October 27, 2026
by James Mahon, Reinsurance Pre-Sales Lead, DXC Technology
Every geopolitical shock lands on reinsurers twice.
First, as a loss. Then, an operational test. The loss gets the attention, but the test (whether the operation can reprice exposures, recover across counterparties and stay compliant while conditions move) is where the real strain lies.
Conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere are reshaping exposures faster than treaties were built to absorb, and the consequences run well past the next loss event.
Aon's 2025 Global Risk Management Survey placed geopolitical volatility among the top 10 global business risks for the first time in the survey's 19-year history, yet found most organizations still aren't fully prepared for it. For carriers and reinsurers, that gap between exposure and readiness is increasingly an operational one.
Recent events have made portfolios harder to read. Exposures shift as conflicts evolve, supply chains fracture and regional risk gets repriced, forcing adjustments to treaty structures and participation right across the reinsurance chain. At the same time, claim rates are rising in the lines geopolitics hits hardest, including political risk, aviation, marine and cyber.
Each of those claims frequently has to be calculated, tracked and recovered from several counterparties at once, across layered programs that span multiple reinsurers, brokers and jurisdictions.
When teams have to juggle disconnected systems, cracks quickly appear. Data gets scattered, decisions slow down and small errors snowball into delayed recoveries and claims leakage at precisely the moment every second counts.
The same volatility is rewriting the compliance workload. Sanctions regimes change rapidly, cross-border payments face new restrictions and regulators are scrutinizing screening and reporting with fresh intensity.
A recent Society of Actuaries and Casualty Actuarial Society survey found that senior insurance leaders view sanctions, tariffs and trade controls as the primary forms of global geopolitical risk. In addition, 60% of C-suite respondents identified economic and geopolitical risk as the most significant influence on their organizations.
Counterparty stability moves just as fast. A regional shock or a sovereign downgrade can change a partner's creditworthiness between renewals, so credit control has become a continuous activity rather than a periodic check. Without a single, reliable view across the chain, carriers and reinsurers are exposed to misdirected payments, missed recoveries and compliance breaches driven by nothing more than out-of-date data.
The practical answer is to bring contracts, claims and accounting into a single controlled environment, so the same reliable data carries through the entire lifecycle. With that in place, teams can see straight away which treaties and exposures a development touches and act on it, without reconciling spreadsheets by hand. In particular:
Crucially, this is the essence of what DXC builds for the market. DXC is the number one provider of primary insurance systems and works with more than 130 re/insurance customers across 40 countries, including 40% of the top 50 reinsurers.
The Assure Reinsurance platform (the modern version of DXC SICS) automates the assumed and retro lifecycle, while Assure Cede handles ceded premiums and recoverables, the area where fragmented tracking casually loses real money and can leave hundreds of millions of dollars in recoveries unclaimed
Geopolitical uncertainty isn't likely to settle any time soon, and reinsurers can't control the external environment. However, they can control how their operations respond.
Accordingly, a proactive strategy involves consolidating contracts, claims and accounting on a modern administration platform, integrating live sanctions and credit data into workflows, and deploying AI only where its decisions are governed and traceable.
Modernization enables reinsurers to manage volatility with greater confidence, rather than relying on error-prone manual interventions.
James Mahon leads the pre-sales function for DXC’s reinsurance offerings, working directly with (re)insurers to help them transform their reinsurance operations through the adoption of DXC Assure Reinsurance and DXC Assure Cede, our automated solutions that streamline the end-to-end reinsurance processing lifecycle
