In Partnership with
A ‘golden age’ for E&S?
From catastrophe risk to AI, E&S leaders reveal where the biggest opportunities and challenges lie
Tom Krause
Westfield Specialty
Industry experts
Wes Robinson
Risk Placement Services
Jake Rothfuss
Velocity Risk Underwriters and WKFC Underwriting Managers
Tom Krause brings 39 years of property expertise to Westfield Specialty. He spent the first 17 years of his career as a facultative reinsurance underwriter with National Re/GenRe, CNA Re, and Direct Fac. Krause entered the direct property market with Max Specialty/Alterra, where he spent 17 years in various property-leadership roles between Alterra, Markel, and Argo Group. He joined Westfield Specialty five years ago as part of the startup.
Westfield Specialty
Tom Krause
Wes Robinson has served as president, national property at RPS since 2012, leading the RPS Property Practice Group with a focus on public entity, real estate, and construction risks, particularly those with catastrophe exposure. He manages a $240 million property portfolio and supports large public entity, scholastic, and real estate clients nationwide. Since joining RPS in 2002 as a property broker, Robinson has become a recognized leader in large shared and layered property placements and is consistently among the firm’s top producers. He holds a degree in risk management from the University of Georgia and is a Certified Insurance Counselor.
Risk Placement Services
Wes Robinson
Jake Rothfuss is CEO of Velocity Risk Underwriters and WKFC Underwriting Managers, both part of Ryan Specialty Underwriting Managers, following the acquisition of Velocity Risk in 2025. He became CEO of Velocity Risk in 2023, after serving as president beginning in 2020. He first joined the firm in 2018 as chief operating officer and head of systematized risk.
During his tenure at Velocity Risk, Rothfuss co-founded Vector Specialty Insurance Company (VSIC), formally known as Velocity Specialty Insurance Company, and helped scale the firm into one of the leading specialty property insurance platforms in the United States. He has also served on the boards of several privately held insurance-related businesses.
Velocity Risk Underwriters and WKFC Underwriting Managers
Jake Rothfuss
“When I think about the opportunities in front of us through AI, it’s absolutely aimed at helping to solve complex risks. This is the start of a golden age for the E&S sector”
Jake Rothfuss,
Velocity Risk Underwriters and WKFC Underwriting Managers
The E&S property market is highly competitive, leaving carriers to balance growth ambitions with technical returns, portfolio fit, and underwriting efficiency. But as one of insurance’s most dynamic sectors continues to evolve and expand, those pressures are also creating significant opportunities – particularly for businesses that can combine underwriting discipline with flexibility and speed.
In a recent roundtable hosted by Insurance Business, Tom Krause, SVP, head of middle market property at Westfield Specialty; Jake Rothfuss, CEO of Velocity Risk Underwriters and WKFC Underwriting Managers; and Wes Robinson, national property president at Risk Placement Services, came together to discuss market conditions, emerging risks, and the overall outlook for the sector – beginning with balancing opportunity with discipline.
As Robinson told IB, he doesn’t necessarily see E&S entering a more competitive phase, adding that the current market reflects rate increases over the past three years.
“The E&S sector can very actively compete with the admitted markets, single-carrier deals, and win those deals. [Maybe] not all of them, but more than I can remember”
Wes Robinson, Risk Placement Services
“We’re going to have to sit down internally, put our heads together, and look at other ways to address how, from a growth perspective, we can continue to come up with better solutions”
Tom Krause,
Westfield Specialty
Read on
Share
Published Oct 5, 2026
Westfield Specialty delivers strategic, creative coverage solutions designed to help protect businesses, mitigate risk, and assist in driving growth for clients. Our team works collaboratively with brokers and clients to structure coverage that reflects the realities of today’s risk environment across the US, Europe, the London market, and MENA.
We combine global reach with on-the-ground insight through our US, London, Dubai, and Luxembourg offices, alongside Lloyd’s Syndicate 1200 and our Luxembourg-based European company platform.
As we expand our specialty insurance and reinsurance capabilities and appetites, we remain focused on delivering thoughtful, responsive solutions built for an evolving risk landscape.
Velocity Risk Underwriters is a managing general underwriter specializing in excess and surplus insurance for the US commercial property market. Velocity Risk works through agents and brokers to provide insurance solutions for complex property risks, including those in catastrophe-prone and underserved areas. By combining experienced underwriting professionals with advanced analytics, technology, and risk modeling, Velocity Risk delivers customized insurance solutions and responsive claims support. Velocity Claims is our in-house Lloyd’s-approved claims administrator, built for consistent, accurate, cost-efficient, and swift claims management unmatched by industry peers. Velocity Risk’s underwriting discipline, proven scalable platform, and strong capital backing position us with the experience, stability, and longevity to lead through any market cycle.
“The E&S sector can very actively compete with the admitted markets, single-carrier deals, and win those deals. [Maybe] not all of them, but more than I can remember. That’s how competitive the E&S market has become, and it’s become that way for a [couple] of different reasons – flexibility and creativity.”
Krause agrees, adding that when it comes to growth, the market is currently looking at where carriers are and what sort of occupancies or territories they’re in today.
“From the growth perspective, do they now go into other lines or other sectors within our business? Do they get into small property or middle-market property? And then, within the large-property space, are they looking to attach at different layers of the risk tower, including some that they never considered before, to help them grow?”
CAT events: the end of ‘secondary perils’? In among all the questions around opportunities and changing, emerging risks, sits one growing threat – CAT losses. According to research from Verisk, global insured catastrophe losses are now expected to average $171 billion annually on a modeled, long-term basis, with the US accounting for $117 billion (68 percent) – its highest annual estimate reported to date.
And with CAT events seemingly happening daily of late, those losses paint a worrying picture, with secondary perils such as convective storms, wildfires, floods, and other severe weather events increasingly driving claims activity as well. Krause has seen first-hand how these incidents are reshaping underwriting strategies as well as portfolio-management decisions over the long term.
“From a secondary peril perspective, there are many organizations, including Westfield, not looking at flood, convective storm, or wildfire as secondary perils. We view them as critical catastrophe perils. We’ve always been cognizant of those exposures, and we’re seeing where organizations are being more cognizant of those exposures due to their risk analyses. As a result, the marketplace has become a little bit more competitive in certain zones. A few short years ago, there was Tornado Alley – that’s now expanded into Dixie Alley – and, again, you can have a catastrophe in any zone. And as long as the underwriters are aware of what their aggregates are, our industry can comply and provide additional capacity to insurers.”
That expansion of the borders of Tornado Alley is reflective of a shift in market mindset, with almost all property risks having some catastrophe element to them nowadays. As Rothfuss told IB, he doesn’t view CAT as a secondary peril anymore.
“It’s really a question of which perils have been well modeled versus those that are truly harder to understand – such as wildfire or severe convective storm. As an industry, we have a great opportunity to demonstrate and provide expertise around the underwriting, pricing, and modeling of those harder-to-understand perils. We’re in a place where, if you have made investments in technology, infrastructure, underwriting analytics, and you can underwrite at scale, you can produce your own view of risk as a carrier. And that view of risk is exceptionally powerful and valuable to everybody that we trade with and do business with inside the E&S sector.”
‘Understanding the risks that we’re taking on’ Aside from CAT risks, property valuations and rebuilding costs remain major concerns for insureds. Rothfuss told IB that valuation is one of the most critical elements for his company as an underwriting organization.
“[It’s about] understanding the risks that we’re taking on,” he explained. “There’s no doubt about that. The last few years of the hardened market really helped us get valuations to a place where they felt correct – they were at the right technical levels. That has really been something that I see the industry continuing to hold onto. Generally speaking, the discipline continues to be there. There are pockets where it’s not, but, ultimately, those that have the discipline are looking at econometric data, their claims data, internal data, third-party data from the industry. They’re listening to their brokers and carriers alike, trying to come up with what that right valuation is, and I see that there’s a level of discipline around that conversation, which, three or four years ago, wasn’t there.”
With valuation so top of mind right now, Robinson revealed that he recently wrote an article on the very topic – an advice feature on what happens to clients when they leave the standard market.
“The language in a manuscript form from an E&S carrier may be different,” he told IB. “There’s different endorsements, such as the occurrence limited liability endorsement, there’s margin clauses, agreed amount, there’s blanket [coverage] – there’s a multitude of ways that the industry is showcasing the importance of having the proper valuation. It’s up to the insured and the broker to figure out what that is, but they need to understand the complexities of getting it wrong [too]. There’s major consequences to that – there was a reckoning during the hard market a couple of years ago because it was such a systemic problem, and there are legitimate claim examples. And there was a rebound effect on that. I believe every insured was educated properly on the importance of that [reckoning], and we’re now in a much better spot.”
But valuation discussions, however important, haven’t managed to remain top of the pile in conversations with clients. Not because valuation isn’t a key component, but because, as Krause puts it, “we’re slipping as an industry.”
“We’re getting away from talking about valuations,” he added. “Case in point, the inflation we’re experiencing as a carrier is largely being offset because a significant portion of the business we’re seeing is renewal business with little or no growth in underlying exposures.
“One area that continues to shape client expectations this year is the ongoing use of technology, innovative tools, and platforms that have the propensity to totally transform risk assessment. But how much confidence should brokers be placing in emerging technologies? And is there a line that professionals shouldn’t cross when it comes to human-in-the-loop processes and automation?
‘The tool is only going to spit out a result’ For Robinson, the answer lies in which tools you use and, more importantly, how you use them.
“Underwriting companies need to evaluate the cost-benefit analysis of any new tool they introduce to their system. But if they’re not using every tool available to them to make their portfolio the best, then they’re not doing their job appropriately. It’s vitally important to pick the risk based on all those ‘secondary perils.’ [But] they’re [just] tools – they have to be used in conjunction with the human element.”
Krause agrees, going further by adding that no tool can or should ever wholly replace a human underwriter’s creativity and expertise.
“You can never take that away. At the end of the day, there are a lot of very talented E&S underwriters at their desks who are making very critical decisions for their firms. And I think another point that needs to be made is, what is a tool? The tool is only going to spit out a result. And what if the data is bad? Bad data input into AI tools leads to bad results.”
In the E&S sector, standing still simply isn’t an option. The market is evolving quickly, with admitted markets continuing to adjust appetite in those CAT-prone regions, which in turn challenges occupancy.
“The E&S marketplace has, in my almost 40 years, always been a consistent provider of capital for those exposures,” added Krause. “Now there might be different rate structures and deductibles, but we’ve always been here. And our insureds and brokers can feel confident that no matter what Mother Nature presents, we can find a solution for them.”
Rothfuss told IB that the agility of the E&S market is really shining through right now, adding that when it comes to dealing with something as complex as CAT perils, it’s the sector’s ability to move with the times that’s the name of the game.
“The marketplace is changing, the risk profile is changing, and our ability as an industry to adapt quickly has allowed us to very efficiently underwrite and price those risks over time. That’s led to stability [as well as] a continued inflow of capital into the marketplace in order to take risk alongside the carriers and the other participants in the space.”
And while E&S may be a comparatively small segment of the P&C market, it’s growing – and quickly. As Robinson explained, while P&C hit $1 trillion in premium recently – and E&S represents around $100 billion – it’s much larger than when he started out.
“The larger it gets, the more you’re going to have the fringe accounts going back and forth between the standard market and the non-admitted E&S market. I think there’s always going to be accounts that are rooted 100 percent in the E&S market, and there’s always going to be accounts that are always going to be in the admitted market. But that line between E&S and admitted has grown and will probably continue to grow.”
What does the future hold for E&S? Looking to what 2027 and beyond hold for the E&S market, Rothfuss told IB that investments into new technologies, most notably AI, will be top of mind.
“The E&S market creates value and adds value to the entire ecosystem by being able to make sense of hard-to-understand, complex risks. When I think about the opportunities in front of us through AI, it’s absolutely aimed at helping to solve that problem. This is the start of a golden age for the E&S sector in terms of utilizing AI in a way that adds value for clients, carriers, capital providers, and brokers.”
And the data certainly chimes with Rothfuss here. Sixty-two percent of insurance companies are currently using AI, according to Goldman Sachs Asset Management’s 2026 Global Insurance Survey. And, among insurers using or considering AI, 83 percent cite reducing operational costs as a use case, while 38 percent cite insurance risk underwriting.
Then there’s the wider implications of AI in the construction and maintenance of data centers. Aon’s 2026 Reinsurance Market Dynamics report estimates that data centers will generate approximately $134 billion in cumulative global insurance premiums between 2026 and 2030. What’s more, there are 2,108 data centers under construction or planned by 2030.
“Data centers are so unique from a property risk perspective – each one of them is measured in the hundreds of millions to multiple billions of dollars at a single location,” added Robinson. “That unique concentrated exposure is one thing, but so is the transit exposure, the EDP exposure, the infrastructure, the water, the water treatment plants, everything else that goes along with it – the industry has to figure out how to properly cover that.
“And, ironically, these data centers are not using AI to place their own insurance – further showcasing the need for the human element to actually do the job.”
While AI may be reshaping how insurers assess risk, its most immediate impact could be much more practical – helping underwriters move faster and make sense of increasingly complex accounts. And as carriers explore new avenues for growth within property, speed to market and risk analysis are becoming central to the conversation.
“It really comes down to speed to market and helping the individual risk underwriter analyze that account,” added Krause. “Development and implementation of effective AI tools is definitely going to be important for us as an industry [over] the next [several] years.”
But technology is only one part of the market outlook. Barring a significant disruption to capital or reinsurance capacity, the expectation is for a relatively steady environment over the near term.
Krause continued: “Absent a major capital event and/or a loss of reinsurance capacity, I think our marketplaces for the next two years are going to be consistent. We’re all going to have to sit down internally, put our heads together, and look at other ways to address how, from a growth perspective, we can continue to come up with better solutions.”
Sources: Verisk; Aon, Reinsurance Market Dynamics, 2026.
$117B
Average annual insured CAT losses expected in the US
CAT risk by the data
68%
Share of modeled global insured CAT losses accounted for by the US
$785B
Global reinsurer capital at the end of 2025 – a record high and almost 10% higher year over year
Sources: Verisk; Aon, Reinsurance Market Dynamics, 2026.
$134B
Estimated cumulative global data center insurance premiums 2026–2030
The rise and rise of data centers
2,108
Data centers under construction or planned by 2030
$5–10T
Estimated total investment associated with those projects by 2030
$10B+
Insurance limits that can be required by large, multi-building data center campuses
