Legacy Roundtable: Stakeholders eager to close perception gap & advance run-off market

Around the annual meeting of the legacy insurance and reinsurance marketplace in Brighton, UK, last month, we hosted a roundtable discussion in partnership with global reinsurer Swiss Re, during which experts from across the market discussed trends, opportunities and challenges for the run-off world.

Janic Schilling, Swiss Re

Held on May 12th, 2025, it was the first Reinsurance News Legacy Roundtable and featured 11 run-off market experts with broad experience on the seller and buyer side, as well as broking, legal, and advisory, all focused on further advancing the legacy marketplace.

Our first legacy roundtable was sponsored by reinsurance giant Swiss Re, and on the day, Janic Schilling, the reinsurer’s Head of Legacy Origination, set the scene ahead of a technical and insightful discussion.

“We are not just here as a sponsor, we are here as a committed and long-standing legacy transaction partner,” explained Schilling. “As Swiss Re operates across multiple segments of the reinsurance value chain, we want to ensure that those concepts, best practices and learnings can be transferred and tested from those other areas to the legacy market.”

On the day, a key message from Schilling was that “legacy is a long-term, strategic tool rather than being about one-off deals,” and he underlined the opportunity the roundtable discussion presents.

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“This is a unique opportunity to rethink how the legacy market can better support our clients in these uncertain times,” said Schilling.

For the roundtable, Swiss Re’s Schilling was joined by numerous other run-off market players, including buyers and sellers, broking groups, and also advisory and legal entities.

Market and macro trends were discussed at length as roundtable participants explored unlocking transactions and building momentum, enablers and best practices to grow the deal universe, barriers to deal execution, repeatability, regulatory scrutiny, shaping the future, and more.

Collaboration and potential syndication were also hot topics on the day, and a participant from the seller, or client side, highlighted the often wide gaps between legacy valuations, as one of the brokers in the room underlined the importance of stakeholders ensuring they are different to avoid a legacy market characterised by a single business model.

The topic of syndication garnered some divergent views among roundtable participants, as did a debate around price transparency early in a transaction.

Speed of execution was another key theme from the roundtable, something all sides of the market are eager to improve alongside greater efforts to retain talent and better communicate the benefits and rewards of working in the legacy insurance and reinsurance sector.

“We all agree that we want to provide and generate value for our clients, but do they actually see the full value the legacy market could deliver? This highlights a clear perception gap, and it’s where we, as a market, still have work to do,” said Schilling.

Stay tuned as we’ll be releasing the full 2025 Reinsurance News Legacy Roundtable, sponsored by Swiss Re, in the coming weeks, which will include more commentary from our sponsor and valuable insights from all of the other legacy market participants.