Brokers speaking at the CII conference have taken Allianz Cornhill's general manager of commercial lines Chris Hanks to task over comments that the market is not softening.
Hanks said that with price rises still being achieved by insurers, albeit at smaller levels than in recent years, the current situation was a "price correction".
He said the market would not go soft as insurer chief executives now had a bettter understanding of capital.
But Smart & Cook group managing director Paul Meehan said that business moving from insurer to insurer was doing so at 15%-20% price reductions. "Prices are going down, isn't that softening?" Meehan asked.
Carl Bach, president of UK and Ireland for Ace, agreed that there was a "trend of weakening prices". He said large cases carried some big rate reductions during the third quarter.
But Bach said the industry would watch with interest the impact that the recent hurricanes had on 1 January reinsurance renewals and subsequently on insurance rates.
Toby Foster, chief executive of UK retail for Marsh, agreed that there had been a "dramatic dropping of rates" since the end of the second quarter.
Foster said that the market was "trending down very significantly", and could continue to do so as insurers came under pressure to meet their income targets towards the end of the forth quarter.
