Howden Re has appointed Filipe Duarte (pictured) as head of Howden Re Portugal, establishing the broker's first physical presence in the country. Duarte is based in Lisbon. He joins from Aon Reinsurance, where he served as head of treaties, leading placement and advisory for Portuguese insurers. He began his career at Willis in Lisbon in 2010 and brings more than 12 years of reinsurance experience across treaty and facultative business.
The Portugal appointment extends a regional build-out that Howden Re began in September 2025, when it launched Iberia operations with the appointment of David Santos as managing director in Madrid. Santos, who also serves as head of Iberia at Howden Re, described Duarte's hire as the natural next step from that Spanish base. Duarte will report into the Iberia structure and build a local team in Lisbon.
The move fits a pattern Howden Re has followed in Europe, adding operations in DACH, Iberia, and Ireland over the past two years. Each has targeted a market where local presence is expected to deliver a commercial advantage over remote servicing from London or continental hubs.
Whether Portugal develops into a substantial reinsurance broking market will depend partly on how quickly the catastrophe pool framework takes shape. The 2026 storm losses have at least accelerated the conversation. Duarte's appointment gives Howden Re a local voice in it from the outset.
Duarte joins a market that Storm Kristin has left with urgent questions about catastrophe modelling and protection gaps it is not yet equipped to answer. Kristin made landfall on January 28 with wind gusts of up to 130mph. Aon estimated insured losses at approximately €900 million, making it the costliest windstorm on record for Portugal. Eight named storms struck the Iberian Peninsula in the surrounding weeks, with Munich Re calculating total regional economic losses at roughly US$7.7 billion.
More than 80 per cent of those losses were uninsured, according to Gallagher Re's Q1 2026 catastrophe report. That figure reflects low insurance penetration in flood-prone areas and gaps in catastrophe modelling capacity that the Portuguese market has not yet resolved.
The storm losses have given new urgency to a structural debate Portugal was already having. Work on a state-backed natural catastrophe pool predated the 2026 season. The government's recovery and resilience plan, published in May, then identified mandatory catastrophe insurance and a national disaster fund among its core proposals. What that pool looks like, and how it is modelled, has become an open question with real commercial stakes.
Howden Re arrives with a specific reference point. Since December 2025, the broker has provided natural catastrophe modelling services for Spain's Consorcio de Compensación de Seguros (CCS), the state-managed extraordinary risk pool. That work covers probable maximum loss estimates across flood, earthquake, and storm perils: the same questions now being worked through in Lisbon.
