Exclusive: Munich Re hires Arch Re’s Hackett as US casualty head following Freiwald promotion

By James Thaler

March 25 - (The Insurer) - Munich Re has hired Arch Re executive Joshua Hackett as its new U.S. head of casualty reinsurance, filling a role that was vacated at the start of this year when Maura Freiwald was appointed CEO of Spain, Portugal, Latin America and the Caribbean.

A spokesperson for Munich Re confirmed Hackett’s appointment in a statement to The Insurer, saying that Hackett would start in his new role on March 31.

The firm cited Hackett’s “extensive experience managing large reinsurance portfolios, for both casualty and personal lines business, and in underwriting and business analytics.”

Marcus Winter, president and CEO of Munich Re North America, also commented on Hackett’s appointment.

“We welcome Joshua to the Munich Re team and are confident that under his leadership, we will continue to provide outstanding solutions to our casualty and professional liability clients,” Winter said in a statement.

“This appointment reaffirms our continued investment in exemplary expertise and reinforces our long-term commitment to the casualty reinsurance space,” he added.

Hackett will report to Winter and join the reinsurer’s North America executive leadership team and be based in Princeton, New Jersey.

Hackett has spent the last nine years with Arch, most recently as chief underwriting officer for longtail casualty and specialty lines, after previously serving as managing director and head of casualty.

Hackett has spent the last nine years with Arch Re, most recently as chief underwriting officer for casualty and specialty, after previously serving as managing director and head of casualty.

He previously held senior underwriting roles at Swiss Re and Endurance, after earlier working at Zurich. He also spent time as an equity research associate at Goldman Sachs.

The Insurer was first to report the news of Freiwald’s promotion last September. Freiwald led Munich Re’s U.S. casualty reinsurance business for three years after joining from Scor in January 2022. She also previously worked at Swiss Re.

Speaking to The Insurer last October ahead of the January 1 renewal season, Munich Re’s U.S. president and CEO Marcus Winter said he had observed “two different philosophies” in the casualty reinsurance market.

“There are those that say the last three years were very good years after very poor years up until 2019. We have always been more cautious and we are in the second camp,” Winter commented.

“We’ve always said that the latest years are just too green to really know, and from what we see at the moment, those years are challenged by the underlying trends – social inflation, legal system abuse, however you want to call it,” he continued.

For that reason, Winter said, Munich Re’s strategy had been to not grow into those years and to reduce in certain areas, which he said “has worked very well”.

“We have a casualty portfolio of a certain size but it is not dominating our book. It’s with cedants in parts of the market that are well understood. It’s a solid casualty portfolio and we have no issues on the reserving side,” Winter said.

“We will just wait it out and we will need to see the reserving actions in the market, both insurance and reinsurance, in Q3 and Q4. In all likelihood we will just move with our prices up a bit, or ceding commissions down a bit.

“But if there’s material change in the casualty market in the current environment, we will not deploy more capacity on the casualty side. We don’t need to cut back drastically because we did our own work in the previous years,” Winter concluded.

Arch Re did not immediately respond to a request for comment.