Q3 2026 Insurance Leadership Review: Falling Property Prices, Rising Health Costs and New Leadership

Pricing Judgment in a Turning Market

Property and casualty leaders are running two markets at once. US commercial property rates fell 13% in the second quarter while casualty rates rose 7%. In property, too much capital is chasing the same risks: ample insurer capital and record catastrophe bond issuance pushed prices down. In casualty, large jury verdicts kept prices climbing, and umbrella premiums rose for a 35th straight quarter.¹

Together the two markets left insurers with a cushion: a $31.7 billion underwriting gain in the first half, nearly triple the prior year, even as premium growth slowed to 2.1%.² Companies split on how to use that cushion: some shored up casualty reserves and others released them into results. In second-quarter results, Everest strengthened North American casualty reserves and offset the charge with releases elsewhere in its book, CNA took a second consecutive annual charge for legacy abuse claims and Travelers released reserves.

Weather added to the cushion. With El Niño holding, the Atlantic produced no hurricanes during the quarter, and US hurricane damage was limited to Hawaii. Isaias, the season’s first Atlantic hurricane, made landfall near Destin, Florida, as a Category 2 storm on October 9, with Verisk estimating insured losses at $1 billion to $2 billion.

Chief Underwriting Officers must compete on property only where price still covers the risk while defending casualty terms. Chief Actuaries face the harder call, since every reserve release props up results that softening prices will soon erode. Carriers that set aside enough for casualty claims now will avoid larger charges when those claims come in above estimates. Carriers hiring a Chief Underwriting Officer or Chief Actuary should look for a record of walking away from underpriced business and defending a reserve call to the board.

Claims Practices Under Scrutiny

In personal lines, the pressure has moved from price to claims. Approved homeowners rate changes fell from about 13.6% in 2024 to 1.8% through July.³ Personal auto has stayed profitable since 2024, and that profit drew attention to how insurers pay claims. On October 2, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Josh Hawley pressed six of the largest personal lines insurers, including State Farm and Allstate, to explain a rising share of home and auto claims closed without payment.

Claims and coverage leaders face bipartisan scrutiny as pricing relief shifts policyholder attention from price to claims handling. Carriers able to document why each claim closed without payment will answer lawmakers and regulators from a stronger position.

Operational performance remains essential for Chief Claims Officers, but expectations are broadening. Effective leaders must understand how to deploy technology without compromising decision quality, establish defensible governance practices and communicate claims outcomes clearly to regulators and other stakeholders. As scrutiny increases, the ability to connect operational efficiency with policyholder trust will become an increasingly important leadership differentiator.

Health Plan Margins and the Blue Bench

Employers face their steepest health cost increase in two decades, and the pressure is reaching the top of health plans. Marsh projected those costs would rise 8.2% in 2027, the most since 2003, and Aon put the underlying increase at 9.5%. UnitedHealthcare reported commercial medical cost trend running above 11%.⁴ Four forces drove much of the increase: GLP-1 drugs, cancer therapies, provider consolidation and AI-assisted billing, the most contested of the four. The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association attributed $942 million in added costs to hospital AI coding, a finding the American Hospital Association disputed.

Government business offered no relief: insurers kept pulling Medicare Advantage plans from markets, insurers proposed double-digit ACA increases again and Medicaid enrollment fell ahead of federal work requirements. Many Blue plans responded by scaling through affiliation, most recently when Arkansas regulators approved Arkansas Blue Cross and Blue Shield’s affiliation with Cambia Health Solutions in September.

Over the past year, several Blue plans have announced leadership transitions at the top, and affiliations add another test of who leads: Arkansas Blue kept CEO Curtis Barnett as it moved under Cambia.

Health plans need leaders who can price accurately as costs rise by double digits, negotiate with consolidated provider systems and build claims-review teams that use AI to check AI-coded hospital bills. Blue plan boards weighing an affiliation should decide who will lead the combined business before it closes, and boards hiring a CEO should favor candidates who have priced through a cost spike and negotiated with consolidated hospital systems.

Life insurers face their own test, on the investment side. Scrutiny of private credit turned into new reporting rules. The NAIC estimates US insurers held about $1.2 trillion in private credit at year-end 2025, and new disclosures on private placements, privately rated holdings and payment-in-kind interest begin with year-end 2026 filings. Chief Investment and Chief Risk Officers will defend those allocations in more detail.

Who Gets the Top Job

Deals and departures opened CEO seats across the industry this quarter, and how boards filled them shows where bench strength held.

Zurich completed its £8.1 billion acquisition of Beazley on October 1, and Munich Re agreed to acquire cyber insurer At-Bay for $575 million. Aon’s $17 billion agreement to acquire USI concentrated the broker and benefits channels on which carriers rely, and Baldwin’s $7.7 billion take-private extended private capital’s push into insurance brokerage. Each deal is a leadership event, since buyers paid largely for underwriting talent and broker relationships that can walk out if integration goes badly.

The Hartford, The Hanover, AIG’s General Insurance unit, Cigna and Zurich’s US business each announced or completed a CEO transition during the quarter, and the choices show which boards had a successor ready. Most promoted from within, often from the seat directly below the top job: The Hanover named its Chief Operating Officer (COO), The Hartford its President and Cigna its President and COO. AIG, which hired its group CEO from outside earlier in the year, hired Zurich’s departing US CEO, Sierra Signorelli, for a new Americas and personal lines role but had not named a successor for its General Insurance leader by quarter’s end.

Other boards went outside for the experience the next phase required. CareFirst hired Elevance Health’s Medicaid President, Kurt Small, and its interim CEO returned to the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) role. Acquisitions passed over the acquired company’s bench: after Zurich closed on Beazley, Beazley’s CEO left and Zurich executives took the CEO and CFO seats.

The pattern puts executives one level below the CEO at the center of succession planning. Company and business unit Presidents, COOs, CFOs and Chief Actuaries who have run a full business through a soft market are getting pulled up, and those who have not are getting passed over.

Today’s insurance CEOs must navigate capital allocation, regulatory relationships, distribution, technology modernization, organizational culture and increasingly complex stakeholder expectations. Success in a functional role provides an important foundation, but boards must also assess whether an executive can make decisions beyond their functional expertise and take accountability for enterprise-wide outcomes. Effective succession planning therefore requires more than identifying potential replacements. It involves deliberately developing executives through broader operating responsibilities, exposure to strategic decisions and opportunities to lead meaningful organizational change.

AI Oversight Moves to the Executive Team

Regulators spent the quarter learning how to examine insurers’ AI through the NAIC’s 12-state pilot of a review tool, which ran through September. The health billing dispute showed the cost of deploying AI faster than governance can follow, with hospitals using AI to code claims and payers using it to review them.

Responsibility for AI now rests with the executive team. Leaders who tie AI to the economics of underwriting, claims and payment integrity and document governance before deployment will be ready when examiners ask for that record. Companies should expect the executive who owns AI to explain both its economics and its controls, and should hire for that combination.

The Road Ahead

Medicare Advantage. Open enrollment runs October 15 through December 7, with 34 million people, nearly half of Medicare beneficiaries, projected to enroll in Medicare Advantage plans for 2027.⁵ The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services releases its advance notice of 2028 payment rates in late January or early February. For 2027, the final increase of 2.48% came in far above the 0.09% first proposed, a reminder of how far the number can move before the April final notice.

November. Regulators could adopt the NAIC’s AI evaluation tool, renamed the AI Risk Evaluation Supplement, making it available to every state insurance department. Carriers will decide whether to document ahead of examination or in response to it. Responses to the Senate claims inquiry will show how much insurers are willing to disclose about claims closed without payment.

January 1. Reinsurance renews, employer plans reprice at higher cost levels and Medicaid work requirements take effect. The renewals will show whether insurers keep prices tied to risk as reinsurance gets cheaper, and companies promoting underwriting and actuarial leaders should weigh judgment shown in a falling market over results earned in a rising one.

Leadership Transitions. The Hartford’s planned CEO transition and other leadership changes across the industry will continue to reshape executive teams. Each appointment also creates potential succession needs further down the organization. Boards should evaluate the readiness of their next generation of leaders, provide meaningful enterprise responsibilities to high-potential executives and remain open to external talent when critical capabilities are not available internally.

The insurance industry enters 2027 with different challenges in each sector but one leadership need: executives who combine financial discipline, operational adaptability, technological fluency and sound strategic judgment. The organizations best positioned for the next cycle will have developed leaders who can make difficult decisions and deliver results in any market.

SOURCES

¹ Marsh Global Insurance Market Index, Q2 2026 US results (Marsh); Council of Insurance Agents & Brokers Q2 2026 survey (Insurance Journal) | ² Verisk and APCIA, first-half 2026 US property/casualty results (Insurance Journal) | ³ S&P Global Market Intelligence (Insurance Journal) | ⁴ Marsh and Aon 2027 employer cost projections (Fierce Healthcare, Managed Healthcare Executive); UnitedHealth Q2 2026 earnings call (Becker’s Payer) | ⁵ Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services 2027 Medicare Advantage projections (Fierce Healthcare)

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