Every treaty season, reinsurance teams open the same sprawling spreadsheet libraries, juggle versions with names like “Pricing_v12_FINAL_final.xlsx”, and spend late nights stitching together triangles, rate changes and limits profiles.

Spreadsheets have served the market well for decades. They’re familiar, quick for ad-hoc analysis and infinitely flexible in the hands of an experienced actuary or underwriter. But the job has changed.

Data volumes have exploded, portfolios are more complex, and the pace of decision-making has accelerated. What used to feel nimble now strains under scale, collaboration and governance. Excel isn’t a strategy – it’s a stopgap.

Below we look at why treaty pricing still lives in spreadsheets, the hidden costs that come with it, and a practical path toward a modern approach with the relaunch of our SmartRe™ platform.

Why teams still reach for Excel

There are good reasons practitioners default to spreadsheets, even when they know the pain points.

People know the tool

Every actuary and underwriter can build a basic model, test a scenario or create a quick exhibit without waiting for IT. That sense of control matters during renewal crunch.

It feels flexible

Spreadsheets are the blank canvas that internal systems rarely are. If a submission arrives with a new quirk, you can hack a workaround and move on.

It looks cheap

Licences are already paid for and there’s no queue for development resources. In the moment, building another workbook seems faster than raising a change request.

Familiarity and speed are compelling. But they disguise costs that can compound over time.

The hidden cost of spreadsheet-based pricing

Look closely and the cost can often be far higher than it first appears. Hours of actuarial time can disappear into cleansing, stitching and reformatting data rather than interpreting it.

Version drift creates a minefield for governance; there’s rarely a single source of truth, links are fragile, and important logic lives in cells with opaque references.

Errors propagate from one renewal pack to the next because no one has time to unpick the lineage.

Collaboration becomes a bottleneck: one file per person, email ping-pong, conflicting changes and benchmarks that never graduate from someone’s laptop into a reusable asset.

Then there are the scale limits. Multi-line, multi-currency, stacked programmes, event-level views and different bases (risk-attaching versus losses-occurring) all stretch a workbook beyond what it was made to do. When runs are slow, scenario exploration suffers, which is precisely when insight is most valuable.

What “good” looks like in a modern treaty pricing stack

There is a better pattern and it isn’t about exotic maths – it’s about having the foundations.

Start with clean data in one place. A central store for submissions, claims, premiums and limits – validated, time-stamped and consistent – feeds pricing so the team works from the same ground truth.

Frequency–severity, exposure rating, increased limits factors, excess factors, and the ability to frame analysis on a risk-attaching or losses-occurring basis should all be available, configurable, and explainable.

The journey from submission to economic summary should live in a single record, with selections, notes and approvals captured as part of doing the work rather than a chore afterwards. Build collaboration into the fabric. Parameters, benchmarks and peer pricing should be sharable instantly so a useful selection made on one account can be applied to another without hunting through folders. And performance matters: tens of thousands of claims processed in seconds, a responsive front end, and an audit trail that is clear without being a burden.

A practical path forward with SmartRe™

SmartRe™ is designed by practitioners who understand reinsurance, so the workflow feels familiar and the results are explainable. The interface is quick and responsive, handling 50,000 claims in seconds and scaling across complex multi-line accounts and multiple currencies.

Pricing runs end-to-end in a single record, from submission through to the economic summary, with integrated MI that removes the need for separate reporting tools.

Collaboration comes as standard

Teams work from common reference data, share selections instantly, and compare peer pricing for immediate benchmarking. New benchmarks can be created and reused on the spot, turning individual insights into repeatable team practice.

All work is done on the front end

Data can be downloaded in seconds, scenarios can be configured without code, and all standard pricing methods – frequency–severity, exposure rating, ILFs and excess factors – are prebuilt and ready to use.

Support is delivered by specialists who know reinsurance

Onboarding includes technical training from day one, ongoing access to the Academy and direct contact with domain experts when you need them.

SmartRe™ focuses on the platform rather than reinventing the mathematics. The result is a single, seamless workflow with a built-in data warehouse that compresses weeks of reporting into seconds and a user experience built for underwriters. First launched in 2010 as the market’s earliest fully digital, cloud-based end-to-end reinsurance pricing platform, SmartRe is returning in 2026 to help treaty teams move beyond spreadsheets and meet today’s scale, complexity and pace with confidence.

Learn more about SmartRe™ and join the waitlist now.

Ana Mata

Managing Director and Actuary