SUSEP: new rules for offering and placing reinsurance

Background

On July 17, 2026, Brazil’s National Council of Private Insurance (CNSP) issued CNSP Resolution No. 494, which replaces CNSP Resolution No. 451/2022 and now governs reinsurance and retrocession transactions in Brazil, including the rules on cession percentages and the preferential offer to local reinsurers.

To implement the operational aspects of the new rule, the Superintendence of Private Insurance (SUSEP) released, under Public Consultation No. 07/2026, a draft SUSEP Resolution that repeals SUSEP Circular No. 683/2022 and sets out, among other things, the minimum content of reinsurance proposals, contract formation through the reinsurer’s silence, the preferential offer to local reinsurers, the placement of risks with unregistered reinsurers when local capacity is unavailable, and the purchase of insurance abroad. The comment period closed on October 29, 2026.

Key Points of the Draft

1. Electronic delivery of reinsurance proposals. Under the draft, proposals must be sent electronically to the email addresses that reinsurers provide to SUSEP. Ceding companies must maintain procedures that evidence actual delivery, and reinsurers must keep those addresses up to date. The original draft requires the addresses to be listed in the Periodic Information Form (FIP), which creates a problem for occasional reinsurers, since they are not required to file the FIP. Comments submitted in the consultation suggested publishing the addresses through SUSEP’s “Licensed Entities Lookup” service instead. It is also unclear whether each reinsurer must designate a single address for all of its lines of business, which could be hard to manage for foreign reinsurers and Lloyd’s syndicates.
2. Minimum content of the proposal. The draft lists the minimum required elements of a proposal, such as identification of the ceding company and the reinsurer; the nature of the reinsurance (facultative or treaty, proportional or non-proportional); the intended term; a description of the risk (line of business, risk profile, limits of liability, loss history, basis of cession, territorial scope, and coverages); the estimated premium and commission; and the share offered. A proposal that fails to include these minimum elements, or that covers a group of lines in which the reinsurer is not authorized to operate in Brazil, will not be valid either for contract formation through the reinsurer’s silence (Article 60, Paragraph 1, of Law No. 15,040/2024) or as evidence that the preferential offer was made.
3. Additional documents and commercially sensitive information. Reinsurers’ requests for additional documents and information must state the grounds for the request, may be made no more than twice, and suspend the 20-day period for tacit acceptance of the risk until all requested documents are delivered. Those documents become part of the proposal. The requirement to state grounds does not appear in Law No. 15,040/2024 and, like the two-request limit, is open to challenge, since there is no imbalance of bargaining power between ceding company and reinsurer. The draft also protects ceding companies against unjustified requests for commercially sensitive information, but it does not say whether such a request may be treated as a declination of the risk, or how the rule applies to retrocession, where the offer may go to the ceding company’s competitors.
4. Deadline for acceptance by silence. SUSEP will not consider individual requests to extend the 20-day period for acceptance through the reinsurer’s silence, but it may extend that period for specific lines or groups of lines through separate regulations. It would make sense for any such extension to cover, from the outset, the risks that CNSP regulations already classify as complex.
5. Reinsurance brokers. The draft requires proof of full authority to represent the ceding company when a proposal is submitted through a broker, which is not common practice in the reinsurance market. Lack of authority renders the proposal invalid, at any time, for purposes of contract formation by silence, without prejudice to the broker’s civil liability for damages caused to the reinsurer and the ceding company.
6. Timing of the offer and retroactive coverage. The draft requires the proposal to be offered before the risk attaches, which makes it harder to place risks for which the ceding company seeks retroactive coverage, a common situation in market practice.
7. Preferential offer to local reinsurers. The ceding company must send the proposal, identical for all reinsurers approached, to as many local reinsurers as needed to satisfy the preferential offer of at least 40% of each cession. Local reinsurers that have waived in advance the review of proposals in certain lines are exempt. The exemption expressly extends to reinsurers not authorized to write the line of the risk. The draft allows the ceding company to include in the proposal quotes from foreign reinsurers committed to accepting the same terms, preserving the current practice of quoting the international market first. If a local reinsurer definitively declines the risk, the ceding company is not required to offer it the same contract again, even if the terms or conditions change.
8. Advance waiver of proposal review. The draft introduces a mechanism allowing reinsurers to issue, in advance, a document expressly waiving the review of reinsurance proposals for specific lines or groups of lines. As long as the ceding company or reinsurance broker is aware of it, that document may be treated as a declination of the proposal, and it is valid for no more than one year from its issuance. The mechanism lets reinsurers exclude their appetite even for lines they are authorized to write, which is especially useful for reinsurers that serve only intragroup or captive business and for Lloyd’s syndicates. For ceding companies, it avoids waiting on responses from reinsurers with no appetite for those lines.
9. Insufficient capacity and unauthorized reinsurers. Risks may be transferred to reinsurers not authorized to operate in Brazil only after the proposal has been declined by all local and foreign reinsurers authorized in the relevant group of lines (excluding those that have issued an advance waiver), and the transfer must be reported to SUSEP within 30 days. The proposal sent to an unauthorized reinsurer may include the ceding company’s commercially sensitive information.
10. Purchase of insurance abroad. The draft keeps the existing rule under which a lack of local capacity is established by obtaining declinations from five insurers that write the line of the proposed insurance. To evidence that no coverage is available in the Brazilian market, the following will not count: declinations based on missing information from the applicant, inquiries made to insurers after the foreign policy has incepted, and inquiries made to insurers that have not written premiums in the line in the previous twelve months.
11. Insurance-Linked Notes (LRS). In a new provision, the draft provides that, for purposes of calculating the cession percentages under Article 8, Paragraph 1, of CNSP Resolution No. 494/2026, LRS premiums will be treated as premiums ceded in reinsurance or retrocession. It remains unclear whether these cessions will be treated as cessions to local reinsurers for purposes of the preferential offer.

Next Steps

The final text will depend on SUSEP’s review of the comments received, and the draft is scheduled to take effect on January 2, 2027. Even so, we recommend that ceding companies, reinsurers, and brokers start reviewing now their proposal submission workflows, delivery-evidence controls, broker appointment documentation, and any line-specific advance waivers.

The Insurance and Reinsurance team at Cescon, Barrieu, Flesch & Barreto Advogados is available to answer any questions.