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It’s been a dynamic market over the past year,” says Jack Snowden head of the global reinsurance clients team in London for Aon’s reinsurance solutions, with the look of a man who has used words other than ‘dynamic’ to describe it
to friends. 

Over the past year or more, the reinsurance industry has embarked on an industry-wide move to rethink
how it structures and prices-up so-called ‘cat risk’ – those natural disasters that leave properties exposed to damage, and insurers therefore exposed to claims. 

It’s his job to work with global insurers to take risk off their books, using the reinsurance market to free up capital, bring down clients’ exposures and – eventually – allow insurers to keep premiums down for everyday customers.

Snowden began his career in property, and it’s still of interest. 

“We’ve had to account for climate change. We’ve seen a huge increase in the insured losses from so-called secondary perils – not necessarily the hurricanes or Japanese typhoons, but those lesser-known events like flash floods, tornadoes and hail that are becoming more relevant,” he says. 

In addition to all the analytics, it’s still a people business at the end of the day

Jack Snowden, Aon reinsurance boss

For Jack – whose job it is to work with reinsurance buyers to identify the optimal use of capital to reduce their exposures – this presents a fun challenge. Even at a broker like Aon, there is much more work with clients directly now than there used to be  – with Aon’s team working with those big insurers not just with a view to transacting reinsurance, but to understanding the balance sheet, suggesting ways to navigate volatility, implementing technology, and working as a de facto consultancy. 

For the very biggest of Jack’s global clients, that’s a remarkable level of access to have across the scope of their operations, and plenty of information to wade through, too.

“These clients have large, global, complex businesses, and our job is to work with them to build a coherent and comprehensive view of their risk that enables them to optimise their negotiations with reinsurers. That means we work with huge volumes of data, which we distil down and present to reinsurers to drive efficient transactions,” he says. 

“The good news is that we perform much of the analysis on their behalf; our utility to clients is in helping
them to navigate the market and put them in a position to make better decisions.” 

Snowden had his own navigation of the market to do when he started in reinsurance fresh out of university. 

The Liverpudlian graduated from Cambridge and fired off as many CVs as he could – and when he got a call from Aon, he admits he’d slightly forgotten what it was they did.

“The Aon representative said ‘shall we tell you a bit about what we do’ which was lucky,” Snowden says with a laugh. He was attracted not just to the work but to the skills they wanted – somebody who was personable and engaging but who could also thrive in an analytical environment. 

He joined a smaller European property team and since then has made his mark and moved around. He works with a team of people he says “he really wants to work with”, and enthuses about a recent project in which he had to engage a range of colleagues across Aon’s global network to deliver a really compelling offering to a global giant – a “truly rewarding” experience, he says. 

“The great thing about this industry,” he says, “is that in addition to the analytics and the broking and the consultancy, it’s still a people business at the end of the day.”