A particular trend in life reinsurance has enabled the life business at Aon to grow and, according to Colin Dutkiewicz, head of Aon’s Life Reinsurance, the global pandemic has boosted this trend further.

Dutkiewicz explained that a trend has started in the past four or five years, with a movement from life reinsurance being purely direct-placed to being intermediated or advised in some way.

“At Aon, we’ve grown our life practice and hired people on a global basis to offer an increasingly broad advisory capability to look at life reinsurance.

“The global pandemic has accelerated the demand for this advisory capability significantly because the cedants, clients, have needed clarity from their insurers about the current situation and what to expect going forward,” he said.

Cedants had approached Aon for its expertise in this area, he added.

“We give them logical, rational ideas of what we believe is going to happen based on our analytics, expertise and insights. They’ve found the process interesting and have told us that the work has been highly valuable, and that Aon’s life team is giving them an independent impartial view of the world and what could potentially happen.

“It has been tremendously good for our business, in terms of our connections with clients and providing advisory information to them.

“The more business-specific part of that is that the big life reinsurers like doing quota share business where they’re taking a substantial portion of the entire portfolio, for example 50 percent of the entire portfolio for the next 50 years. It’s proved to be very profitable.”