SIRC: What will be the key talking points from SIRC 2025?
November 3 2025 by Marcus Alcock
As APAC’s movers and shakers prepare to gather for the 21st Singapore International Reinsurance Conference (SIRC), we provide a snapshot of the hot topics that will be on peoples’ lips this year.
Market-making brokers
Underpinning most of the discussions at the conference will be the most important dynamic of them all for the majority of practitioners: the embeddedness of the soft market.
Yes, the H1 claims experience has not been pleasant – according to Munich Re, for example, worldwide, natural disasters caused overall losses of around US$131 billion in the first half of 2025 (2024: US$155 billion), of which US$ 80 billion was insured, dominated by the Los Angeles wildfire losses and the Myanmar earthquake.
Yet so far it would be fair to say that H2 has not really delivered any nasty surprises.
The North Atlantic hurricane season has been relatively benign, and in Asia in Q3 the only events which have exceeded US$1 billion in insured losses have been seasonal floods in China, Tropical Storm Wipha in Asia and Southeast Asia, and the Punjab floods in India and Pakistan.
With reinsurance industry capital having increased to US$720 billion in the first quarter of 2025, according to Aon, having reached a new high of US$715 billion in 2024, and driven by the retained earnings of established reinsurers, it’s all clear that this is once more a well-supported, keenly competitive marketplace.
Putting all this together means that reinsurance brokers are once again firmly back in the driving seat and will be the market makers for upcoming APAC renewals, setting the tone and more importantly guiding discussions around pricing, structure and terms and conditions.
Expect multi-year deals, expanded coverage, and structured solutions to be very much in play.
Deal-making uptick
With attractive returns harder to come by, investors in the Asia (re)insurance market will be getting increasingly twitchy in 2026 and will be demanding that boards come up with some attractive proposals that go beyond quarterly dividends
After a bit of lull in the M&A space in the region in recent years, expect deal-making to uptick next year. And keep a careful eye out at SIRC for who is sneaking off with who!
Parametric enters APAC mainstream
Parametric insurance is one of those tantalising topics that have promised so much for so long but, let’s be honest, have never really set the world alight, especially in Asia.
Yet one gets the sense that now is the time for parametric to finally break through to the mainstream.
The technology appears to be there, the brokers are on board, and more importantly investors are getting their heads around it as parametric covers expand beyond their traditional agricultural base to become a more interesting tool for the APAC market.
Regulatory overhaul
Regulation often takes a backseat at the industry’s major conferences, but I have a feeling that this will change at SIRC given the timing of the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA)’s release of its paper, ‘Targeted adjustments to the general insurance reinsurance framework’.
Ok, that may not sound thrilling, but actually this could be a game changer as it is proposing an overhaul of the country’s general insurance market which is intended to provide a significant boost to the country’s underweight alternative reinsurance sector, including a proposal which would remove reinstatement requirements for reinsurance arrangements where reinstatements are typically unavailable, such as catastrophe bonds, to improve access to alternative forms of reinsurance. ILS, here we come!
The impact of AI
At Monte Carlo, one of the key topics was the impact of AI on the wider industry, and I’ve no doubt that this will be an important topic at SIRC at well.
For the (re)insurance market, AI continues to be a double-edged sword: on the one hand, it offers the possibility of innovative risk assessment and radical modelling; on the other, it continues to pose the threat of job losses. How it will pan out in the technology-leading APAC region will be fascinating.
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