
Aspen’s announcement of an IPO earlier this week may have caused a sharp intake of breath in the sector, as participants marvelled at the nerve of such a decision.
The question of whether the offering will be a success depends on a variety of factors. Chief among those – and at the forefront of most minds – is the impact of the economic uncertainty created by President Trump’s global tariff project.
Aspen will also go to market amid investor sentiment towards P&C that is on a downward turn – and it must also convince investors that its five-year remediation project has been a thorough success, overwriting memories of the old, Chris O’Kane-led Aspen.
The macroeconomic picture
The news that Aspen has chosen to launch its IPO may have struck some as surprising, given current economic turbulence.
The Bermudian carrier has been looking to list for over a year, having paused and then resumed work on the IPO during 2024 with a view to floating at some point during 2025.
The US IPO market suffered a slump during 2022, with only gradual improvement in 2023 and 2024.
Over Q1, the improvement looked set to continue, with EY recording 59 US IPOs – compared to 176 in all of the previous year – that raised $8.9bn.
Trump’s announcement of swingeing trade tariffs in the first days of Q2, however, sent shockwaves through the market, with Klarna, Medline and StubHub all choosing to put their IPO plans on hold, according to the Financial Times.
It would not have been unreasonable to expect Aspen to also shelve its flotation until the outlook is clearer – even though it is not alone in taking the plunge, with personal lines carrier American Integrity announcing on the same day that it would also brave the IPO markets.
Aspen's IPO filing implied a target price-to-book multiple of around 1.1x. This would be below the minimum valuation of 1.2x-1.25x book that it had targeted during preparations in 2024. Notably, the offering is relatively small, which would create time for the stock to trade up before Apollo sells down more heavily.
Of three insurance IPOs in 2023, both Hamilton and Fidelis priced below book value at 0.9x and 0.8x respectively, though Skyward priced at a premium multiple.
At 1.1x, then, Aspen has pitched itself at a rough midpoint between recent sector offerings, and at around the bottom end of peer valuations if you use the Bermuda cohort as most investors likely will.
That said, IPO pricing is typically targeted at conservative levels, so a 10%-20% discount to established listed peers would be expected to some degree.
But putting aside 2023 and 2024’s macroeconomic environment, there is evidence to suggest that 2025 may be worse – and in that light, Aspen's decision to IPO looks bold.
As Insurance Insider US explored earlier this week, insurance stocks are unlikely to be immune to pressures created by the broader macro-economic environment – even though, as an essential purchase, insurance is often seen as resilient to market shocks.
Specifically, there is direct correlation between primary insurers’ top-line and GDP.
Current economic uncertainty created by President Trump’s trade war, and the subsequent downward revisions of real GDP to -0.3% for Q1, are therefore likely to give insurance investors cause for concern.
Sentiment towards P&C
On top of the difficulties brought about by economic uncertainty, the P&C sector also faces a trio of sector-specific headwinds with which Aspen must also contend.
The two key issues are fears around reserving – whether the US P&C sector has really got a handle on loss cost trends – and pricing, with rates falling in many major lines of business.
These issues had already created a turn in investor sentiment away from the sector in late 2024, after a year in which price to book multiples and share prices across US P&C had almost universally peaked.
As this publication set out early this year, the price to book value multiples of every group within P&C hit a peak around November before beginning to fall by the end of 2024. Multiples started to recover in the new year, particularly in personal lines, but have taken a hit again amid the stock market selloff.
Some subsegments within P&C clearly outperformed the overall sector, however, and investor sentiment remains kinder to these than to others – namely personal lines and specialty insurance, as opposed to reinsurance and commercial.
There is also a distinction to be made within specialty. US specialty consists of onshore US business written on an excess and surplus (E&S) basis, while Bermuda specialty includes some US E&S but also Bermuda high excess large account business, reinsurance, and Lloyd's business, with some international risks as well.
Investors’ preference is for the former, rather than the latter. This is borne out in the enthusiastic reception of the IPOs of Skyward (2023) and Bowhead (2024), and the healthy performance of the two stocks since.
Aspen is likely to be classed more as a Bermudian hybrid (re)insurer – although its book has a heavy skew to primary business – and so the investor preference for US specialty looks to be a disadvantage.
Aspen: The road to rehabilitation
When Apollo bought Aspen in 2019, it set out to turn around the carrier following a disastrous period of growth into the soft US insurance market.
The key question on would-be investors’ minds now is whether Apollo, and the former Brit CEO it installed, Mark Cloutier, have made good on that ambition, given the memory of Aspen’s repeated underwriting issues under prior management and the almost distressed nature of its sale to Apollo.
The turnaround strategy rested on the aggressive reduction of Aspen’s expenses and the remediation of its underwriting portfolio – and by 2022, Cloutier declared most of the heavy lifting done.
A key part of that work was a loss portfolio transfer (LPT) agreed with Enstar, in which the legacy carrier assumed net loss reserves of $3.12bn. The deal concerned 2019 and prior business comprising property, liability and specialty lines, and was designed to draw a line under Aspen’s troubled past.
Other features of the turnaround included exiting 12 lines of insurance and five in reinsurance, which accounted for more than $900mn of its 2018 GWP.
It also cut cat exposure significantly. By 1 July 2023, its net 250-year probable maximum loss exposure was $293mn, a reduction of almost 70% compared to the start of 2018.
Operational efficiency also featured in the plan, as Aspen slashed its number of office locations from 30 to 19 and grew GWP per employee by 53% between 2018 and 2022.
The remedial action appears to be working, with Aspen able to post a sub-100 combined ratio for three consecutive years from 2022, and a sub-90 combined in the past two calendar years.
The trouble is, however, that investors know the damage that can be done by unexpected longer-tail liabilities. For that reason, they are not fond of insurance turnaround stories and generally demand more than a few years’ proof that a strategy has worked.
The Enstar LPT will soothe concerns around the worst losses of the soft casualty market in the second half of the last decade, and as of the end of 2024, Aspen had around $379mn of limit left on the deal.
But investors may also be worried about the health of the casualty accident years from 2021 onwards, given the growing concern that these years are not as healthy as the industry had hoped.

The IPO not only asks investors to buy in to the Aspen turnaround story – it also asks for faith in Cloutier, and his likely successor.
Cloutier has a strong track record when it comes to turnaround projects, having seen Brit through a major restructuring, an IPO and then a sale to Fairfax Financial. He has garnered respect during his 35+ years in the industry, working across a variety of jurisdictions.
But Cloutier has no proven track record of working with Wall Street – he has a new constituency of investors to win over having previously led a London-listed business.
The market will also expect that a few years after the IPO, a new CEO may be in place, and this means that the offering also asks investors to take a stance on his likely successor – group president and heir presumptive Christian Dunleavy.
The read-across
As this publication has previously explored, a handful of US and Bermudian carriers and InsurTechs are looking to go public, including Ategrity, Slide, Accelerant and Core Specialty.
Businesses that that have not yet taken the plunge will watch the progress of Aspen and American Integrity closely, looking to ascertain whether their success or failure is a symptom of those companies’ own characteristics or broader economic and structural factors.
Correction: In an article published on Tuesday April 29, we incorrectly calculated Aspen's hypothetical price-to-book multiple at IPO by omitting amounts owed to preference shareholders from the calculation of its book value. This article has been retracted, and the price-to-book multiple corrected in the chart above.