Triangle Eight rides Bermuda's start-up wave with a cost warning

Heather Kitson frames her new firm from an operating career that began as general counsel on Aspen Re's early executive team and continued as deputy chief executive at Convex Re, then launched Triangle Eight Group a year ago for clients among the island's newest re/insurers. The advisory arm handles strategy, regulation and operations across life and non-life; sister firm T8 Partners runs retained searches for re/insurance executives and recently opened a London office near Lloyd's.

The leadership roster reads like a formation team sheet. Fiona Davies, formerly group chief of staff at Monument Re, is on board; T8 Partners was co-founded by Antony Williams, Jon Sharpe and Aaron Scott, former directors at a British re/insurance recruiter. "We're not just a bunch of consultants, we're folks who have been in the seat before," Kitson told the Royal Gazette, and the group draws on a bench of former re/insurance executives and directors for flexible, cost-efficient contract work.

That bench has already produced an initial AM Best Preliminary Credit Assessment of A- for a client carrier, carried that carrier into BMA licensing, and delivered complete leadership team builds. The wider numbers support Kitson's timing: more than 35 new insurers have registered with the BMA so far in 2026, putting the island on track for its most active formation year since 2022, while this publication's registry tracking, captives included, had counted 42 additions by the end of July.

Kitson bills the firm as the operational edge consultants cannot supply, but the safeguard she names for Bermuda's formation boom is blunt: the cost of doing business. Keep it down, she argues, or the competitive edge the island has built will erode. The warning is public and personal, because every new carrier her firm helps organise becomes a data point for rivals watching where formation costs are heading. Other domiciles will not need to match Bermuda's speed to compete; they will only need to undercut its invoice. Triangle Eight's first year suggests the island still turns applications into companies efficiently, but the registry cannot confirm the invoice will stay low enough for the next wave.