As the specialty insurance and reinsurance markets take stock of another underwriting cycle, the conversations that matter most will, as ever, turn on capacity, pricing and appetite. Yet beneath these perennial questions lies a deeper one: how does the global reinsurance market extend meaningful capacity to the infrastructure, energy and trade corridors that will define economic growth over the next decade, particularly across emerging and frontier markets where risk perception often outpaces risk reality?

 

This is where multilateral credit and political risk insurers have an increasingly important role to play, not as competitors to the specialty and reinsurance markets, but as partners that widen the pool of insurable risk and bring underwriting discipline, on-the-ground intelligence and long-standing relationships with sovereigns and financial institutions across some of the world’s most complex jurisdictions.

 

The Islamic Corporation for the Insurance of Investment and Export Credit (ICIEC or the Corporation), a Shariah-compliant multilateral credit and political risk insurer and member of the Islamic Development Bank (IsDB) Group, has spent three decades building precisely this kind of bridge. Established in 1994 and now serving 51 Member States, ICIEC closed 2025 having insured $17.8bn in business, a 37.8% increase on the previous year, bringing cumulative business insured since inception to $138.9bn, split between $107.8bn in trade and $31.1bn in investment across Asia, Africa, Europe, the Americas and Oceania. Behind these figures sits a simple proposition: risk that is properly assessed, priced and shared becomes risk that banks, export credit agencies, reinsurers and institutional investors are willing to underwrite.

 

ICIEC’s mandate has always included reinsurance, co-insurance and fronting arrangements alongside its direct credit and political risk insurance business. This segment has taken on growing importance as Member States’ export credit agencies and national insurers seek to build their own underwriting capacity.

 

Rather than displacing local or regional insurers, ICIEC typically works alongside them, providing treaty and facultative capacity that allows younger agencies to take larger and more complex risks than their balance sheets would otherwise carry, while the local agency retains the relationship with the underlying obligor.

 

This activity grew markedly in 2025: outward reinsurance reached $13.6bn, a 54% increase on 2024, ceding roughly 77% of insured business to 20 reinsurance partners, up from 17 the year before, while net retained exposure was held to a disciplined $1.6bn.

 

This model matters for the specialty market for a simple reason: it expands the universe of insurable transactions before they ever reach a broker’s desk in London, Zurich or Singapore. A reinsurance treaty with a Member State export credit agency, or a co-insurance arrangement on a large infrastructure risk, effectively pre-underwrites and de-risks a transaction, making it more understandable and attractive when placed into the wider reinsurance market.

 

In this sense, ICIEC’s reinsurance activity functions as a feeder mechanism for global specialty capacity, not a substitute for it. The Corporation also gives international reinsurers a form of comfort that is difficult to replicate through desk research alone. Because ICIEC underwrites alongside Member State agencies over many years, it accumulates claims history, obligor behaviour and sector-specific loss data across jurisdictions that would otherwise be opaque to underwriters based in Europe or North America. Sharing that experience, formally through treaty arrangements and informally through ongoing dialogue, helps close the information gap that so often keeps capacity away from markets that are creditworthy.

 

That engagement is becoming more structured. In October 2025, ICIEC convened international reinsurers in London for a workshop dedicated specifically to sovereign sukuk insurance, working through the credit enhancement mechanics, documentation standards and rating considerations that would need to be in place before reinsurance capacity could stand behind insured sukuk transactions. Such sessions, where a multilateral insurer sits down with the market that ultimately absorbs much of its risk to design a new asset class together, are a useful indicator of where the relationship between multilateral credit insurance and specialty reinsurance is heading.

 

Nowhere is this more visible than in mega-project and infrastructure finance, where credit insurance has moved from a peripheral consideration to a structuring necessity. Large-scale transport, energy and industrial projects across Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East increasingly depend on a layered risk architecture, in which export credit insurance and political risk cover sit alongside commercial bank debt, development finance and, ultimately, reinsurance capacity.

 

ICIEC’s recent engagement illustrates the pattern at scale. Two Murabaha financing facilities totalling $1,266m, arranged by Deutsche Bank and First Abu Dhabi Bank and backed by up to 95% political risk cover from ICIEC, are supporting early construction of Nigeria’s roughly 700-km Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway. In Turkiye, a EUR230m ($263m) Non-Honouring of Sovereign Financial Obligations cover underpins financing for the 118-km Antalya-Alanya Motorway, a project expected to generate an estimated EUR6.8bn in economic activity over the life of its build-operate-transfer concession. And in Iraq, a EUR99m reinsurance placement, ICIEC’s first sovereign transaction in the country, supports three high-voltage substations, adding 4,500 megavolt-amperes of transformation capacity for a population of roughly 4m. In each case, credit insurance enables commercial lenders to extend financing into markets they might otherwise consider too exposed to sovereign, transfer or performance risk. 

 

The lesson for the specialty insurance market is that mega-project risks in emerging economies should not be viewed simply as a choice between accepting or rejecting them. Instead, these risks can often be managed through the right structure, with multilateral insurers playing an important role from the early stages of the project.

 

Energy remains the clearest illustration of where this partnership between multilateral credit insurance and specialty reinsurance is deepening, and it is by some distance ICIEC’s largest sector, accounting for $10.1bn of the $17.8bn insured in 2025 and $57.8bn in cumulative trade and investment since 2015. As Member States pursue both continued oil and gas development and an accelerating build-out of renewable generation, ICIEC has extended cover across the spectrum, from upstream and midstream financing through to solar, wind and transmission infrastructure. A $150m Murabaha facility supporting Pakistan’s imports of crude oil, refined products and liquefied natural gas, arranged with two prominent financial institutions in the MENA region, illustrates how this cover extends beyond project finance into the trade flows that keep national energy systems running day to day. Each exposure carries its own risk profile, from construction and completion risk through to Non-Honouring of Sovereign Obligations, and each increasingly calls for the kind of layered capacity that only a combination of multilateral insurance and specialty reinsurance markets can supply.

 

Beyond energy, ICIEC’s activity spans sophisticated lines that will be familiar to specialty market practitioners: political risk insurance for cross-border loans and equity investments, Non-Honouring of Sovereign Financial Obligations cover, structured trade and commodity finance, and letters of credit confirmation business for banks operating in frontier markets. These are lines where underwriting expertise, local knowledge and a disciplined appetite for calculated risk matter more than volume and where ICIEC’s deep claims experience and sovereign relationships offer genuine underwriting value to reinsurance partners.

 

Global reinsurance capacity has hardened and softened in cycles over the past decade, but underlying demand for infrastructure, energy and trade finance across Africa, Asia and the wider Islamic world has continued to grow. ICIEC’s 2025 results point to an expanding pipeline of transactions that will, in time, seek reinsurance capacity of their own: new insurance commitments reached $7.3bn, a 38% increase on 2024, with Foreign-Investment Insurance accounting for 65% of that total as ICIEC’s business mix shifts toward longer-tenor, investment-led exposures. Since inception, ICIEC has insured $138.9bn in trade and investment across its Member States. Asia commands the largest regional share at $68.4bn, followed by Africa at $44.0bn and Europe at $20.5bn.

 

As ICIEC enters its 2026-2030 Corporate Strategy, deepening these reinsurance and co-insurance partnerships is a deliberate priority, not an incidental one. This means more structured dialogue with specialty underwriters on emerging risk classes, from climate-linked infrastructure to supply chain and critical minerals financing, and a continued willingness to take a first loss or anchor position on transactions that later attract broader syndication.

 

ICIEC’s Shariah-compliant structure, its ‘Aa3’ rating from Moody’s and ‘AA-’ rating from S&P Global, both reaffirmed with stable outlooks, and its position within the wider IsDB Group give it a distinctive standing from which to originate and structure risk in markets where global reinsurers are seeking better visibility and more dependable partners.

 

For a specialty and reinsurance industry weighing where capacity should flow, multilateral credit insurers such as ICIEC offer more than additional limits. They offer origination discipline, sovereign access and a demonstrated ability to bring previously uninsurable risk into a form the specialty and reinsurance markets can confidently underwrite. That, ultimately, is the proposition worth putting to reinsurance partners in the years ahead. M