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When historical claims offer little guidance, reinsurers must price emerging risks by combining past loss experience with forward-looking scenarios—and by looking beyond individual projects or policies to where exposure could accumulate across clients, supply chains and lines of business. That is the approach Lisa Butera, chief underwriting officer of MS Reinsurance North America, described in an interview published by Reinsurance News on 1 October 2026.
Why emerging risks are difficult to price
Pricing works best when insurers can learn from a credible record of losses. For newer or changing exposures, that record may be thin, while the range of plausible future outcomes remains wide. Butera’s answer is not to discard historical results, but to use them alongside prospective loss scenarios. Scenario analysis can help underwriters consider outcomes that are not well represented in past claims, though it cannot remove uncertainty or serve as a validated pricing formula on its own.
For reinsurance, the challenge is also one of accumulation: a single underlying risk may affect multiple insureds, cedents or insurance lines. A loss that appears isolated when viewed policy by policy could become more consequential if exposures share a common source.
Why recent catastrophe results do not settle the question
Butera argues that relatively benign recent North Atlantic hurricane seasons in the US are not evidence that underlying property risk has disappeared. She points instead to continuing attritional losses from severe convective storms in the US and catastrophe losses elsewhere. Her point is that a short or favorable run of results should not, by itself, justify easing pricing or terms.
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She describes MS Re’s approach as maintaining underwriting discipline while seeking portfolio-level relationships with key clients across lines and market cycles, rather than pursuing growth for its own sake. The interview reports that MS Re’s global portfolio had grown to more than $4 billion after four years of transformation, with the US and Bermuda contributing approximately one-quarter. These are figures reported about the company by Reinsurance News, not independently verified market measures.
Where data-centre exposure may extend
Data-centre risk is not limited to the construction phase, in Butera’s view. Underwriters may also need to consider where liability or financial exposure could sit across a wider supply chain. That changes the framing from “What could go wrong at this site?” to “Which connected parties or insured interests could be affected, and where might the resulting exposure land?”
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The interview does not identify specific supply-chain actors or provide a data-centre loss estimate. It therefore supports treating the supply chain as an area for exposure analysis, not assigning a quantified risk to particular parties.
How AI raises insurance questions
Butera describes AI as a broad exposure that can raise different questions across coverage lines. One example is whether directors and officers coverage could be implicated by questions about a company’s fiduciary responsibility in how it uses AI. General liability is another area she flags for consideration.
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These are underwriting and coverage questions, not settled conclusions about legal duties or how a policy would respond. The interview specifies no particular AI-related claim scenario, legal standard or coverage outcome.
Why PFAS and microplastics raise accumulation concerns
Butera says PFAS and microplastics could create exposure across industries, with the possibility that multiple insureds, cedents and lines share an underlying risk or event. She points to the active US litigation environment and compares the potential breadth of these concerns with historical asbestos and opioid-crisis exposures.
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Those comparisons signal the possibility of wide-ranging exposure; they are not quantified loss comparisons or forecasts. The interview supplies no projected losses for PFAS or microplastics, so the scale and distribution of any eventual insurance impact remain unspecified.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What underwriting discipline means in this context
Butera’s discussion connects emerging-risk analysis to the same discipline she applies to established lines: consider the portfolio, preserve pricing and terms where loss conditions warrant it, and avoid treating recent favorable results as proof that risk has receded. On casualty, she says frequency and severity of losses continue in most lines, with litigation funding contributing to social inflation and nuclear verdicts continuing. She specifically highlights commercial auto and large corporate risks in excess casualty as areas of consistent loss severity, and says she sees no reason to relax casualty pricing. The interview provides no loss series or numerical estimate for these observations.
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She also identifies regional accounts, particularly regional mutual insurers, as an opportunity because they use reinsurance as a capital tool and value long-term relationships, in her account. On managing general agents (MGAs), she describes momentum in MS Re’s business and says the company favors partners that value high-quality data, transparency and open dialogue. These are Butera’s descriptions of company priorities, not independent rankings of those segments or partners.
A practical way to frame the uncertainty
Butera’s comments suggest three useful questions for assessing a developing exposure. They are an interpretation of her discussion, not a formal MS Re framework:
- What can past losses tell us, and what can they not? Use historical results where relevant, while recognizing when the record is too limited to capture the risk being assessed.
- Where could exposure travel? Look beyond a single project or insured to connected supply-chain relationships and financial or liability interests.
- Could the same underlying risk reach multiple parts of the portfolio? Consider whether insureds, cedents or lines may share a source of potential loss.
As Butera put it: “With emerging exposures such as data centres, AI, and PFAS, there is still so much we do not know.”
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