Full Capacity: War risks spill over, M&A insurance’s scramble for talent

March 21 2026 by

Welcome to Full Capacity, a weekly briefing on all the most important developments of the past week with a personal take on the news from our editor-in-chief, Mithun Varkey, delivered to your inbox every Saturday.   

IAN exclusive.  MGA startup Amiga Specialty has received regulatory approval from Hong Kong’s Insurance Authority to begin underwriting. The MGA, led by Ralph Sherbahn in Hong Kong, has capacity from Axa XL and will write financial lines from around the region, including Japan and South Korea. 

Asian focus.Lloyd’s CEO Patrick Tiernan, unveiling a new five-year strategy for the marketplace, identified attracting new capacity and talent in Singapore and Europe as a key part of its strategy.

Singapore is certainly a market that it is keen to expand in and “to allow underwriters to operate at a scale which is attractive to them, and that will include new approaches and new solutions to new risks”.

Cyclone Narelle. A category 4 tropical cyclone has made landfall in Far North Queensland, bringing high winds of up to 220km/h and heavy rains. Tropical Cyclone Narelle, described as the “biggest system in living memory” by Queensland Premier David Crisafulli, poses a severe threat to several communities in the flood-hit northeast of Australia.

Betting on treaty. Price Forbes, the Ardonagh Group wholesale broker, has built a treaty team in Singapore with four senior hires – Bruce Ford, Goh Thian Leong, Mark Foster and Florence Lam Puoy Yin. The hires follow the appointment of Dick Heath as MD for reinsurance and wholesale in January. The broker, this week, also announced the expansion of its multi-line follow facility Lectio into APAC.

Alarming claims. Swiss Re Institute’s latest Sigma report is modelling a peak-loss scenario of US$320 billion in nat cat losses in 2026. Balz Grollimund, Swiss Re’s head of catastrophe perils, noted that the upward trend in insured losses is structural.

As exposure accumulates, a peak-loss year in 2030 could cause about US$400 billion in global insured losses.

However, their models say that losses could top US$148 billion this year if losses return to normal long-term levels following the favourable variability caused by the absence of losses from peak perils last year.

Testing assumptions

The intensification of the war in the Middle East is fast becoming a structural threat to the global economy.

Iran’s strike on Qatar’s Ras Laffan liquefaction complex, the world’s largest LNG plant, on Thursday marks a tipping point.

The attack on the facility producing 77 million tonnes of gas per year has put energy security on the line for Asia and beyond.

The disruption will impact 12.8 million tonnes of LNG annually for three to five years and cost US$20 billion in lost annual revenues, according to Saad al-Kaabi, chief executive of QatarEnergy.

Energy and supply chain disruptions echo far beyond oil prices or LNG cargoes.

As an analyst put it, this is no longer a “regional escalation” but a “systemic global energy crisis” – a crisis driven more by geopolitics than by market fundamentals.

In the early days of the conflict, war risk premiums and cancelled marine covers were the headlines. Shipping lanes shifted, insurers scrambled, and underwriters worked overtime to contain losses.

What we’re seeing now is a potential contagion racing through multiple lines of business, we noted in a story earlier this week.

As Aon’s Tracy Lee Kus points out, the risks are bleeding across marine, energy, aviation, property, cyber, and even credit portfolios. It’s no longer about a single class of risk – it’s about systemic exposure.

For Asian and European governments, that means hard, high-stakes choices in the months ahead.

The Iran war, still with no clear end in sight, isn’t just testing the resilience of global markets; it could well shape up to be a stress test for the (re)insurance industry itself. As Aon’s Joe Peiser urged, it is a moment to test assumptions, about how policies respond, where coverage ends, and whether alternative structures are needed.

Hiring frenzy

M&A insurance is having its moment in Asia, or at least it seems like that from the talent war that is going on.

When you track people moves every day, you see fads come and go. But rarely do you see anything like the current frenzy for M&A insurance brokers and underwriters.

It started with Howden’s smash-and-grab on Aon’s M&A team. In just a few months, Howden has racked up 12 new hires in its transactional liability unit – 11 of them straight out of Aon.

Lockton, meanwhile, has been quietly but steadily stocking its Asian specialty bench, chipping away at rivals, too.

Enter the underwriters – QBE has launched a transaction liability practice in Asia, and Fusion has planted its flag in Japan.

So, is the mad scramble backed by fundamentals? Data does suggest so.

A Marsh report showed that global M&A deal value in 2025 surged to near-record levels, closing in on US$5 trillion.

The broker had its second-busiest year ever, placing US$59.3 billion in transactional risk limits across more than 2,200 policies.

Asia was even hotter: its team closed 40% more deals than in 2024, with limits up 37% to US$10.7 billion.

The deal machine is on full tilt. The outlook for 2026 is strong. It remains to be seen who will win the talent contest.

People moves

Aviso Specialty has appointed former Marsh Pacific president Josh Roach as CEO and former Lockton Pacific CEO Paul Marsden as executive director of broking. 

QBE Re has appointed Soichiro Tanaka as its head of Southeast Asia. 

Sompo has hired Francis Lim as its financial lines lead for Singapore. 

Do check out our weekly people move round-up to stay up to speed on the most important appointments in the region.  

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