. The metaphor I used when we first announced our 2026 targets is this: We're not here to squeeze the lemon for short-term gains. Instead, we're growing a lemon tree, so it delivers a consistent harvest year and year after year after year. This is our commitment, and we will deliver on it. With this, I would like to hand over now to Anders, and he will run you through more details of the 2025 results. Thank you, Anders.
Thank you, Andreas. Also, good morning from my side. Let's start with the P&C Re results. Swiss Re achieved its combined ratio target by a considerable margin, coming in at 79.4% for the year against a target of below 85%. We have been writing good business, and the performance has been helped by a low level of large natural catastrophe claims outside of the first quarter. Corporate Solutions also continued its strong track record, with net income reaching almost $1 billion. The combined ratio for the year was 86.5%, meeting its target of below 91% for the full year, very comfortably. Moving on to Life & Health Reinsurance.
Despite the negative impact of the assumption strengthening, which amounted to $0.65 billion, the business unit delivered a net income of $1.3 billion against a target of $1.6 billion. Let's look at the Property & Casualty Reinsurance renewals. More than half of P&C Re's Property & Casualty treaty business is renewed each January. Through the renewals, we executed on our priority. Firstly, to lead with confidence in segments where we have a differentiating value proposition. Secondly, to actively manage our sub-portfolios to respond to the more competitive market, including prioritizing sustainable structures. Thirdly, to grow together with our clients by offering solutions that address challenging concentration risks. Demand for cover increased, but competition also intensified. Although clients selectively increased the risk they retained, we successfully preserved our share of wallet.
We renewed treaty contracts representing $12.4 billion of premium volume in line with the business up for renewal. Nominal pricing remained stable overall. Mid-single digit improvements in casualty were offset by similar declines in property, particularly for natural catastrophe covers. At the same time, based on a prudent view on inflation and updated loss models, we increased loss assumptions by 4.6%, resulting in a net price decrease of 4.3%. Importantly, terms and conditions remained stable. We expect similar conditions in the upcoming renewals, always subject to loss activity. In asset management, we generated $4 billion in recurring income in 2025, supported by a high-quality investment portfolio. We achieved a return on investment of 4.0% and a recurring income yield of 4.2%, providing an important and stable contribution to our earnings.
Here, we also took steps to increase the resilience of our portfolio. We realized a gain from the sale of a minority equity position in the first quarter. We decided to use the opportunity to sell lower-yielding fixed income instruments, locking in a loss in the current period, but reinvesting in higher-yielding instruments, which increase potential recurring income in the future. Taken together, the strong Group result allows us to increase our payout to investors. We will propose a 9% dividend increase, delivering against our objective of growing the ordinary dividend between 2025 and 2027 by 7% or more per year. In December, we also announced the launch of a sustainable annual share buyback program to complement that dividend, subject to achieving the annual Group net income target.
Today, we also announced the launch of a $1 billion extraordinary share buyback, taking the total share buyback for 2025 or 2026 to $1.5 billion. To put this into context, the $500 million sustainable buyback reflects the fact that we achieved our group net income target. The additional $1 billion extraordinary buyback reflects all the key drivers. Firstly, we generated significant additional SST capital in 2025, despite the various actions we took to increase the resilience of the group, in particular, on the Life & Health Re side. Secondly, as pricing conditions in Property & Casualty are becoming more competitive, we are managing capital carefully through this phase of the cycle.
Thirdly, the extraordinary buyback reflect our confidence in the overall resilience of the Group, having successfully completed a host of actions across our businesses in the last 2 years. We expect to launch the buyback in early March, with completion targeted by the end of this year. The capital actions that we announced today imply a total payout of $3.9 billion, or approximately 80% of our full year 2025 earnings. The Group SST ratio, including all of the announced capital actions, remains at a strong 250%. That's where I will leave it for now. I'm happy to hand back to Elena to start the Q&A.
Thank you, Anders. We're going to start our Q&A session now. For those of you joining online, please use the Raise Your Hand functionality on Zoom if you would like to ask a question. It would be great if you could turn on your camera and introduce yourself at the beginning. Perhaps we start with a question in the room, if there is one. Johnny? Just wait a second for the microphone.
Thank you. Good morning. Could you please elaborate on the new assumptions in your Life and Health business? What are these assumptions you have changed these assumptions, and have set free a lot of capital, apparently, as a result of it? What are these assumptions now? Thank you.
Yeah. In Life & Health, we have always said that this is the third and the last business unit that we were analyzing. We started with Corporate Solutions, then with P&C Reinsurance, where we introduced the new reserving philosophy. Life & Health Re , we analyzed the reserves in three steps. The first step, we looked at the very large portfolios, in particular, critical illness, and we took already action then to address the assumptions. We looked at the medium-sized portfolios, finally, last year, we looked at the last tranche, here in particular, we can single out the countries Australia, Israel, and South Korea. These were the remaining smaller portfolios that we analyzed, and we can now say we have completed the assumption review in Life & Health Reinsurance.
That's why we are in a much stronger position now in Life & Health Reinsurance than we were before. We can now say each business unit has completed their fundamental work, and now each business unit can play its role that it's supposed to play in the context of the group, in order to see the diversification benefits that we have, because they are not correlated Life & Health Reinsurance portfolios with the P&C portfolios. This is the strength of the group, and we are very happy that our teams have done the heavy lifting, the work last year. This resulted to an increased resilience, and hence, you know, what Anders was just saying, put us in a position to address also some capital management actions.
Maybe just to add, in all these three markets, we not, we not just updated assumptions and increased reserves, we also took business actions. In Australia, we basically paused new business.
Sorry?
We paused the new business in Australia. That was a significant action that actually got quite some feedback in the market. Very positive feedback, actually, from our clients, 'cause they were pleased to see that somebody is taking actions. In Australia, it's really an environment that's just not supportive of the for the private and insurance. It's mostly disability, and it's really related to the increase in health claims, health issues, so that are driven by the state insurance.
In Israel, we took action that we put these businesses in run-off, and in Korea, we took action that we stopped the particular product completely and then adjusted them to products for new business. In all three, it's not just assumptions, but it's also business actions. To your point, this did not free up capital, the actions. Because I think I heard you asking that. The actions themselves did not free up capital.
Is there a run-off you have?
These particular treaties are just not sustainable in from the environment, and so we put these particular treaties. Besides it making the assumption changes, also, we just put that in run-off.
Yeah.
All right, I see we have a question from Ben Dyson online. Can we cut to that?
Hi, good morning. Yeah, I've got a couple of questions, if I may. Firstly, I was wondering if you could tell me what the Hurricane Melissa claim was in isolation. I know you gave them as a in combination with the L.A. wildfire claims earlier. I was wondering if you could separate that out. The second question I had was just on the profit target for 2026. That's lower than the actual result you achieved in 2025, although it's higher than the target. I was just wondering there if you could say why you set that level where it is, given how you performed in 25, and whether if, you know, that's an acknowledgement that 25 was an exceptional year, and if you could say why that was, and if it was, you know, driven by the lower level of natural catastrophes in the year.
The third one I had was just around the renewals, the renewal outcomes. It kind of looks like you've not done as much pruning as some of your competitors have, and because the overall outcome was relatively flat on a volume basis. I was just interested there, if you could say a little bit more about, you know, whether when taking into effect the prices and the volume changes that you saw, whether you're actually growing or shrinking effectively? Thank you.
Maybe I'll start with the Hurricane Melissa question. You said the quantum on the Hurricane Melissa question. It was a cat bond, and I said it's $150 million. This is outside of the P&C claims that we paid out, where it's referring to the $39 billion. In the U.S., in total, we have been paying out around $17 billion for the U.S. alone. The biggest Nat Cat event was obviously the L.A. wildfires, which amounted around $600 million for Swiss Re. It was basically the biggest Nat Cat event in the U.S. in 2025. Maybe I should link that also to the question around the renewals now. You were asking about the volumes?
First of all, you've seen on the, on the slides that the volumes were pretty flat, and nominal price increases were also roughly flat. We used the opportunity also to address inflation, model updates, and also initial loss assumption updates, which then impacted, obviously, the risk-adjusted price adjustment or the price outcome. That's the -4.3% that you saw on the slide. So this is an additional. You can see it as an additional resilience for the company. So it's not just reserves that you increase, there are many other aspects that you can do. This is important because you need to have a very robust, resilient portfolio when you enter into a cycle management phase now. I think that gives us the comfort that we're ready for a cycle management.
Again, we never steer people or mention growth targets. We always look at the quality of the business, the disciplined underwriting, and for us, it matters that you have a bottom line growth. Obviously, bottom line growth implicitly also means you need to grow the top line, but you only grow it in desired areas where we have risk-adequate pricing, and we feel very comfortable with this. On the Nat Cat side, and Anders, you might take this question also around the targets, but one thing I would like to do as an intro, don't consider the 2025 Nat Cat experiences and events as a new normal.
Exposure is exposure. It can happen anytime, and there is exposure out there. That's why the demand for such covers is actually increasing. Competition is also increasing, and that's why you have to be very prudent also in engaging, so that you don't, you know, fuel another softening of the market. We look for rate adequacy. We put price to risk. That's what we do. That's why you always have to expect normal Nat Cat events in 2026, because that's why we have budgets for this.
Yeah, maybe just to add to that, if you, and usually you normalize results, which exactly to Andreas's point, you take the positive experience out that was, yeah, in this case, because of Nat Cat. In that context, we believe that the $4.5 billion target for 2026 is a ambitious but an achievable target, and I think we're very confident that we will get there. This is a good target that we believe reflects the true underlying earnings power that we can deliver.
Thanks. Just quickly, could you tell me what you think is at all, what you're using as a, as a normal, assumption for Nat Cat in a year?
For Nat Cat, we have a budget of $2 billion on the P&C Re side. As we mentioned before, I think we had claims up to the amount of $800 million. We had a $1.2 billion positive. Not all of that went to the bottom line. I think we used that also to strengthen the resilience as we talked about before. I think you see it's about $700 million that went to the ultimate result, and then $500 million we used to strengthen the overall reserves.
All right. Thank you very much.
Thanks, Ben. Let's, have take a question from, Jonathan.
Thanks. Thank you for taking my questions. I have some on the share buyback. How should we think about the $1.5 billion share buyback in terms of, like, sustainability? I mean, how sustainable is this level of additional share buyback? I mean, you guided for $0.5 billion as a base. If I look at other players in the industry, your peers, or also other large insurers, they are not returning as much capital, but are retaining it more to and look for further M&A opportunities. You also have stressed that you would like to engage in more M&A activity during the current consolidation phase, if I can use this term, but what do your current capital management actions say about your M&A strategy?
Last question, I'm just thinking about why exactly now are you buying back shares on this level of the share with 100 CHF, more or less? H ow could you maybe plan this more ahead in terms of buyback shares, when the shares are, in your, in your view, lower and lower level, like maybe 90 CHF, 100 CHF? I'm just thinking about, you know, last five years and next five years, in terms of why not just wait for the shares to fall, and then maybe try to buy them back? Yeah, that's it.
Maybe I start with the sustainability of the your question about sustainability. I think we were very clear in at the Management Dialogue when we introduced the new capital framework, that the number one priority is to keep dividends stable or increase the dividends. We have a clear commitment that we want to grow the dividends by 7%, at least for three consecutive years. In addition, we said, if we achieve targets, we can add to that dividend amount, also, a sustainable buyback. We call it a sustainable buyback, and we start with around $500. This brings you then to a payout ratio of about 60%. You know, insurance and business or reinsurance business is quite volatile, so you should think that as the sustainable part of the business.
We obviously want to use the capital to grow the business, if you see opportunities. If we have sustainable excess capital that we don't see that we can deploy it at the right level, and we are very well capitalized, then we would give it back in the form of a buyback. You should really see this $1 billion in that context. We have a very strong solvency ratio that even after these actions, is at 250%, which is the upper end of our band.
We are going now in a cycle where you have to manage. You don't want to deploy capital below the target ratio. That's I would say, that's the rationale, and that's very much in line with what we talked about in December. Don't think that the additional $1 billion is sustainable. That really depends on the situation where we are in the business, where we are from an earnings and cap generation, and where we are on the capital front.
That's how you have to think about it. To the question about when to buy back? I mean, we don't have discretion, that I can just go out and say, "Now I should buy." You start a program, and that program needs to be structured, and then you give it out, and then it runs. Look, I think in my view, this is not because the stock is weak. It is because we don't have. We see better use for the capital to give it back to shareholders than to keep it. Yeah.
On the M&A question, I can say that with this action, you can read it as we don't believe in really transformational M&A, but what we believe in is adding to our portfolios where we see a need or where we see a strengthening of our resilience or diversification, even, of our portfolios. We have always said, for instance, that in Corporate Solutions, we see opportunities in the market to add lines of businesses that are not correlated with the property or cap pricing cycle.
If the rates are going down in property, they're definitely not going down because it's not correlated on the credit insurance space. We always said we like this line of business, not only because it's decorrelated to the property cycle, but also because it adds nicely to our capabilities that we have. If opportunities present themselves, then we will go for them, and that's exactly what we did in Australia with the QBE's Global Trade Credit Insurance portfolio that we took over from them. We will look further for opportunities like that. We call them the bolt-on opportunities, and we feel much more comfortable with this approach.
I have a question also concerning the dividend payment. When you look on Swiss investors, because of the change to the dollar, they are really now under, it's CHF 6.19, I calculated this morning. They're getting less dividend payment in Swiss francs. Is this a point where why you put the share buyback to give something additional on this? What do you think, why you didn't increase more the dividend proposal? This was the first question.
Maybe, again, I think maybe to reiterate. I mean, we said clearly in our capital allocation policy or deployment policy, that we want to keep the dividend stable or grow it. Our business is
Yeah
Predominantly in US dollars, 50% of the business is US dollars, then we have all the other currencies. We don't have any Swiss exposure, Swiss franc exposure. It's about 1% of the business. It would be impossible for us to give a Swiss franc dividend policy. The policy we give has to be in dollars, because that reflects the overall business. I think that's a strong message also, and we were able to increase the dividend by 9% in US dollars.
I understand that in Swiss francs, and we all are Swiss kind of people, but that this reduces. That's not the 9% increase in Swiss francs, but I think it's that's how the business is managed. We cannot just go up and do the Swiss franc dividend increases, and then the exchange rate moves around, and we cannot commit to that. We really want to commit to our policy, and that's a consistent framework that we have here. The buyback, to your question, has nothing to do with the Swiss franc situation.
It's just 154 years it was okay to have a Swiss dividend and Swiss franc dividend, and then you recently changed before the weakening of the US dollar started to change to US dollar. You always had a big portion of U.S. business, and never, it was never a topic, but recently you changed, and now the Swiss investors are getting less in Swiss franc due to this change. Otherwise, you would have, with the same strategy.
Yeah.
would have to pay more, dividend.
I mean, look, the way I look at it is I'm coming from the other side. I think we're generating earnings, and we're paying out about 50% in dividends. I think you see another 10% now in the sustainable buyback, and you see another 20% in the extraordinary buyback. This brings you to 80%. The overall amount that we give back to shareholders is significant. That doesn't make a difference if that is in dollars or in Swiss francs. I think that's how I look at it. We want to give the earnings back to shareholders in these various forms. I wanna have a stable dividend going forward.
The second question I have is concerning the strategy. Again, the 4.5 billion target seems to be very low compared to Munich Re, for instance, which has EUR 6.1 billion in earnings, just in EUR, announced yesterday. If you just said that the Nat Cat risk is there. You had a good year because there were less claims, but shouldn't be the target higher if or the payout higher if nothing happens really dramatic?
Yeah, yeah, I mean, I can just repeat what I said before, that year 2025 had, call it luck or not, but had a very. It was a benign Nat Cat year. I think that's factual. That's why, I mean, we have a budget of $2 billion, and there's a reason for that. We are market leaders in the Nat Cat space. On a global basis, we have around 10% market share. If you wanna manage volatility, and that's what we're there for, manage market cycles, you have to factor for that.
That's exactly what we do. We're not ignoring what's happening out there in the market and what could happen. What we try to do is to manage consistently, you know, to deliver consistently on our targets. We don't want to go too aggressively into a target space, where the probability not to meet the target is very high. That would not help us with the credibility that we built up.
The last question, I have 43% of your investment portfolio, or of the bond portfolios are in U.S. government bonds. Do you feel comfortable with this high level of U.S. government bonds?
Yes. Look, I think the way we manage the business and also the investment business is we basically match the investment with the liability in its currency, in its market. We want to be matched in each market, and because almost 50% of the business is in the U.S., you would also expect that, 50% of the investments are in the U.S. Because I think that's the most efficient and effective way, because when something moves, then it moves on both sides.
Yeah. It's not too high in government bonds, you're saying?
No, no. It's matched. It's linked to the liabilities, yeah.
Let's take a question online from Maximilian Voss.
He's on mute.
We can't hear you.
Yeah.
You're muted.
Sorry, can you hear me now?
Thank you.
Yes? No.
Yes.
Fine. Okay, sorry. Sorry, I'm an idiot. My first question is about P&C Reinsurance. I have noticed more selective underwriting and slightly decreasing price in the branch and by Swiss Re. Yet climate change should increase loss exposure and this demand, which should increase the prices. Can you please explain this to me? Will this trend continue, and how does it affect your 2026 target? The next question is a CEO question. What is more likely, that you will catch up with Munich Re or that Hannover Re will catch up with you? Thank you very much.
Yeah, let me take the first one. I mean, Swiss Re Institute published a number, you can really go into the details there. The Nat Cat exposures obviously increased, the losses increased 5%-7%, you know, annually, we have exceeded the $100 billion losses, US dollar losses, six consecutive years now. It is real. You have a distinction between the primary and the secondary perils. What reinsurance is there for, we take the peak risk. We, the shock absorber, take the peak risk. What we're not there for is for the frequency risks, because that is better managed by the primary insurance companies. If you look at the structures of the contracts and look at the attachment points when reinsurance is triggered, it is too high for this, for the frequency risks.
The perils, the secondary perils in particular, when you look at floods, for instance, that's a secondary peril, wildfires. A lot of it is actually managed in the, in the net retentions of the insurance companies, the primary insurance companies. What we then provide is data, analytics, and solutions for them to better understand those risks and better manage those risks. This is nothing for severity protection. That's why we are modeling it, obviously, and we're well positioned. We help our clients, but this is a discussion that the primary insurance companies need to have with the end customer.
If this is systemic and too big to be solved by one party, then we join in a public-private partnership model, and we have various programs in place. I mean, I was just mentioning Melissa, for instance. That is another program, the cat bond program that we set up. We do also have government programs for floods, flood protection. In the U.K., for instance, where we bring in our expertise and our claims-paying ability, the government brings in protection, prevention by building dams, for instance, to protect against floods. These kind of instruments are there, and we're one of the market leaders in those instruments as well. The second question?
Second question was.
Versus
CEO question.
Oh, CEO question.
You said, you probably referred to our transformation program when we said we need to close the gap to number one. It's not about any of names of our competitors. It's about a mindset. Obviously we look at benchmarks, we look at how do we do in comparison. Everybody does this. That's good practice. Then we look at root causes. You know, why are we lagging behind in certain KPIs? Then we address this. This is the mindset, because we are a leading reinsurer in the world.
We are built to lead, as I said it. Historically, we are built on a lot of data, analytics, and risk insights, and we are part of the tier one reinsurers, so naturally you would want to lead, and that's exactly what we do. Closing the gap to number one, yes, if you look at numbers, we leave this judgment to yourselves. You know, you just have to look at the numbers and see how we were doing. We believe that we were, we had built up a good track record in building, in closing the gap to number one in critical KPIs, yes.
Thank you very much.
Let's take the next question from Iain Pearce.
Hi, thanks for taking my question. I'd like to see if you could give us a bit of color on the first two months of 2026. There's been quite a few weather events between the cold snap in the U.S., the blizzard in New York, the floodings in France. I assume at this point you're probably gonna tell me that you don't have an estimate yet. The water level has just started to recede in France, for instance. Could you give us a bit of an idea of what you know so far, how significant are these losses? Since the sigma reports always point out the increasing pressure of the secondary perils, like flooding, how do these cold snaps and floodings in France compare to what you've seen so far in the last few years?
For 2026, in the first months, as far as the activities, Nat Cat activities are concerned, we can say it's not higher than first quarter so far, I mean, the first couple of months in 2025. We don't see this as an extraordinary start of the year. It's still early days, yeah, Q1, still some time to go, and things can happen anytime. As far as the secondary perils that you mentioned are concerned, we can say that these don't hit our budgets yet.
Yeah, we allocated the budgets, obviously, and we are still in the territory within our expectations. We do have our models that have, probably the most, one of the most advanced flood modeling, through the acquisition of a company called Fathom, that's included now into our models. This we provide, obviously, we give clients the opportunity, obviously, to access this and to help prevent or mitigate, yeah, so prime insurance, but also, in the corporate sector.
I say that I assume you don't have an estimate yet, but do you actually? Do you have a full, some idea of how much all this is going to cost, the cold snap, the avalanche in Switzerland, the floodings in France?
It's too early to say because, you can obviously speculate, I think it's much too early to say. The notifications, you know, of losses are not even coming in at this stage, maybe in certain individual cases. I would say it's still too early to say.
Thank you.
There's a question from James Shuck, hello.
Thank you. Also, CEO question. When you started in 2024, there was a lot of talk about you doing the same thing in the group that you did at CorSo, this turnaround. I was wondering, how far do you think have you come on this path, and what are your priorities from here?
Yeah. Corporate Solutions was a specific situation which is not 100% comparable with Swiss Re Group. I would separate the two events. The Swiss Re Group was not a burning platform, and Corporate Solutions was a burning platform. We had certain areas where we were underperforming at Swiss Re Group level, and those ones we addressed. There was one commonality maybe between Corporate Solutions and all the other reinsurance, the reinsurance business units. This was the introduction of the new reserving philosophy. This was done across the Swiss Re Group, and that's something that everybody had in common.
There are other very good, positive examples where we also found synergies between the business units. I think Corporate Solutions started with the analytical data model, where we manage our business completely differently to traditional ways using software. That's something that started at CorSo, and we deployed it across the Group, not only in the business units, but also in all Group functions. That's a positive, for instance. But, as far as the transformation, the cultural transformation is concerned, this is really a Group topic. That's not a CorSo cultural transformation. That was for the whole Group, across all functions, all territories and all business units.
I just wanted to ask a bit on the renewals again. You explained it a little bit, but can you maybe elaborate a little bit what kind of this softer market is due to the benign environment of 2025, and how much is the competition, and are there more non-traditional competitors? Can you a little bit say about something about that? Thank you.
First of all, let me state, there is not one cycle. It's very important to say, because each line of business is in a different market cycle. There might be a few lines that are correlated to each other, but not in general. That's what I said around the lines of business like credit and surety, which I mentioned before, which is not correlated to the traditional property and casualty lines of businesses. For the renewals, we have seen demand, but we have seen also higher competition on the supply side. There's capital, abundant capital in the market, and that is reflected in a more intense pricing competition.
The good news is that the structure stayed broadly intact, the terms and conditions and attachment points. That's something we need to observe, we need to keep that discipline in the market. We have seen the sophisticated and very large reinsurance buyers. They have taken more risk, meaning taking premium out of the market. Again, the good news is they need reinsurance partners, our share of wallet in the market didn't reduce. Yes, we see trends of alternative capital coming into the reinsurance space. We have seen so far transactions. They all, in their nature, were very bespoke, something we are observing. Swiss Re is always known to be very active in the intersection between the liability and the asset side, but also capital market side. Again, we were one of the founders of, or maybe the founder of the ILS market.
This is normal cycle management. There are parts of the cycle, you know, when rates go up, and then parts of the cycle when, due to the high rates, investors think there's an attractive market, so capital will come in, and it puts more pressure on pricing, competition goes up. Here, technical excellence, technical underwriting, you know, how do you assess the risk? How do you price risk, is very important. You always have to look at rate adequacy and about, you know, composition of your portfolios and protecting your balance sheet. That's the professional answer that I would give you on this.
Thank you. I have two additional questions. The first I understand that from what you said earlier on Life & Health, the release of capital is not due to this third step that you have explained, but rather to the first two steps. I would appreciate to learn more about what these first two steps were specifically in terms of assumption new assumptions. The second question is also about Nat Cat. You mentioned this interesting figure about your market share, 10%. I have the impression, could be completely wrong, but, I have the impression that, in earlier years, the role of reinsurance companies in this Nat Cat field was more pronounced in terms of market share, et cetera, and exposure. I could be wrong, but that was my impression.
Maybe I start with the on the Life & Health side. Maybe just to step back, what we said and what we did is when we go in and say we strengthen assumptions, means you go in, you check, are your assumptions adequate for what you see in the market? For the experience, and also what your insights have about the future. When you strengthen that, you actually increase your reserves. Increasing reserves, per se, uses capital, doesn't free up it actually uses capital. That's what happened. Just for this year.
Lose?
Yeah, we did not lose assumptions. No, we strengthened assumptions.
Right.
That uses capital. The capital generation, what we said is, despite all this strengthening, we still generated significant SST capital that put us in this strong position here. Yeah, yeah. This is Stamacia.
What assumptions, what are the most important assumptions that you have strengthened? Are we talking about life expectancy, this kind of things, or what is it?
Yes, I mean, when we started, three, four years ago, with the strengthening, and Andreas said we had the large portfolios. That was U.S. mortality and then critical illness in mostly China and some other countries. On mortality, this is life expectancy. Clearly. On critical illness, this is the probability of getting sick. This is a kind of a disability, a disability probability. You have lapse assumptions. That's quite important here. I think those are the three main assumptions . Disability i n all instances, I mean, there's multiple ways that you can assess that, but it's really mortality, disability, and then lapse assumptions.
Life expectancy in the United States, your assumption is a decrease of life expectancy over the last few years, right?
I mean, we haven't updated these assumptions in this year. This was not the focus.
Yeah, yeah.
Previously, yes. Yes, we basically had to strengthen the mortality, and this was driven by COVID. COVID really changed the life expectancy. It's coming back, so that's reflected. COVID clearly increased mortality, and so that had an impact on life expectancy. You see a release of that. You see how that kind of fades back, to pre-COVID then.
On the second question, that's cap related and market share related. As a general, if you look at the bigger picture, you've got the top three, or call it four. We actually look at the top three, and they have the majority of the market share still as a top three group. You have the second-tier reinsurance companies, and you have third-tier reinsurance companies. Over the years, you could see that the market share of the top three didn't really reduce. I think that's an important message. Why? Because the insurance companies and reinsurance buyers, they need strong long-term partners, and that's why even now, we said our share of wallet didn't reduce in this renewal, even though some of the large insurance companies took out premium. They must have reduced somewhere else.
The second-tier ones, tier one means those with the best rating also. The second-tier ones are the ones that, over the years, could actually also increase our shares, but also then to the expense of the tier-three ones. The tier-three ones are very small reinsurance companies, if you look at the panel that one given insurance company has, there are plenty of reinsurance companies on one panel, and some are starting to optimize a little bit to reduce the number of reinsurance companies on that panel. They still need the lead reinsurance companies.
On screen?
I think we have a question from Vipul Garg on online.
I have a question about the L&H outlook for 2026. You've projected it to be at $1.7 billion, which is almost 30% more than what you achieved this year. The presser does mention about strengthening the portfolio, but could you just shed a little more light on it, specifically with regards to any real pockets that you see that might deliver this or help sustain this? Because you did take action in South Korea, Australia, and Israel. In that sense, I just wanted to check. Thank you.
Look, I think, I mean, this year we had the target of $1.6 billion. We took significant actions this year, in the sense that we took a charge of $650 million. We believe now that we're in a good position, that we don't have negative assumption changes in 2026. That brings you back to the target or actually above the target. That's why we feel comfortable that we can actually increase the target for 2026 relative to 2025.
We have to wrap up. There is a question online from Glenn Schorr. I think this will be the last question that we take.
Hello. Thank you. I should like to know a little bit about appetites, especially in casualty lines in P&C Reinsurance. In part because of the growth in casualty at the 1/1 renewals, if that can be explained in greater detail. Also I'd like to understand the revenue progression. When you discuss full year IFRS 17 revenues by segment, if I back out the 9-month results, I see that suddenly fourth quarter P&C Re casualty seems flat year-on-year, after having been down double-digit throughout each of the first three quarters. I know that's an earned in measure, and there's a lot of give and take on prior periods, but I'd like to understand how that turnaround came about so quickly.
Okay.
If you'll have extra time, I would do the same thing on property, since you backed out of property on renewal, at the renewals. I'd like to know if that's an omen for cedants who are lining up for the midyears. Thanks.
Just quickly on casualty, starting with casualty. You know where we came from. You know, at the peak, we had 17%, roughly 17% market share in the U.S., on U.S. casualty, and we corrected that. We are now around five-ish, yeah, maybe 5%. Call it 5%. We are where we want to be. Not everything in casualty is highly exposed and not rate adequate or risk adequate. They're every breaking in. I would say, would come from the rate increases. If you look at the territories where we are also active, that is also EMEA, Europe in particular, and there you could see that we had significant growth also on the motor book. That is one driver also on the casualty side.
On casualty, as far as, you know, the trends are concerned, we're very careful and conservative because. Here you need to dig deeper into the sublines of businesses and where they're exposed. In Europe, you've got to be careful, for instance, with casualty portfolios, with U.S., exposure. You get basically the US exposure that we addressed, you know, in the pruning of the U.S., casualty or the U.S., liability book. You don't want to get it through the back door in European treaty. That's something we're watching. On the property side, look, I can't give you. I don't have the crystal ball, but we expect the market to be similar as, and from the dynamics, as we had in the January renewals. Yeah? Why would it be over so quickly?
Obviously, if there's a huge loss event, that changed the dynamics again, you know. That's something we observe all the time. We're going now into the April renewals. They're mainly Asia or Japan-driven. Again, the Japanese market is a very different market to the U.S. market or European markets. You go into the July renewals, during July renewals in the U.S. Everybody's waiting for that, obviously. Let's see. I think it's higher demand. That's always a good sign. There's demand for the product, and we just need to have discipline in keeping the rates adequate and keeping the structures disciplined.
All right. Thank you everyone for joining. If you have any follow-up questions, we'd be happy to receive them at the media relations and, clarify anything.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you. Bye-bye.