The professional who analyzes a ceding portfolio, sets its price and commits the reinsurer's capacity.
A treaty underwriter assesses a cedant's portfolio, not risk by risk as in facultative business but as a whole: composition, underwriting policy, adjusted loss history, reserving quality, governance. From that it derives a price, an acceptable structure and a share, then commits its company's capacity for a year. The problem the job solves is underwriting blind: it has seen none of the policies it reinsures and will see none, so that what it actually underwrites is an organization and a discipline, of which the figures are only the trace. That is why relationship matters as much as model in this work, and why an underwriter follows a cedant across years to tell a bad year from a drift. Its tools are experience rating, exposure rating, catastrophe models and reserve variance analysis, and its standing trade-off sets the technical price it computes against the price the market will accept.
An underwriter reviews a cedant in 2026 whose reported combined ratio improves from 104 to 97 percent. Examination of the settlement triangles shows the improvement comes from a 14 million euro release of prior-year reserves, not from current underwriting, whose ratio has in fact worsened by 3 points. It holds its share at 9 percent but requires a loss corridor and refuses the rate reduction sought.
Treaty underwriter, Souscripteur réassurance, Underwriter de traité, Souscripteur cédante