Fingers crossed, 2014 seems to be shaping up to be another quiet hurricane season. Although there is still some way to go, there has been little sign of a major windstorm in North America this year. If that stays true for the next month and a half, it should yield a comfortable renewal season for insurance buyers, but it may produce discomfort for the ultimate risk bearers in the insurance purchasing chain: the reinsurers.

Now is the time of year when reinsurers and reinsurance brokers gather in rather splendid surroundings for their annual renewal meetings. For decades, company executives have met by the Mediterranean in Monte Carlo in September and then by Germany's Black Forest in Baden-Baden in October to discuss reinsurance market conditions and year-end renewals. The U.S. reinsurance market appears to be less of a creature of habit and changes its meeting place each year, but this year it is in the pleasant surroundings of Scottsdale, Arizona.

Twenty-five years ago, to a young reporter, it seemed apt that European reinsurance executives should meet adjacent to luxurious casinos, as reinsurance appeared to be the money end of the industry and luck seemed to play a fairly large role in the success or failure of individual underwriters.

That has all changed, of course, since 1992's Hurricane Andrew, with development of catastrophe models and underwriting transitioning into much more of a science than an art.

Accompanying that shift in underwriting fundamentals has been a change in capital behind the reinsurance contracts. Back in the early 1990s, insurance securitization was a minor interest for a few people on the Chicago Board of Trade; now alternative capital accounts for about 20% of the catastrophe market.

While risk managers largely remain detached from the reinsurance market, the changes that have taken place may have significant implications for them. On the one hand, access to the huge amount of capital-markets capacity to support insurance risks via insurance-linked securities and hedge fund-backed reinsurers should keep a damper on insurance prices. On the other hand, they are dealing with a different breed of capital providers.

What that means remains unclear. The familiar and convivial surroundings of the reinsurance meetings tended to produce trusting relationships and a sense of what goes around comes around for reinsurers and their cedents, but that way of doing business is also rife with inefficiencies.

The new structures may produce more efficient transactions, and the indemnity triggers of the products seem clear-cut. As risk managers know, however, when large amounts of money are due to change hands, policy wordings can quickly become murky.

We won't know how the claims will play out on a large scale until another catastrophe strikes. Touch wood, it'll be at least next year before we find out.