As the global data centre build-out continues to gain traction across the re/insurance market, insurers are reportedly considering the insurance-linked securities (ILS) market to help support their capacity needs, a shift which follows a record opening quarter of catastrophe bond issuance for reinsurance broker Guy Carpenter, CEO Dean Klisura said today.
However, this did fall slightly behind the record $7.1 billion of new catastrophe bond issuance recorded in the first quarter of 2025.
Speaking during Marsh’s Q1 2026 earnings call today, Dean Klisura, CEO of Marsh’s reinsurance broking arm Guy Carpenter highlighted the rapid momentum the firm has seen throughout the opening quarter.
“Despite the property market and everything that John and Mark talked about, which was a clear growth headwind for Guy Carpenter in the quarter, we’re seeing record new business across our platform. We grew double-digit new business growth in every region in business globally in the quarter, I was really pleased with that,” he said.
Turning attention towards the cat bond market and ILS space, the CEO noted that Guy Carpenter continues to see “a really strong cat bond market and ILS market overall.”
“We issued seven cat bonds in the quarter, a record for Guy Carpenter. We’ve seen some $2 billion dollars of new third-party capital flow into the market, just chasing casualty sidecars, whole account quota shares and other similar vehicles. We’ve gotten several new mandates around those, very, very promising,” he added.
“I’ve talked in prior calls about our capital and advisory business, our investment banking boutique, we’ve never received more M&A advisory mandates, forming new sidecars, as I mentioned, raising capital for MGAs, Lloyd’s platforms, structured credit business, our MGA business. And in the last call we talked about data centers, right. And just a couple of headlines there. There’s 50 deals that have been in the marketplace for more than seven and a half billion dollars of capital to put these together. And all of Guy Carpenter’s clients want to write more data centers, but they all need additional reinsurance protections.”
As we’ve highlighted before, underwriting the data centre build-out, where major technology companies, hyperscalers, and artificial intelligence startups are investing hundreds of billions of dollars to create new capacity to support and deliver their computationally demanding software and services, is regarded as being one of the most significant new opportunities for re/insurers in recent decades.
However, as Klisura observes, insurers are reportedly considering to leverage cat bonds and third-party capital to support this expansion.
“I think the newest element of it… is clients now are talking about issuing cat bonds and leveraging third-party capital to write more data center business. So, I would say overall, for Guy Carpenter, there’s more diverse new business opportunities that we’ve seen in several years.”
