Ryan Specialty sees near zero Q2 growth on property drag
Ryan Specialty reported first quarter 2026 results showing continued growth, but the call was defined by a reset in expectations as property market conditions deteriorate.
Total revenue reached $795 million, up 15% year over year, with organic growth of 11.8%. Adjusted EBITDA rose 15.7% to $232 million, while adjusted EPS increased 20% to $0.47. Margins remained stable at 29.2%, and the company repurchased $40 million of shares during the quarter.
Despite the strong quarter, Ryan lowered its full-year outlook. Organic growth is now expected in the mid-single digits, down from prior high-single-digit expectations, with margins projected to decline by 100 to 150 basis points. The main pressure is coming from property, where large and catastrophe-exposed accounts are seeing rate declines of 25% to 35%, with Q2 expected to show little to no organic growth due to heavy property exposure.
Founder and executive chairman Patrick G. Ryan described the current environment as unusually volatile, pointing to a rapid shift from a prolonged hard market to sudden declines. He emphasized that underlying risks such as climate exposure, litigation trends, and social inflation remain elevated, even as carriers redeploy capital aggressively, putting pressure on pricing.
E&S flows remain strong, with new business up 8%, while underwriting management delivered solid performance across casualty, financial lines, and international specialty. The reinsurance unit, Ryan Re, also contributed meaningfully, supported by the Markel renewal rights deal.
The company continues to push aggressively on AI and automation. Submission processing times in underwriting management have dropped from 24 hours to under 2 hours, while facultative reinsurance processing has been reduced from hours to minutes. In property, AI-driven appetite scoring improved submit-to-bind ratios by 11 times and increased quote speed by 36%. The firm also noted that AI is compressing employee ramp time from years to months.
“And this goes beyond our brokers and underwriters. We are changing how we train and develop talent. New hires will ramp up faster when our AI tools accelerate institutional knowledge, recommend next steps on unfamiliar risks and provide real-time guidance informed by decades of placement data. What used to take a junior broker 2 years to learn through experience, they will begin accessing in just months, accelerating our return on the most accretive investments we make.”
Strategically, Ryan highlighted its ~$10 billion delegated authority platform as a core differentiator, now accounting for over 40% of E&S premium. The company also launched Rock Re, an alternative capital sidecar, while Ryan Re approaches $2 billion in premium.
On MGAs, management pushed back on broader market criticism. Patrick G. Ryan said most MGAs are built by backing a few underwriters with capital, often leading to short-term, loosely disciplined businesses that contribute to pricing pressure. In contrast, Ryan builds around niche opportunities and invests heavily in full carrier-level capabilities — actuarial, data science, catastrophe modeling, and underwriting — with a focus on delivering underwriting profit for capital providers.
He emphasized that Ryan has invested billions into delegated authority as a long-term strategy, while many newer MGAs tend to have shorter life cycles.
“Most MGAs are started by capital backing some underwriters who have a following. We never believed that, that was the appropriate strategy. We always believe the appropriate strategy is to find a niche that needs delegated authority and to equip that with the top quality services that any carrier would provide, that’s actuarial — that’s data science. That’s a cat modeling. And it’s great underwriting. And it’s an overall culture tells you #1 is we have a duty of care to the capital provider to make an underwriting profit and represent them appropriately in the marketplace.
That’s not the way historically MGAs have come and gone in the business. But we don’t like being harnessed with that brand because we’re totally different. It was part of the founding thesis that this was going to be an evolving — quickly evolving change in the industry, we seize the opportunity, and we made the investments. And just to put an exclamation point on that, the $2.7 billion that we invested in ’23, ’24 part of 25 was all delegated authority.
That’s how much we believe in it. And so I said hundreds of millions, I should just say billions have been invested in that. So that’s the difference between us and the run of the mill, new MGA. But that run of a new MGA is putting a lot of pressure on pricing. But that’s not us, but it’s putting a lot of pressure on pricing. So a carrier who wants to put capital work doesn’t have the talent, know some underwriters that they did business with a company they get together and they form an MGA. The average life cycle of those kinds of MGAs is very short term.”
