Reinsurers are far less cavalier and more investor-friendly than they used to be a couple of decades ago.

That is the view of PartnerRe chief executive officer Costas Miranthis, expressed on a CEOs’ panel at at the PwC/S&P Bermuda Reinsurance 2014 conference in Hamilton yesterday.

Mr Miranthis said: “I think the reinsurance industry is far more sophisticated than it was in the 1990s.

“The quality of the human capital has improved immensely and some of the stupid behaviour you may have seen 15 years ago is not happening today.

“Transparency has also improved. The economics of the industry were once not transparent to the equity investor. But that has changed dramatically over the last ten years. It’s far more difficult now to put your face in the sand and not face the truth.”

PwC Bermuda territory leader Arthur Wightman said that transparency was “closing the gap in the information asymmetry” in the reinsurance market between reinsurers and their customers and investors, and this was leading to a more efficient market.

ILS Capital Management CEO Don Kramer said management had “improved dramatically” in the business, partiuclarly through the use of analytics, since the days he set up his first reinsurer in 1973, a short-lived venture that he said had been “the definition of naive capital”.

With many risks well modelled and widely understood, Mr Miranthis said he thought there was little differentiation between reinsurers on pricing in what he described as a largely syndicated market. Where they could differentiate was in their capability to tailor solutions to the specific needs of their customers.

Hiscox Re CEO Jeremy Pinchin spoke about the upheavals in the reinsurance market sparked by the influx of alternative capital, saying it was too early to say whether fundamental changes to the industry were happening.

“We have got access to new capital sources through a new mechanism that we cannot go back from,” Mr Pinchin said. “How far that goes, I can’t tell.

“We need to go through a longer term period of the cycle and see the market fully tested. We have not seen the real tests in terms of losses.”

Speaking on a panel at the PwC/S&P Bermuda Reinsurance 2014 conference in Hamilton yesterday, PartnerRe CEo