Re · 2026-10-14 16:58 UTC

What Does a Reinsurance Broker Do? Interview w/ Howden Re Managing Director of Broking Josephine Li Insurance is a critical component of life in today's world. You buy insurance to protect yourself and your assets, be that health, your car, your home, your possessions, and more. Businesses and even governments do the same. But insurers need insurance too. That’s why they seek out reinsurance: insurance for insurers. Hardly anyone outside of the insurance world will ever see it, but it’s critical to the industry at large. When insurers seek reinsurance, it’s the reinsurance brokers who do the legwork. They’re involved from start to finish in arranging the deals, and their work continues well after the contract is signed. Josephine Li, ACAS, is managing director of broking at Howden Re, one of the world’s leading reinsurance brokerages. In this interview, she discusses the role of a broker, what a deal involves, and her experience working with Cover Re. The work and the person behind it The role of a reinsurance broker draws on expertise in risk, negotiation, analysis, and industry knowledge. Brokers act as the primary channel through which insurers seek out reinsurance, helping them determine suitable reinsurers, negotiate the terms, and then manage the ongoing work after a contract is signed. Josephine’s experience offers a view into the profession, including her path into broking, what the work involves, and the lessons she’s learned about building relationships and a career in reinsurance. For readers who’ve never met a reinsurance broker, how do you describe your job at a dinner party? We help insurance companies insure themselves. A reinsurance broker is part strategist, part translator and part negotiator. We help clients understand the risks they’re taking, decide how much of that risk they want to keep, and find capital to take the rest. What does a typical day actually look like for you right now? There really isn’t one. I can go from talking with a client about growth or capital strategy, to working through analytics and treaty structure, to negotiating with reinsurers, to getting different internal teams aligned around a placement. A lot of the job is connecting the technical, commercial and relationship pieces. You have an actuarial background. How does someone go from the actuarial track to broking, and what made you make that jump? The actuarial background gave me a very strong foundation for deconstructing risk and testing whether the economics make sense. What attracted me to broking was being able to take that analytical foundation and add strategy, negotiation, clients and the market. I liked being closer to the decisions rather than only analyzing them after the fact. What’s the moment you knew reinsurance was going to be your career? Was there a deal, a mentor, a market event? It wasn’t one dramatic moment. I stumbled into reinsurance after college, but I stayed because the problems kept being interesting and no two deals were ever exactly the same. What’s the hardest lesson the market has taught you? A deal that went sideways, a renewal you lost, a call you got wrong? Being technically right isn’t enough. You have to understand what motivates everyone involved, communicate clearly, get the timing right and know when to push versus when to listen. And when you do get something wrong, owning it quickly matters a lot more than trying to defend it. Reinsurance is a relationship business. How did you build your book of relationships when you were starting out, before you had a track record? By being useful. When you’re early in your career, you may not have decades of relationships or a big book, but you can be prepared, responsive, curious and dependable. If people learn that when they call you they’ll get a thoughtful answer and you’ll do what you said you were going to do, the relationships build from there. What’s a misconception about brokers (even inside the industry) that you’d like to correct? That the job is primarily matchmaking, take a risk from a client and find someone willing to write it. The best broking is much more consultative than that. A good broker should be helping shape the risk, challenge assumptions, improve the structure, create competition and ultimately help both sides make a better decision. What advice would you give someone considering a move into broking today? Learn the fundamentals first. Understand analytics, contracts, how your client makes money and how the reinsurer makes money. Then learn how to explain complicated things simply. The people who can combine technical credibility with judgment, communication and relationships become very valuable very quickly. How a reinsurance deal comes together A reinsurance deal begins with establishing the insurer’s specific goals. The broker then works through the insurer’s data, develops potential contract structures, and approaches potential reinsurers to seek feedback and negotiate. After the agreement is signed, the broker continues working with both sides on contract issues, amendments, and premium and claims activity throughout the life of the treaty. Josephine describes how that process unfolds in practice: the preparation behind a deal, and the factors she considers when selecting a reinsurer. Walk me through a deal from the very first conversation to binding. Where does a treaty actually begin (a phone call, a renewal date, a lunch)? The treaty usually starts with a business problem, not a treaty structure. You first understand what the client is trying to accomplish, growth, capital relief, earnings protection, something else. Then you work through the data and modeling, develop structures, build the underwriting story, approach the right markets, take feedback, negotiate terms and capacity, allocate the line and ultimately bind it. The structure is really the output of understanding the underlying problem. Matchmaking is the visible part of broking. What’s the invisible part, like the work clients and reinsurers never see? A huge amount of preparation. It’s understanding the portfolio, pressure-testing the analytics, anticipating reinsurer questions, figuring out which markets are genuinely relevant, managing competing interests and sometimes solving problems before the client ever knows they existed. The meeting or negotiation is the visible 10%; most of the work happened before anyone got into the room. When you’re deciding which reinsurer to bring a client’s risk to, what are you actually weighing? What separates a market you trust from one you don’t? Price and capacity obviously matter, but they’re only part of it. I’m looking at underwriting appetite, financial strength, expertise, responsiveness, consistency and whether I believe they’ll still behave like a partner when something goes wrong. A market earns trust through what it does after the easy part of the transaction is over. Once a treaty is bound, you service it for its whole life. What does that actually involve month to month, and why does it matter so much? Binding isn’t the end of the relationship. There are contract issues, data, premium and loss activity, claims, amendments, changing exposures and ongoing conversations with both sides throughout the year. Good servicing also makes the next renewal better because nobody wants to rediscover the relationship once a year. Working with Cover Re Howden Re is Cover Re’s largest broker relationship. Josephine shares her first impressions of Cover Re, her experience working with its technical team, and what Cover Re has done to secure repeat business with Howden. Do you remember the first Cover Re deal you worked on? What was your honest first impression of them as a market? What stood out was that you were innovative without treating innovation as a substitute for underwriting. There are plenty of new ideas around capital and technology, but ultimately this business still comes down to understanding risk, pricing it appropriately and honoring your commitments. Is there a moment in the relationship that stands out? The team’s technical capability stands out, especially in structured markets. Jon [Lim, chief underwriting officer) and Blanca [Qin, head of underwriting] are very strong technicians in their respective areas, which makes conversations about structure mechanics much smoother. It feels more like a thoughtful debate with knowledgeable peers than having to explain how each part of the deal mechanics works. Howden is now Cover Re’s largest broker relationship. From your side of the table, what has Cover Re done to earn repeat business? What does “reliable execution” actually look like in practice? Engage early, give useful feedback, give a clear yes or no, make decisions when you say you will and don’t change the rules late in the process. If a reinsurer consistently does those things, brokers remember it. How the market is changing The reinsurance industry is drawing upon an increasingly varied mix of capital: not just traditional reinsurers and private capital, but also newer technology-enabled approaches such as Re. Josephine discusses where those changes could lead, the potential role of crypto-native capital, and what participants on both sides need to understand about each other. You sit at a vantage point where you see the whole market. What’s changing in reinsurance right now that you find most interesting, or most worrying? I think the variety of capital entering the market is fascinating. You have traditional balance-sheet reinsurers, ILS capital, private capital and increasingly technology-enabled approaches all looking at similar risks in different ways. That creates more options for clients, but it also means brokers have to understand the differences between sources of capital rather than treating capacity as interchangeable. New sources of capital keep entering the market. Where do you think that goes in the next 5-10 years? Is crypto-native capital a novelty or the beginning of something structural? I think it’s part of a broader structural trend toward new forms of capital entering insurance and reinsurance. The technology itself is interesting, but what ultimately determines whether any new source of capital lasts is much more traditional: permanence, control, liquidity, how it performs through losses, and whether policyholders and cedants have appropriate protections. If it can pass those tests, then it becomes less about “crypto” and more about another credible source of risk capital. What would you say to a traditional insurance person who’s skeptical of protocols like Re? And conversely, what should crypto people understand about how this market really works? To the traditional insurance side, I’d say don’t dismiss a new mechanism simply because the technology is unfamiliar. But the reverse is equally important: technology doesn’t eliminate underwriting cycles, claims development or the importance of trust. Insurance has accumulated a lot of institutional knowledge for good reasons. Finish this sentence: “The best brokers are the ones who ______.” …create outcomes where both sides win. Many thanks to Josephine for taking the time to share her experience and perspective! Learn more about Josephine on LinkedIn. Explore Re → Disclosures: For educational and informational purposes only. Nothing in this post is investment, financial, legal, or tax advice, or an offer, solicitation, or recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any digital asset, including reUSD and reUSDe (together, the “Tokens”). No advisory or fiduciary relationship is created by this post; readers should consult qualified legal, tax, and financial professionals before making any decision. Yields are variable, not guaranteed, and may change at any time. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results. 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