Rebirth without the drag of legacy: Willis Re’s Summers

THE architects of a new and improved Willis Re have made considerable progress and will be meeting with clients and markets at this year’s Rendez-vous de Septembre to listen and discuss reinsurance programmes in the run up to the January 1 renewals, according to the reinsurance broker’s chief executive of global specialties, Jim Summers.

In an interview with Insurance Day, ahead of the annual meeting of reinsurers in Monaco, Summers says that, by the time of the event in 2027, the company’s “tech stack” will be fully operational.

WTW ended a three-year hiatus from reinsurance broking when it partnered with equity firm Bain Capital in 2024, following Arthur J Gallagher & Co’s acquisition of Willis Towers Watson’s treaty insurance brokerage operations for $3.25bn.

This was after Willis had agreed to terminate a $30bn merger agreement with Aon, which would have created the world’s largest insurance broker, after the proposed transaction was blocked by the US Department of Justice. As part of that deal, WTW’s reinsurance arm and Gallagher’s existing reinsurance operations combined, to trade as Gallagher Re.

The former deputy chief executive of global specialties and global head of marine & energy specialty at another rival broker, Guy Carpenter, Summers had missed the RVS in 2025 because he was on 12 months of gardening leave before joining the newly formed Willis Re in June this year.

Other Willis Re appointments include Jonathan Ogilvie as global head of non-marine specialties, Chris Dart as head of treaty reinsurance, Bermuda, and John Fletcher as chief executive of Willis Re Bermuda. They are among about 22 of Willis Re’s new hires since June 2025 to have come from Guy Carpenter, whose High Court challenge to the recruitment drive largely failed, with the court rejecting allegations of a systematic team-poaching scheme and refusing the broad injunctive relief sought against Willis Re.

More recent appointments include Richard Jones, who will join from Gallagher Re in October to lead Willis Re’s Asia operations.

Core infrastructure

Bain’s ability to scale a business was key, Summers stresses. The core infrastructure — human resources, finance, compliance and C-suite — was already set before the new brokers, including Summers, joined Willis Re. In addition, the actuarial and catastrophe modelling capabilities, and data and analytics systems, were in place.

“I can’t take credit for that because I was ‘in the garden’, but those of us joining knew we would be able to hit the ground running,” Summers says. “Over 30 colleagues had been providing support from WTW’s Insurance Consulting and Technology (ICT) division to ensure that actuarially and cat modelling-wise we were fully operational by the time the first brokers joined Willis Re, which was in December 2025,” he adds.

Since then, Willis Re has been employing its own actuaries and catastrophe modellers, with a number of members from WTW ICT remaining to build out its tech platform and make sure that “everything’s interconnected”. From within the Willis Group, about seven artificial intelligence (AI) engineers will be joining Willis Re, “so that everything’s engineered the way it needs to be”, Summers says.

“We’re a brand-new business, so it’s about how we’ve set out our stall with what Willis Re should be, and what we think reinsurance should look like”
_{Jim Summers
Willis Re}

The rollout of that system between January and June coincided with the accelerating improvement of AI in general. “Any company’s digital transformation will have seen massive change in those six months, which for us was very fortunate timing because it’s meant that everything being developed for Willis Re has been brought forward,” Summers says. That pace means Willis Re will have every component of its new digital platform ready in time for RVS 2027, he adds.

With much of the preparation of Willis Re already done, Summers was therefore able, upon his arrival, to join meetings with dozens of WTW’s clients, led by Lucy Clarke, president of risk & broking at WTW, and including colleagues from Willis Re, Willis and WTW ICT. “We’ve done it that way so that, by the time we get to Monte Carlo this September, we want to be listening to our existing and potential clients and partners there,” Summers says.

Moreover, Willis Re, WTW ICT and the C-suite of the Willis Towers Watson Group will be “heavily represented” at the event, which will show the “interconnectivity” of the WTW businesses. “We’ll talk about tech, which is obviously a big play for us, but I want to make the point that technology can make good brokers better, but it won’t make bad brokers good brokers. We’re still in the people business and we still need that formal interaction with clients, to run through serious matters, but in a faster and more efficient way.”

The beauty of the new Willis Re and the main part of its appeal to Summers is that it is “legacy free”. 

“We’re a brand-new business, so it’s about how we’ve set out our stall with what Willis Re should be, and what we think reinsurance should look like. We’ve set up a business led by reinsurance professionals and with a joined-up approach, so that Willis Re is not in isolation but connected by design with the rest of the Willis businesses, including Willis Insurance, the WTW ICT arm and the wider Willis Towers Watson Group,” he explains.

Deep collaboration

The absence of a legacy system also means Willis Re can create a technology platform that encourages “deep collaboration in real-time” by making use of AI. This combination of connectivity and efficiency will be shaped around its clients. “Every broker says, ‘it’s all about the client’. but really, actions speak louder than words. So if we put a technology platform together that makes our clients lives easier, that makes the markets easier, then we’ll have done our job creating what we think reinsurance should be like,” Summers says.

He describes Willis Re’s data pool as a hub, with spokes running out to its various functions, including client relationship management, claims and premiums processing, pricing and technology tools, and catastrophe models. “These are the things that most brokers can individually do very well, but we’ll have an AI infrastructure wrap to bring everything together, so that we’re all talking together and live.”

Another advantage Summers points to, is access to the Willis Research Network. “These are the guys who have relationships with 50 or so academics around the world, which help us challenge model changes thanks to their insights into any specific peril in the world,” he says.

And WTW ICT’s risk analytics modelling platform, Igloo, is “one of the most widely used capital models in the market”, particularly within Lloyd’s. “The colleagues we seconded from WTW ICT to help us with our tech stack are also designing Willis Re’s pricing tool, Igloo Re, which will be fully compatible with Igloo. So if our clients choose to use it that way, they will see the pricing flows straight through to the capital model. So again, all of Willis Re is interconnected by design,” Summers says.

Summers also values the company’s “rich history”, having been founded as Willis Group Holdings in 1828, and particularly the marine and energy brand of Willis Re before it was sold to Gallagher.

“I know the ambition for Willis Re is to build something which is the same scale as Willis the insurance broker again, and so we would like to be in every geography and every class of business that they’re doing, but starting with specialty lines,” Summer says.

“The London market has a huge concentration of capital and reinsurance buyers and reinsurance sellers and so it’s an obvious place to start and an obvious place for me to go to, because of that very strong brand and rich history that Willis Re had. It’s like a startup but with the compelling feature of having sister companies and mother companies around you,” he adds.

Willis Re has already made as Summers describes it “a great start” as the company onboards new clients and announces a key acquisition of its own, signing a definitive agreement in August to acquire the US reinsurance division of BMS Group for an undisclosed sum.

According to Willis Re, the acquisition brings the company a strong client base across regional and super-regional carriers, and MGA and programme, along with offices in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Minneapolis, Atlanta and Dallas. The deal, which is subject to regulatory approval, also gives Willis Re US capital markets capability.

“So where do we want to be? We want to make sure we’ve got the talent right and we have more teams joining. We’ve announced aviation, trade credit and Singapore. We’ll continue to announce new initiatives and new individuals joining, as time goes on,” Summers says. “If we get the talent right and the tech right, then Willis Re will be in a great place and our new clients will be saying they’re glad they made the decision to move over to us.”

To Summers, the ‘right talent’ means the collective expertise. “I’ve always worked that way in my career because teams always outperform the individuals in the long run.”

Market trends

Having been on gardening leave since before the last RVS, Summers says his observation of trends in the market this year are restricted to the second-quarter earnings season. “We’ve seen combined ratios for a number of the major reinsurers in the mid to late 80s, which still shows that the market is in an area of profitability. So with that as a backdrop, it’s very difficult to expect much in the way of upward pressure on rates in most areas of the property casualty specialty market,” he notes.

Discussions at this year’s RVS are likely to include the longer-term implications of the March 2024 collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, which triggered the biggest-ever single marine insurance loss.

“What will probably happen is a recalibration of the model because the severity of such a loss is higher than we'd expected and the frequency is becoming higher, and so you may see some rating implications on the reinsurance programmes,” Summers says.

“It’s about building the models to make sure that we’re capturing all the perils, making sure we’ve got appropriate loss curves so that we understand the type of loss that the market may have to pay”
_{Jim Summers
Willis Re}

“The reinsurance markets had already priced in the loss outside of what they’re then recovering in the retro market and so the retrocessionaires are picking up a loss that they didn’t think they were going to get. It’s the area of the market that’s most likely to see upward pressure on rates,” he adds.

The “blocking and trapping” of vessels in the Strait of Hormuz will be another subject for conversation because there is “disparity” between war insurers pricing individual vessels and reinsurers seeing the situation as an ‘event’. Summers explains: “There’s a disparity between the way the original markets have written it and how the reinsurance markets will be paying claims, but of course that doesn’t take into account whether individual vessels are damaged in the process of coming out, when there’s smaller risk losses which will be within the retention.

“So there could be some discussion about whether excessive loss or quota share is the best way of protecting those portfolios going forward, but I do feel there is room for better alignment between the reinsurance and the insurance markets.”

On energy, Summers says it may appear that climate change has dropped down the list of priorities for policymakers. However, he cites Willis Research Network data that in 2026, global clean energy spending is projected to exceed $2.2trn. “That’s nearly twice the investment of what’s going into fossil fuels, so you can clearly see there’s a big shift in that direction. The point is, it’s not just about energy being clean, but that security and resilience are now as important to climate policy,” he says.

Electricity demand for data centres means that “decarbonisation is not the primary conversation anymore”. Summers explains: “Energy is multi-faceted and the opportunity for our sector is how we model the different types of risks with their various loss profile potentials. If an oil platform blows up, that’s a multi-billion-dollar event, but wind turbines and solar plants haven’t got that size of value or historical loss records.

“It’s about building the models to make sure that we’re capturing all the perils, making sure we’ve got appropriate loss curves so that we understand the type of loss that the market may have to pay. And having Willis Research Network means we’ve got the data and insights to ensure our clients and markets understand the risks they’re taking on.”

On property catastrophe business, Summers notes that global insured losses for 2025 were over $120bn and despite the fact there was no significant hurricane landfall in the US. “It’s a proper number, and of course you’re also picking up the secondary perils. So you can start thinking about the self-insured losses and that the wider reinsurance markets, with the retentions they’ve got, are still quite profitable,” he says.

Willis Re is looking forward to finding innovation through reinsurance structures, Summers stresses. “We’re seeing greater use of alternative capital and, in particular, parametric solutions, which must be bespoke for each client. And finding ways to manage price volatility to help close protection gaps is another area where tech’s going to play a really important part as we build out the best-in-class AI services; bringing our pricing tools together along with our cat models simultaneously, to make sure that we have a fast decision-making process.”