Welcome to the most worrisome Rendez-Vous in a decade, where all the best rumours are laced with a hefty dose of paranoia.
The most popular refuge of the troubled mind continues to be the fear of potential disintermediation.
Depending on who you talk to, either the ILS crowd is going to go direct to insurers, or it's going to play direct with our original big corporate clients.
This has been the fear for as long as the ILS world has existed. In fact, to listen to the Cassandras, one would assume that some day in the future even the smallest individual personal lines insurance could some how be turned into a fixed income stream for a pension fund ravenous for income.
Meanwhile, most of the variants on the "big cedants ganging up to be nasty to insurers" story that is stalking the terraces and cafés this year involve poor old reinsurance brokers being bypassed and put out to grass.
What nonsense we talk after a long day and a couple of champagnes!
A veteran reinsurance broking friend of mine once described the process that ensured that if reinsurance brokers didn't exist, you would surely have to invent them.
He was no student of Adam Smith, but this description was a more elegant and succinct analysis of the division of labour than I have heard from any economist or moral philosopher: "Look, you've got to buy reinsurance and so you have to give someone the job of doing that," he said.
"They do a great job, but they aren't all that busy and therefore you begrudge having to pay them for only a certain amount of work a year. "So you let them go and do the reinsurance buying for some of your competitors. This is great, because they start to have a bit of muscle in the marketplace and can get you a better deal than when they were purely in-house.
"But soon they start to pitch to potential clients who aren't that comfortable with them being part of your organisation. Eventually, the decision is made to rebrand them and sell them off so they can get on with their job unencumbered by potential conflicts of interest.
"Bingo - you have an independent reinsurance broker!"
Good brokers can't get cut out because they add enormous value. Sometimes this added value is nothing more than the simplest aggregation of demand to get a price discount. And there is also the ability to use influence to get claims paid and avoid disputes - in fact this is often the most valuable thing of all. And these days, the application of sophisticated modelling techniques and industry data are starting to put even more icing on the broker's cake.
As long as the added value exceeds the cost of the brokerage or fee, then the bargain is obvious and clients will never leave. So if you are reading your The Insurance Insider over breakfast, please discount some of the foolish scare stories doing the rounds.
You may be enjoying the cup of coffee that is accompanying your petit déjeuner, but that hardly means you're going to scale a Colombian mountainside to pick the green beans that made them, ship the produce to Europe, roast, blend, grind and brew it every time you fancy a pick-me-up.
When you put it that way, paying a couple of euros (or more, in the case of the Cafe de Paris) to have it brought to your table seems an incredible bargain by comparison.
To read our Day 3 Monte Carlo issue, please click here
Mark Geoghegan
Editor, The Insurance Insider