From Artemis:
As the negotiations between reinsurance giant Swiss Re and technology and telecoms investor SoftBank are reported to have stalled, with the pair said unable to agree on the size of the stake, among other things. Perhaps SoftBank could put its innovation hat on and leverage ILS trends as a way to do something different in reinsurance?
Regular readers will note that we’re big fans of doing something different and if SoftBank cannot agree on a way forwards with Swiss Re, there are other ways the tech investor could access the reinsurance market, perhaps even more meaningfully.
It was reported yesterday, by news sources and our sister site Reinsurance News, that SoftBank and Swiss Re cannot come to agreement on the size of the investments stake, while the price may also be deemed too high by the Masayoshi Son founded Japanese tech firm, and the level of control in the reinsurer may be insufficient as well.
That’s a number of issues to overcome and sometimes these types of negotiations do go nowhere in the end. But SoftBank does have options and if it’s really keen to enter the insurance and reinsurance market with a bang, it’s certain to be exploring numerous avenues it could pursue.
Among those would be speaking to other reinsurers and trying to find another willing company looking for a major investor. One such potential candidate would be Munich Re, which recently said an anchor investor would be of interest to it.
But perhaps SoftBank could think outside of the box and look to other ways that could secure it access to a product set, distribution, capacity and capital, as well as a way to put some of its own capital to work if it chose to....MORE
