Reinsurance at a Turning Point: RAPA Reflections

By Joe Wilds, Chief Growth Officer

This year’s RAPA Conference made one thing clear: reinsurance is entering a new era, one defined by accelerating growth, rising complexity, and mounting economic pressure. Across conversations with reinsurers, carriers, and capital partners, the message was consistent: the industry is shifting faster than our systems and frameworks were designed to handle. 

A Market Growing—and Tightening 

Today’s reinsurance market sits around $220 billion. Within the next decade, it’s expected to reach $630 billion. But that growth comes with tightening constraints: 

• Capacity tightening as reinsurers become more selective
• Rising claims costs shifting risk appetite 
• Economic pressure affecting how capital flows into the market 

At the same time, carriers are reinsuring more than ever due to demographic shifts and increased volatility. The result is a system stretched by complexity without a unified operational framework to support it. 

Complexity Without Cohesion 

One of the most repeated insights at RAPA was the sheer difficulty of managing today’s treaty structures. The challenges are real: 

• Increasingly complex session and retro arrangements
• No clean framework connecting reinsurers, carriers, and capital companies
• Legacy systems unable to adapt to a dynamic, pooled reinsurance environment 
• Demographic and wealth shifts reshaping risk in ways traditional models weren’t built for 

In an industry experiencing one of the largest wealth transfers in history, from Boomers to Millennials, risk models, pricing, and treaty design are evolving quickly. 

Where FJA Fits into the Future 

It was energizing to hear how strongly the market responded to FJA’s new solution, Reinsurance Accelerator. Leaders said: “This is game-changing”, and “This is the system we’ve been missing.” 

Our Reinsurance Accelerator was built for today’s market. At RAPA, its strengths resonated clearly: 

• High configurability to adapt to unique and emerging treaty structures 
• Native support for sessions and retro sessions in pooled environments 
• A unified solution that connects reinsurers, carriers, and capital providers 
• A user experience designed around how modern reinsurance teams work 

In a market where players like Gen Re, Swiss Re, Hannover Re, AXA Capital, Security Mutual, Guardian, MetLife, and New York Life are facing rising pressure, modernization is no longer optional—it’s strategic. 

Adaptability Is the New Competitive Advantage 

RAPA underscored an important truth: To keep pace with a rapidly growing and tightening market, reinsurance organizations must evolve. 

Those who thrive in the next decade will be the ones who: 

• Modernize their administration systems
• Embrace flexible, configurable technology
• Improve transparency across treaty partners
• Bring all parties together around a unified data model 

Reinsurance is changing, quickly. The companies willing to adapt will define the future. 

As the Chief Growth Officer at FJA, Joe Wilds strives to pioneer new ideas, provide keen insight into the direction of the health insurance industry, and unleash innovation across FJA employee and client teams. Connect with Joe on Linkedin here.