First quarter 2026 net income at W.R. Berkley Corp. increased about 23.4% compared to the same period a year ago to about $515.2 million.
Operating income for the first three months of the year was a record $514.3 million.
The company ended 2025 with record Q4 operating income of $450 million and, for the full year, net income and operating income grew to records of $1.8 billion and $1.7 billion, respectively.
The Q1 consolidated combined ratio for the Greenwich, Connecticut-based commercial insurer was 90.7—about flat versus a year ago. W.R. Berkley’s insurance
segment combined ratio for the period increased to 92.2 from 91.7 for Q1 2025 but the reinsurance and monoline excess segment saw a decrease to 78.6 compared with 85.4.
Total accident year catastrophe losses for Q1 2026 were about $75.7 million compared with about $111.1 million during Q1 2025.
During Q1 net investment income grew 12.2% compared with the same period last year, to a record of $404.3 million.
“Our 88.3 accident year combined ratio excluding catastrophe losses demonstrated the stability of underwriting earnings generated through our diversified ope
rating model,” the company said in a statement. “We are growing our business where pricing, terms, and conditions support attractive risk adjusted returns.”
Berkley said average Q1 rate increases excluding workers’ compensation were approximately 7.2%.
Marsh aims to be an “AI winner” through growth, productivity and efficiency gains, according to John Doyle, president and CEO of the broker and risk adviser.
“[W]e see AI as a powerful accelerator and enabler in delivering value to our clients, colleagues an
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d shareholders,” Doyle said during an earnings call with equities analysts to discuss first quarter results. (See below for Marsh’s Q1 results wrapup).
He emphasized it’s important to remember that Marsh is not selling commoditized products or simply procuring insurance at the lowest possible price. “[Artificial int
elligence] will help us serve our clients who have bespoke and complex needs even better. It will not replace the trusted advice, expertise and capabilities with which we deliver value to clients,” he said.
As KPMG said in a recent report, AI is delivering value, but only for those businesses that scale it. Following that measure of success, Marsh is focusing on scale in its AI investments and is adopting an enterprise-wide strategy.
“While AI adoption is accelerating worldwide, only a small group of ‘AI leaders’ are seeing clear returns. These leaders consistently outperform others, including
82% saying that AI is already delivering meaningful business value, compared to 62% of their peers,” said KPMG International in its first Global AI Pulse survey, published in March.
“This is not simply an AI maturity gap; it is a widening performance gap between organizations that treat AI as an enterprise-wide transformation and those
that are trying to bolster AI onto existing models and seeing incremental gains,” said KPMG.
Doyle said he and his team “feel good” about the company’s AI investments and how these new tech capabilities are improving the business. “We moved early o
n AI, and we’re excited about how it’s already making us better and how it’s going to make us better in the future,” he said, noting that Marsh’s scale matters.
“Our strategy leverages our scale and capacity to invest in AI to drive even greater value from our proprietary data assets and our role as our clients’ trusted adviser,” Doyle said.
