Matt Cranney

Welcome back to Fast Break, where we break down what’s happening across issues that are impacting the business landscape, quickly, clearly, and with the experts who live it every day.

Today, we’re taking a close look at the current state of the property and casualty marketplace, both commercial and personal, and what organizations should be paying attention to as we continue through 2026.

To support our work here, M3 just released the 2026 edition of Horizon, an M3 property and casualty report. And it showed that risk isn’t shifting through big shocks, but through quiet misalignments. Horizon identified the following major patterns: Misalignment between operations and coverage, technology dependency and interconnection, third-party vendor exposure, and regulatory complexity.

Today, we’ll connect those insights to what’s happening across industries. To help us do that, I’m joined by two fantastic guests. I’m joined by Paul Connor, Vice President of Property and Casualty here at M3, and Jamie Gregory, Senior Vice President of P&C Carrier Strategies at Assurex Global.

Before I let them introduce themselves to you a little bit more about Assurex Global, they are the world’s largest privately held commercial insurance, risk management, and employee benefits brokerage group, a global partnership of independent firms that collaborates to share data, market insights, and carrier intelligence.

M3 is proud to be part of that network, which gives us access to broader benchmarking, marketplace trends, and strategic carriers perspectives from around the world.

Paul, Jamie, great to have you both on Fast Break.

01:42 Matt Cranney

Awesome. Well, I’m really looking forward to our conversation today, guys. And let’s start right at the top. And Paul, I’ll go to you first. When you look broadly across the property and casualty marketplace, how would you characterize the environment? Are we seeing stabilization? continued pressures or something in between?

02:00 Paul Connor

Yeah, that’s a great question, Matt. And I believe we’re seeing probably something in between. If you think about the over property casualty market, we have a lot of headwinds that the insurance companies and the market face, things like social inflation, litigation abuse, definitely a increase in catastrophic weather and events, weather in the Midwest that we’ve never seen before.

But that’s also at a similar time teaming up where our insurance carrier partners are becoming very profitable. When you put those pressures together, you come into a unique mix that’s really defining a marketplace that we have now that we haven’t seen in quite some time.

02:47 Matt Cranney

Jamie, I’m going to come to you now from the Assurex global viewpoint, which obviously gives you visibility across regions, carrier strategies. What trends or themes stand out to you the most when you look at the PNC landscape today?

03:00 Jamie Gregory

Thanks, Matt. I think Paul really nailed a lot of it. And we’re seeing that, you know, across the country for sure and across the world. But I think just playing more to that combined ratio bit to start with, these large companies have made a fortune.

Now we’re in a position where they’re seeing the soft market again on the horizon because is very cyclical. But you have these large companies that have made a ton of money and see the prospect of having to give some of that up as competition comes in and prices soften. None of those large companies are going to go into that very lightly. And that’s what kind of puts me on edge.

What is the next decision? We’ve seen some very big carriers make some very large decisions that, how it affects their distribution, how it affects their customers, how all this stuff is affecting. We need to be very cautious of that and go slowly, try to figure out what they’re going to do in that world.  And trying to figure that out is very difficult.

04:00 Matt Cranney

No, that’s really, really interesting. And maybe one question for both of you before we move on, I feel like one of the things that has changed so much about the marketplace in these last five to 10 years has been, when I came up in the business, it was very common for us to be able to say, we are in a hard market and all lines were going to be hard, or we’re in a soft market and all lines would be soft.

In the last five years, it feels like that, those terms have almost gone away because you’ve got some lines of coverage that are hardening, some lines that are softening. And so it’s this sort of in-between piece. I’m wondering, Paul, if you could maybe just comment, is that right? Is that what we’re continuing to see or do you think it’s going to be something different?

04:41 Paul Connor

It’s exactly what we’re going to continue to see. The dynamic nature of the market is tremendous. If you think about, we talk about a lot that we’ve been in a hard market, but in reality, there’s lines like D&O, public D&O, especially, cyber, others that we’ve been in a very soft market for the last several years. And there’s other lines today as we talk about the softening market, such as auto, that is not as soft as what maybe others would see.

And then back to what Jamie mentioned about property, for the first time in 10 years this last year, we didn’t see a hurricane come on US shore. We are one hurricane away from coming on to US shore that creates, you know, somewhat of a substantial loss from a lot changing.

So, you know, it’s very dynamic and there’s not going to be the periods of the past where when it gets soft it’s not, it’s just soft until we know better. We can predict and do everything so much faster that it’s really not day by day, but quarter by quarter.

And there’s trends and there’s things that are longer in time that take to play out. But overall, that’s kind of the market we’re living in.

06:02 Matt Cranney

Well, Paul, you brought it up, so let’s go there now. Let’s talk about commercial property. So it’s arguably been the biggest storyline for a lot of the conversations we’ve had with our clients here at M3.

And I’m sure, Jamie, you would say the same thing for your members over the last few years with, you know, Paul, you referenced the catastrophic losses, reinsurance costs, capacity issues. It’s definitely been turbulent. So, Jamie, I’m going to come to you first. What’s your take on the current state of commercial property? And have we reached a point where fundamentals and pricing are aligning again? Or are there still some fractures in the system and volatility like maybe Paul referenced?

06:41 Jamie Gregory

Well, I had to go outside of my knowledge base and ask a few experts just to double check. You need a stew over at Oswald as their kind of in-house property gal. And she’s so smart. She was telling me the property carriers are just completed their third year of profitability in the space.

So you could see after three years that the party starts to wane and the prices start to go down quite a bit. So it’s softening, if not soft. According to her, she did find that there are plenty of areas of challenge, small to mid-size accounts that aren’t very well structured.

What do you do with $100 million foundry of property values right now? That’s really not an easy solve. 100 million of habitational. So things that are outside of the big national accounts.

Other expert I talked to was Lindsay Dress over at RT. It’s very volatile. She on the excess and surplus side has seen rates really, really, really tank, to use her words, which I think 8 months ago, I’d say tank, that was just, that was a really big word for the property market.

So to see it come down steeply is concerning, honestly, because you really start to worry about, we just, we’re having a bad winter. A lot of claims, a lot of claims are getting reported. To Paul’s point, if the hurricane season is somewhat active, It’s going to be a very confusing market for the buyer.

That’s my take on property. It’s getting easier, but going to be confusing still.

08:15 Matt Cranney

Super interesting. Paul, what about from our perspective here at M3, whether it’s in the Horizon Report or other, like, what would you say our take is from a property perspective?

08:26 Paul Connor

Yeah, and I would just add a couple things onto that. One of the things that we focus on in a soft market oftentimes is price. But there’s a lot of other components. So you’re thinking about the structure of deals and some of the terms and conditions that you can accomplish in a hard versus soft market.

So in a hard market, things like your deductibles or how your structure, your deductibles become very rigid and oftentimes become, you know, greater risk on our clients.

We are now seeing a marketplace that if you are, if you have a good strategy and you can come in the right way, maybe you can get some of those terms or conditions that were taken away from you during the hard market back. That is really something that I think that our people as in the M3ers and brokers out there should be working on their clients with and talking about.

Because oftentimes that may be in a loss situation more meaningful to the client than the premium savings that we’re looking to maybe accomplish, which is a short-term wins.

09:40 Matt Cranney

And I think it’s an important point to call out. If you’re a client listening to this and you’re like, but my property went up. This is still a very, a marketplace where risk matters. Your risk matters.

If you have a significant loss experience or safety controls that are a little different, This may not mirror your experience. And so again, our comments here are at the global trend level. But Jamie, I think you nailed it in terms of it can be a confusing market.

But what are some things maybe, Jamie, that you would say if I’m a client listening to this and it does feel confusing, what are maybe just a couple of pointers that you would give to the client to say, hey, here’s how you can think about the market?

10:20 Jamie Gregory

Good question. I would. I’d come back to the capital and the emotion argument almost every time. that is really what’s going to drive this. We know what a soft market looks like. We know what a hard market looks like.

Sitting with a client, you could probably show them the two premiums. And I would maybe say that as you’re transitioning from one market to another, you’re going to experience some bumps in between.

I’ve always heard that rates go up in an elevator and down in an escalator, right? But in the property market, in some cases, not all cases, they’re coming down in the elevator and it’s going to be a bumpy ride. So just hold on with us for a while until this stabilizes a little bit.

11:10 Matt Cranney

Yeah, Paul, what about your perspective on that?

11:12 Paul Connor

Yeah, I would just go back to as a client’s looking to navigate this, to be really upfront with their advisor on what they’re looking to accomplish. There’s many different ways to navigate this and go about it.

And if we don’t have a solid understanding together of what we’re trying to accomplish and what our goals are, it’s hard to ride this elevator escalator that we’re talking about with the capital. But if we know and we can put it in a strategy, And what I’d really like to see is a risk management property strategy beyond just the risk transfer. There’s a lot that can be accomplished in this market.

11:53 Matt Cranney

Yeah, it’s such a great conversation, guys, because you’re sort of making it about, Paul, your point about terms and conditions, and getting expanded coverage or a point about like, hey, where do you want to be on that escalator or elevator approach, which was more comfortable and a better fit for your business from revenue predictability and those ability to pay premiums.

This is when we sort of say like, hey, hard and soft are off the table and softening, hardening. To your point too, Jamie, on that confusion piece, what brings clarity and confusion is Paul, like you referenced strategy, and being aligned with your advisor on what success looks like.

So that’s a really, really good call out. Okay, let’s switch gears here a little, let’s talk about the casualty market. So obviously casualty has had its own set of challenges. And Paul, you referenced this in your opening around social inflation and litigation financing and some nuclear verdicts. Paul, I’ll come to you first. What are you observing in terms of casualty market behavior?

12:53 Paul Connor

It’s a funny one, Matt, because it’s probably even more complex and more difficult to understand in a way than the property market, because you have different casualty lines that have so many different reasons like the ones you just talked about, nuclear verdicts, social inflation, litigation, financing, et cetera, et cetera, that every reason that we could look at would point to that market you would think you would be seeing contraction in terms and conditions, need for rate, need for all sorts of of reasons to limit risk.

But in reality, because of the way the market is, we’re seeing some of that, like in auto, like in excess, but we’re also seeing a really healthy amount of competition in the general, in the GL, you know, there’s a lot of capital in the market. And when you think about that capital and excess capital and them trying to make money, a great class that’s casualty driven is construction.

And Jamie and I don’t know a carrier in the country right now that doesn’t tell us they want to write construction and they want to write a lot of it. And if we take our clients and put them to market in construction, we can probably find some pretty aggressive capital out there that’s willing to do things that we’re thinking are a little irrational if we’re comparing it to lost cost trends and other things.

And so I think the casualty market is an interesting one. And probably over the next couple of years, we’ll see some more discipline come to it. Most lines in most industries is advantageous for the customer right now.

14:42 Matt Cranney

Jamie, how are you seeing carriers recalibrating strategies on the casualty side? And maybe what is Assurex here and across your partner network as it relates to the casualty market?

14:51 Jamie Gregory

Yeah, this one’s, it’s great. It’s so different for property, right? I mean, just that fundamental, the name on the check that the insurer’s carrier writes is not yours, the policyholder.

So it has all these different effects. And yeah, it’s an odd spot where so much of it is in different places. The auto and the umbrella is what I hear the most need for. And so, you know, we’re talking about habitational business for property. That was a huge problem property wise 12, 18 months ago. Now the unsupported excess for that is super hard to come by right now. And nobody wants to touch it under 50 million in a lot of cases with the standard market.

So what do you do? How are you supposed to address that? I get like Lloyd’s of London comes in to solve some of those problems. We start to band-aid stuff together. We’ve got for our partnership a great carrier. Markel offered to do a active assailant policy that has assault and battery endorsement on it for our partner firms in that space, because that gets excluded and then you see some of the premiums they’re paying for that real mismatch of coverage, to be almost the equivalent of self-insuring, but you could tell a well-funded organization just needed to have that box checked.

Yeah, casualty is, I can’t really say how they’re responding and how they’re recalibrating the carriers that is out there. They’re just, they’re doing it very cautiously. They want small business. They want that private nonprofit D&O, stuff like that. That’s what I hear a lot about.

16:30 Matt Cranney

One other area of the market that I just want to make sure we spend a little time on, and it’s actually the one that probably impacts, well, it impacts everybody, because everybody buys personal lines and insurance. And so let’s talk about personal lines.

Obviously, homeowners and auto have been incredibly stressed over the last few years, and we’ve done a number of Fast Break conversations with our personal lines experts to talk about that.

Obviously, some states have seen withdrawals, drastic rate filings, or coverage reductions. Jamie, I’ll come back to you first. How would you describe the current personal lines environment from a carrier and market conditions perspective?

17:06 Jamie Gregory

I would describe it in one word, it’s just, it’s challenging. I just got my personal renewal stuff just came out, just like you said, and my umbrella doubled. And when I called, they said, well, the carrier hadn’t changed rates since 1990. And the average umbrella claim was like $600,000 or something, some sort of insurmountable odds that the carrier was, there’s no way they were making money. where, we know that it’s gotten more profitable. 

We know that states had a problem, and I tend to see it region by region in our private client practice group, where the Southern California folks were underwater for years.

And I just, I really sympathize with the producer, the client manager, anybody who was getting that call, because they were never right. they were never right to the customer. They were never right to the carrier. The carrier would beat them up about rates being too low and you got to charge more, you got to charge more. Customer on the other end saying, I can’t pay anymore, I can’t pay anymore.

18:15 Matt Cranney

Paul, what about from your perspective at M3, what would your take on the current market be?

18:20 Paul Connor

I’m a little bit optimistic, to be honest, with personal lines. We’re starting to see some, I think, meaningful changes that’s going to bring some relief, not only to the people working in our firm and other firms like it around the world, but actually to the consumer.

And some of our personal lines carriers that we’ve done a lot of business with for a long time had really contracted and pretty much closed the door on writing new personal lines clients.

And I’m starting to see that open back up. And that’s good news for consumers because then as a marketplace gets healthy, we have other options and the ability to create more competition.

And then when I think on the national footprint, us being here in the Midwest, snowbirds are a real thing. And a good amount of people spend some time in warmer climates in the winter. And for a long time, we were having real problems finding a carrier that would then take on the risk of their Florida home or Arizona condo. And now we’re starting to see that open up enough to where they’re saying, run it by us. Let us see what we can do.

And a lot of that’s because of structure. These carriers have been able to open up ENS paper and arms and other avenues to accommodate our clients that even a few years ago, they didn’t have those avenues opened up. So the market’s matured, it’s evolved.

But I do think there’s some optimism there, but like I said, a few storms or some bad results could change a lot quickly.

20:00 Matt Cranney

From my perspective, I would just add too, I think there’s certainly been a significant shift in the market, right? Structurally from a personalized perspective, whether it’s about how our insurance companies are handling roof claims, you know, there’s been some changing of terms and conditions. And it’s been sort of an opportunity where a lot of our carrier partners have moved independently, but in the same ways.

And so it seems like, the days of, hey, the, hail storm came through our neighborhood and now everybody’s getting a new roof. Those things are evolving, right, as it relates to, could that happen if there’s legitimate damage? Absolutely. But the way those roofs are adjusted based on the age of the roof, the condition, all those things matter.

And again, going back to the comment we made about individual clients, the risk matters, right? It still does. And I think what you both are speaking to is the days of being able to sort of predict, well, yeah, it’s personal lines that will go up by plus three, minus three, and we’ll all be fine.

The optimism I think you’re speaking to, Paul, is maybe the industry has kind of shifted in that regard now, and maybe that’s where the relief comes from. So, really appreciate that, guys.

Let’s talk strategy for a second. For our business leader audience who are navigating renewals for their business in this environment, property, casualty, or both, what are the most important things they should be doing right now to position themselves for better outcomes?

And I’ll leave that term vague, right? We’re not saying cheaper premiums, we’re not saying just better outcomes for their individual business. So Paul, maybe I’ll come to you first on this one.

21:40 Paul Connor

That’s a great question, Matt. And the more involved anybody becomes in this, I believe this is, you’re going to get better outcomes and you’re going to have to work this is not a go to your broker once a year as a business, give them your exposures and you’re going to get the best outcomes.

You should truly, and you mentioned the word strategy, but outlining and prioritizing your strategy and what you want to accomplish There’s a lot of different things there, right?

It could be how internally do we put in safeguards or put in things like drivers safety programs, employee safety programs, return to work programs, all different things that mitigate risk for your organization. And then being able to communicate that to underwriting communities upon renewal is really going to help you.

I do think our carriers right now have a different appetite for new business than maybe they do their renewal business. I don’t think they’d like to hear that if they were on the line, but we are seeing different outcomes on something that they want to get in new versus that maybe they’ve been on.

So I think with your advisor, understanding what you want to accomplish and maybe leveraging the market, not always does that mean going to market and getting a bunch of quotes, but leveraging the market through conversations, through insights, through data, benchmarking, all the different tools that we’ve built out can really put you in a position to accomplish those goals.

23:19 Matt Cranney  

Yeah, Jamie, where’s your head at there?

23:21 Jamie Gregory

Man, that was pretty good. There’s not a lot of, honestly, I could add. I always like working with an expert in everything that I do. So if I’m empathizing with the client, you know, I would want to be working with an expert advisor in manufacturing, in construction, in real estate, in anything like that.

The establishment of trust is that I have gone to everybody, you know, job one is let’s have an insurance policy in place so you’re protected, right? You know, I might not be able to shop it because nobody’s really interested in parts of this right now. and that will change, but right now it’s not going to change.

So just getting those expertise straight, when those expertise come with additional services like risk management, I think that’s even bigger.  – But Paul is right carriers are very attracted to the new. Again, we’re in this emotional phase of they’re starting to look beyond at what somebody else has and want to take a run at that. So if there’s some competition, that is what’s going to benefit all of us.

24:27 Matt Cranney

Yeah, it’s kind of the theme of our conversation, right? This is a very complex space. I think Jamie used the word confusing space, regardless of, you know, our commentary on recent trends or things that are showing up.

I think those things will always be true about the space. The very best thing that you can do is have an incredible partner to navigate that complexity with you. It’s also about making sure that that’s not a short-term mindset, that you have a long-term mindset and a real strategy that can help navigate some of the confusion and complexity and challenges of any one year in the marketplace.

But what we do have within our control is the ability to have incredible partners and the ability to understand our own risk. That’s where we point people to, you know, the M3 Horizon report as well. That’s going to be a really detailed resource for people to be able to gather maybe just one or two practical insights for what it means or does mean in the construction real estate space or the senior living and social services or education in government or any of our other practices.

So the 2026 edition, it’s available now at m3ins.com/horizon.

Paul, Jamie, thank you so much for joining us today, for being willing to share your thoughts and opinions on, again, what is an incredibly complex landscape. Your insights have been really valuable, and hopefully this gives our listeners a clearer picture of what’s happening in that PNC marketplace today. So thank you.

26:02 Jamie Gregory

Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having me. I was going to try to put you on the spot and say, can you think of a sports analogy for the current insurance marketplace? And it’s just, I wouldn’t even know, you know, where to start. You know, there’s just, there aren’t clear winners and losers anymore. You know, on things. So it gets really hard to do, but I feel like we made a little bit of headway for the three of us today. Thanks for doing that, that was fun.

26:31 Matt Cranney

Yeah, that’s awesome. Paul, thank you to you as well.

26:35 Paul Connor

Yeah, I really appreciate it, Matt. I think there’s a lot of optimism overall. The marketplace is resilient. There’s solutions for almost anything that’s out there. Looking forward to the partners we get to work with.

26:47 Matt Cranney

So to our audience, thank you so much for listening to Fast Break, and we’ll see you next time.

This has been Fast Break brought to you by M3 Elevate. I’m Matt Cranney, thank you for joining me. Do you want more tips to grow protect your business? Subscribe now and catch all of our episodes and we’ll see you next time.