BMS Re chief executive Chris McDowell expects Hurricane Lee to dominate talk at the upcoming the Rendez-Vous de Septembre insurance conference in Monte Carlo next week.

“It has been another bad year for nat-cats,” Mr McDowell said. “There have been Canadian wildfires and tragic events in Hawaii.

“No doubt storms out there like Hurricane Lee will be the talk of Monte Carlo this year, especially if it carries on strengthening and heading towards the Eastern seaboard.”

The conference will run from Sunday until next Wednesday and will see around 3,000 attendees from 80 countries.

Mr McDowell planned to spend Monday and Tuesday matching reinsurers with clients. “Hurricane Lee lends a level of uncertainty to everything,” he said. “All bets could be off in another ten days time if there is a category 4 hurricane that makes landfall.”

Mr McDowell said the timing of the Rendez-Vous de Septembre is never great.

“It is smack, bang in the middle of the most interesting part of wind season,” he said.

Most Bermuda insurance companies are represented at the event, particularly catastrophe writers. “Some of them have scaled back a bit following Covid-19,” he said.

He has been attending the Rendez-Vous de Septembre since the early 1990s and has only missed the odd one. He said the conference usually sucks up all the hotel rooms in Monte Carlo, a quarter of Monaco on the French Riviera.

“You have to book for the next year as soon as you leave this year’s conference,” he said.

He took on his present role at BMS Re last November, after serving as CEO at Gallagher, formerly Willis Re Bermuda.

“One of the big things we are working on is attracting and retaining talented, motivated staff,” Mr McDowell said.

The company has been expanding globally and locally. Three years ago BMS Re in Bermuda had two staff members, now they have 17. “We have outgrown our office,” he said.

They plan to move from their present space on Par-la-Ville Road to Wellesley House, 90 Pitts Bay Road, early next year.

“That is great, because for the region’s market, probably 85 per cent of the companies are based down there,” he said.

This year’s busy hurricane season is a far cry from when he first arrived in Bermuda in March 2004.

“We had had an amazing run with no American land-falling hurricanes between 1992 and 2004,” he said.

A year after settling in Bermuda, five storms hit Florida: Bonnie, Charley, Frances, Ivan, and Jeanne, in six short weeks. Category 5 hurricane Katrina also struck New Orleans, Louisiana in August of that year.

“The money poured in,” Mr McDowell said. “We saw a lot of new start-ups such as Flagstone Reinsurance Holdings and Validus Re.”

Many of the companies that set up in those days have now been swallowed up by larger ones.

He experienced his first hurricane in 2005 while living at Devonshire Bay in Devonshire.

“It was scary,” he said. “We were told to board up and evacuate. We spent the night in a hotel and our home was flooded out. It really put the human side on things.”