There is a version of the succession conversation happening in Life & Health boardrooms at the moment that looks, on the surface, like every succession conversation of the last twenty years. An incumbent is approaching the end of their tenure. A bench has been identified. Development plans exist on paper.
What is different is what happens when the board actually tests that bench. Candidates who were assessed as ready two or three years ago are now being assessed as not quite ready, and the reason is rarely that the individual has gone backwards.
The role has moved.
That distinction matters more than it might appear, because it changes what an organisation should do about it. If the problem is demographic, the answer is to start earlier and go deeper. If the problem is that the job specification has changed underneath a plan built for the previous version of the job, starting earlier will not help at all. It will simply produce a well-prepared candidate for a role that no longer exists in the form it was prepared for.
In our experience across Life & Health mandates globally, the second explanation is doing far more work than the first.
The Retirement Wave Is the Part Everyone Can See
The demographic pressure is real, and it is worth stating clearly before moving past it.
By the end of 2026, an estimated 400,000 US insurance professionals will have retired since the beginning of 2021, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics figures. In the UK, more than a quarter of insurance staff are already over 50, with Re:Generation research warning that half the current workforce could retire within fifteen years, taking a substantial amount of undocumented technical judgement with them.
The industry is not unaware of this. Pacific Life's 2026 Underwriting Outlook Survey, taken in person from 103 senior underwriting executives, found that 70% expressed concern about the long-term underwriting pipeline. The single largest contributing factor named was an ageing workforce and the loss of institutional knowledge, at 38%.
Those numbers explain why Life organisations need more successors. They do not explain why the successors already identified are falling short at the final stage, and they do not explain why so many Life boards have found themselves running an external process they did not plan for.
For that, you have to look at what has actually changed about the work.
IFRS 17 Changed What the Finance Seat Requires
The implementation phase of IFRS 17 is over. Its effect on the leadership profile is not.
Under the previous regime, a Life CFO's credibility rested substantially on the reliability of the reported number. Under IFRS 17, the contractual service margin sits at the centre of the picture, and the finance and actuarial functions are now expected to forecast profit emergence through CSM run-off and explain how assumption changes move the outcome. Both functions have shifted from valuation and compliance into strategic business partnership, which is a materially different job to the one most current finance leaders were developed for.
The comparability point is the one boards underestimate. Three full reporting cycles in, KPMG's review of 2025 annual reports found that of 44 insurers surveyed, 40 start from IFRS net profit and then apply a wide range of adjustments to arrive at their own operating profit measure. The methodology varies significantly between reporters.
Which means the Life CFO's task is no longer producing the number. It is defending a definition. Explaining to analysts, rating agencies and a board why this business measures performance the way it does, and holding that position under challenge from people who can point to a peer doing it differently. That is a judgement and communication capability, and it is not what most internal finance pipelines have been designed to build.
There is a supply problem underneath it as well. The interdisciplinary profile IFRS 17 demands, combining actuarial, finance and data expertise, is scarce both inside organisations and in the wider market. Boards are therefore competing for a narrow group of people at precisely the point when the seats are turning over.
Private Capital Changed Who the Leadership Team Answers To
The second structural shift is larger, and it has happened faster than most succession plans have been revised.
ALIRT Insurance Research traced the growth of privately-owned insurers in the US life market and found that their number rose from 16 in 2011 to 93 by the end of 2025. Over the same period their share of total invested assets moved from $85 billion, or 2.5% of the industry, to nearly $1.2 trillion, or 19.8%. Direct premiums rose from $10 billion to $161 billion.
The reinsurance side of the model has scaled in parallel. AM Best reported that offshore reinsurance reserves from US life insurers passed $1.1 trillion by the end of 2024, with Bermuda capturing more than 60% of new cessions across 2023 and 2024, and close to 70% of those offshore reserves going to affiliated reinsurers.
The asset side has moved with it. Research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago documents that life insurers' private credit holdings reached $849 billion, or 14% of balance sheets, in 2024, with private equity-owned insurers driving the trend and gaining meaningful annuity market share as a result.
The Model Is Now Setting the Competitive Standard
This is not confined to the platforms built explicitly on the model. It is reshaping the competitive set for everyone. In the UK bulk annuity market alone, LCP noted that three of the eleven active insurers announced acquisitions by international investors during 2025.
The leadership consequence is direct. A Life CEO or CFO is now expected to be conversant in asset origination, affiliated investment governance, offshore capital structuring and the economics of a reinsurance-led balance sheet. A decade ago most of that sat with the Chief Investment Officer, or did not sit anywhere. A successor developed through distribution, product or traditional underwriting can be excellent at the job as it was defined in 2019 and still have a visible gap in a 2026 board interview.
Regulators Have Made Succession an Approval Question
The third shift is what turns the first two from a capability discussion into a governance one.
The NAIC's Actuarial Guideline 55, approved in August 2025, requires US cedants to demonstrate that liabilities transferred offshore remain fully backed by assets under moderately adverse conditions, extending asset adequacy testing to reinsured blocks for the first time. NAIC president Scott White has named portfolio transparency a top regulatory priority for 2026, and in May 2026 the US Treasury Secretary convened state insurance regulators to discuss offshore reinsurance jurisdictions and risk-based capital treatment.
Bermuda's long-term reinsurance market now stands at $1.52 trillion, with the NAIC identifying life reinsurer investment practices as a strategic priority for 2026 and the IMF flagging potential contagion risks linked to offshore reinsurance. The Bermuda Monetary Authority has introduced a prudent person principle alongside expanded disclosure requirements covering assets and liabilities.
When supervision reaches that level of detail, the question of who holds the CEO, CFO and CRO seats stops being purely an internal matter. Boards are increasingly conscious that an appointment has to be credible not only to shareholders but to regulators and rating agencies, and that a first-time executive with no track record of handling a supervisory conversation of this complexity represents a different kind of risk to the one succession plans have historically been built to manage.
Succession in Life has become partly an approval question, not only a selection question. Very few succession frameworks have caught up with that.
Growth Is Still There, Which Is What Makes the Timing Acute
None of this is happening in a contracting sector, which is precisely why it is urgent.
Swiss Re Institute forecasts global life premium growth of 2.3% in real terms in 2026, above the 2015 to 2024 trend of 1.9%, supported by higher reinvestment yields. But the regional picture has diverged sharply. North American life growth is expected at just 0.1% in 2026, down from 11.4% in 2024, with UK premiums roughly flat, while emerging markets continue to see structural growth on favourable demographics and regulatory reform.
That divergence has a direct leadership implication that boards should be sizing now. The executive who can grow an advanced market book through spread compression and the executive who can build a business in a fast-expanding emerging market are not usually the same person, and both are being recruited at once.
What Boards Should Be Doing Differently
Five things we would encourage any Life & Health board or CHRO to build into their succession process this year.
Re-specify the role before you assess the bench. Most succession processes benchmark internal candidates against the outgoing incumbent's remit. Write the specification for the business as it will be in three years, with the capital structure and reporting regime it will actually be operating under, and then assess against that.
Treat capital literacy as core, not specialist. Fluency in asset origination, affiliated investment governance and reinsurance-led balance sheet economics now belongs in the CEO and CFO specification. It is no longer sufficient to have it somewhere in the executive team.
Plan two seats deep, not one. The CFO and CRO roles have changed at least as much as the CEO role, and they sit closest to the regulatory pressure. A succession plan that covers only the top job leaves the two most exposed positions uncovered.
Benchmark externally even when you intend to appoint internally. This is the single most useful discipline we see. External benchmarking is how a board finds out whether an internal candidate's gap is closeable in eighteen months, closeable with the right supporting hire, or not closeable at all. Boards that discover this during a live process have already lost their options.
Develop, do not just identify. Identification without deliberate exposure to regulators, rating agencies, investors and the asset side produces successors who look ready on a talent grid and are not ready in the room. That exposure has to be engineered years in advance, because it does not occur naturally in most internal career paths.
The Real Risk Is Not the Retirement
The organisations that will handle the next five years well are not the ones with the longest succession lists. They are the ones that have understood that the Life business their next generation of leaders will run has been rebuilt around them, in reporting, in capital and in supervision, over a remarkably short period.
The retirement wave is visible, predictable and years in the making. Boards can see it coming. What is much harder to see is a succession plan that is technically complete and quietly out of date, built against a role specification that the market has already moved past.
The cost of that is not felt when the plan is written. It is felt eighteen months later, when a board that believed it had two ready internal candidates discovers it is running an external search under time pressure, in a market where everyone else is looking for the same profile.
Eliot Partnership is the only global executive search firm dedicated exclusively to the insurance and reinsurance industry. We work with the world's leading insurers, reinsurers, brokers, and specialty platforms to build leadership teams equipped for what's next. To speak with our team about succession planning, leadership assessment, or executive search across Life & Health, visit eliotpartnership.com.
