The Voice of Insurance

Ep214 James Slaughter: Innovation at Scale

Today’s Podcast is all about innovation and today’s guest has been responsible for doing more of it than most.
James Slaughter is Chief Underwriting Officer at Apollo Group, a Lloyd’s business that has been behind collaborations and new product launches galore in recent times.
Be it exploring semi-automatic underwriting and the application of artificial intelligence, the development of its own ibott syndicate, helping launch a parametric syndicate, or other specialist start-ups focusing on risks as diverse as Cyber, Drones, employee parental benefits or unlocking new business from Africa, Apollo has become one of the go-to market enablers for innovation in the London Market in recent times.
James is always incredibly direct as an interviewee – and what you see is what you get – I find he’s exactly the same person whether the microphones are switched on or off.
And that’s why this Episode is such a treat, James always says what he thinks - and it’s clear he thinks a lot more than most.
Listen on and you’ll learn a lot about what is coming down the track, how some of the vanguard technologies are best being exploited and which of the newest developments at the insurance cutting edge James is most excited about.
It’s breathless stuff – I had a lot of fun recording this one and I think you’ll enjoy a listen.
 
NOTES:Abbreviations:
UNL – Ultimate Net Loss. In this context it is shorthand for traditional contract-of-indemnity insurance versus a parametric insurance structure.
GUA – the General Underwriters Agreement, which is a leading underwriters agreement designed to govern and streamline how amendments to subscription market placements can be carried out, often allowing a leader or leaders to bind on behalf of following markets.
ICX and TCX – Lloyd’s class of business codes for innovation and the energy transition respectively.
LINKS:We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com

Ep213 Caroline Wagstaff LMG: A Good Story Never Changes

Today’s guest carries out an incredibly important role representing the whole London Market in the UK’s corridors of power.
That means looking out for a market that wrote over $100bn in core gross written premium and controlled just under $160bn in all in 2022, increasing its global market share to over 8 per cent.
That also means representing a market that now employs some 60,000 people and produces two percent of UK GDP and eight-and-a-half percent of London’s GDP.
Caroline Wagstaff, CEO of the London Market Group, was born to do a job like this.
She’s passionate and very difficult to say no to, but she’s also a great communicator and is very good at reading a room and understanding a collective mood.
The London Market Group (or the LMG) allows Lloyd’s, Liiba, the IUA and the LMA to speak with one voice on broad London Market-related topics and in this Episode we dissect the LMG’s latest London Matters Report and catch up with what is now top of the LMG’s busy agenda.
The Report is an essential companion to this episode and there will be a link to it in the Notes – I highly recommend a read – it isn’t long and is packed full of very useful facts about the London market’s place in the global risk ecosystem, as a well as its direction of travel.
Caroline is on excellent form in this discussion and the podcast is crackling with energy. I for one am extremely glad that we have been able to get someone of her calibre to represent us as an industry.
London has been doing relatively well of late but listening back to this recording it’s clear that there is zero complacency at the LMG.
It’s clear that Caroline is not going to rest until the UK government and regulators are working harder to make it do even better.
NOTES:The Latest London Matters report can be found here: https://lmg.london/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/London-Matters-2024-Data-Pack.pdf
LINKS:We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:https://www.advantagego.com/

Ep212 Wendy Houser Markel: The Golden Age of E&S

Today’s guest is in charge of a team of around 400, writing a book approaching $3 billion in gross written premium in the largest wholesale insurance market in the world
I have had many CEOs on the show who run significantly smaller operations.
And that’s what gives this podcast so much weight.
Wendy Houser is Chief Wholesale Officer of Markel Specialty and is one of a select group of people with day-to-day visibility of the booming US Excess and Surplus lines (E and S) market.
So today we are going to go into quite a lot of detail about the state of this huge and dynamic segment.
An unprecedented level of business flow and rate rises has produced something of a golden age for E&S and we’ll be trying answer how much longer this state of affairs can continue.
Wendy is great company, so along the way we’ll be getting to know a remarkable and charismatic insurance leader with a huge amount of knowledge and insight, who isn’t afraid of making difficult decisions and certainly doesn’t duck any of my more probing questions.
LINKS:We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:https://www.advantagego.com/

Ep211 Alex Maloney Lancashire: We’ve done what we said we would do

I can’t believe it’s been three-and-a-half years since I had Alex Maloney on the podcast for a full episode to himself.
We’ve had brief catch-ups at Monte Carlo and when we bump into each other in the London Market, but I haven’t had time with Alex properly devoted to understanding what he and the Lancashire Group is thinking.
A huge amount has happened since we last spoke, not least Lancashire’s entry into the Casualty Treaty arena and its decision to open up a new operation in the US Excess & Surplus lines market.
Alex is a great guest because he is one of the most direct and straight-talking people I have had on the show.
What you see is what you get.
And what we get here is a tour of global insurance and reinsurance market opportunities and what Lancashire is doing to make the most of them, with a minimum of fuss.
We also get a distillation of Lancashire’s strategy of managing selective growth while trying to preserve a small company mindset and culture and at the same time pitching something slightly different to industry talent.
It’s all substance and no spin.
Listen on and I promise you’ll learn an awful lot in a very short amount of time. You’ll also get to meet probably the straightest shooter running a public company in our sector.
NOTES:
I let the abbreviation TIV sneak through. It is a property term and stands for Total Insured Values.
LINKS:We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com

Ep210 Danielle Librizzi & Chris Cooper QBE NA: If it's good for QBE, it's good for me

Today’s episode is a masterclass with two leaders in the North American professional liability market.
Often on this show we talk about the big picture in very broad brushstrokes, but today is refreshing because we are getting into specific and specialist detail about some of the most broad-reaching and dynamic classes of business anywhere in the world.
Danielle Librizzi, Head of Professional Liability, and Chris Cooper, Head of Media Liability, at QBE North America have a lifetime of market experience between them and this is a lively discussion.
Casualty is under the spotlight the world over, but nowhere more so than in North America, so these two senior underwriters are right at the frontline in the battle to keep on top of new perils and trends in the world’s fastest-moving and highest stakes market.
Here I ask what Danielle makes of casualty rate adequacy and I ask Chris how the pandemic, the trend to digital platforms and the writers’ strike have affected the media liability risk landscape.
How is QBE’s professional liability division responding to the call for the globalisation of QBE’s offering and far great collaboration between departments?
And how is QBE utilizing Artificial Intelligence on the ground in its own underwriting processes and, perhaps more importantly, how does Chris view it as an emerging media liability and potentially systemic general E&O peril?
I got all the answers I was looking for and if you stay tuned so will you.
Danielle and Chris are excellent company and this will be a very rewarding listen for anyone wanting to get a better perspective on the North American professional liability market
LINKS:We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:https://www.advantagego.com/

Special Ep Ian Summers AdvantageGo & Bill Pieroni ACORD: Planting tech acorns for the generations to come

Today’s podcast is one of the most eclectic and far-reaching I have produced since founding the Voice of Insurance over four years ago.
And that is entirely down to today’s guests. Ian Summers Global Business Leader of AdvantageGo (pictured top) is a well-known figure to anyone who has worked in the Global Insurance Market and has a full career of pioneering market modernisation behind him from within the market as Global Information Officer at Aon and serving the market at major Software companies.
And if were possible, Bill Pieroni (pictured bottom) has had an even more all-encompassing career to date than Ian. Starting outside the industry at top consultancies, a senior role at State Farm and five years as Global Chief Operating Officer at Marsh followed.
For the last eight years Bill has headed up global insurance data standards body ACORD.
But if you thought that meant our chat would be limited to global data standards, you’d be completely wrong
At their core what Bill and Ian do is provide the tech and the utilities to help insurance get on and do what it does best.
Bill and Ian have only been so successful so far because they understand the industry inside and out and that means this podcast is far more wide-reaching than you would imagine.
For instance, you wouldn’t expect tech experts to commission a historical study on the efficacy of M&A for the insurance industry, would you? But these two have, principally because they are so embedded into the sector that their level of understanding matches most of the most seasoned Executives and analysts.
So get ready for a real feast.
The winners and losers in insurance M&A, really-detailed insights into the best applications for Artificial Intelligence, the real reason why insurance is so hard to transform and the prospects for the London Market if its latest digital reforms are successful are all to come.
And the style of delivery may surprise you. If Ian is a strong and forthright character, Bill is almost off the charts in the energy and passion that he brings to this discussion.
I had a real blast and learnt a huge amount. Listen on and so will you.
NOTES:
The M&A study we discuss can be downloaded here. I highly recommend a read – it’s fascinating stuff (and could potentially save you $billions!)

Ep209 Andy Holmes CEO CFC Underwriting: Look after the loss ratio & everything else looks after itself

Top-tier MGA CFC Underwriting has undergone some very well-publicised leadership changes in the last few months and Andy Holmes is the business’s newly-appointed CEO, so I’m delighted to have him on the show as this week’s guest.
Andy’s been part of this organisation since very early in its remarkable growth story and was previously its Chief Underwriting Officer, so he knows the business inside and out.
Nothing was off the table in this discussion, so we started where we needed to, but soon got swept away in a whirlwind of M&A, new product launches and insights into the world of cyber, embedded insurance, parametric covers and, of course, Artificial Intelligence.
Andy is incredibly engaging and easy to talk to and in this podcast he reveals a huge amount of accumulated insurance business wisdom and fills in many details about CFC’s original and highly successful insurance philosophy.
Listening back to this interview it’s clear that although CFC might have had big changes at the top, it’s definitely not slowing down and its body corporate and innovative culture remain as effective and worth studying as ever.
NOTES:We mention Ciaran Martin, who is former CEO of the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre and chairs the Technical Committee of the Cyber Monitoring Centre (CMC).The CEO of the CMC is William Mayes.
LINKS:We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:https://www.advantagego.com/
 
 
 

Ep208 Gilbert Harrap CEO InsurX: Building a new Insurance Utility

Today’s guest is well on the way to cracking a problem that has been vexing the market for thirty years and something I have been writing about specifically for the last twenty.
We all know that the process of syndication of risk in the London and other international insurance and reinsurance markets is full of inefficiencies and ripe for reform.
But just because a problem has been around for a long time and has been well documented, it doesn’t make finding and implementing a solution any easier.
I have lost count of the number of insurance and reinsurance exchanges I have seen launch and then wither and die over the last two decades.
Gilbert Harrap, the CEO of InsurX is someone who is setting out to change all of this.
Many exchanges failed either because they were founded by people with little understanding of complex insurance or they alienated their potential users, particularly the brokers, who often rightly or wrongly perceived them as a threat to their businesses.
InsurX is different because Gilbert is someone with market experience who is focusing on building a utility that could help both underwriters and brokers increase volumes and improve margins.
This is a fascinating conversation with someone running a business that has already gained significant traction in two classes of business and is looking to expand across the board.
Gilbert is one of us and I think that’s a big part of why InsurX has been well received. He is laser-focused on helping brokers serve customers better while allowing underwriters to diversify in smart new cost-effective ways.
He doesn’t want to be an underwriter or a broker – he just wants to be the one connecting them using intelligent new methods that add value to both parties.
I really enjoyed my time with Gilbert and left feeling that InsurX might be one of the first exchanges to make it in the complex syndicated risk space.
I also ended this conversation feeling much more optimistic about the future of the London Market and its prospects of increasing its global share of high-quality insurance business.
 
LINKS:We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/

Special Ep David Butler of VIPR: Don't install tech - solve real-world problems

Today’s guest is VIPR’s Client Services Director, David Butler.
On this show I speak to lots of CEOs and that means my guests are sometimes quite far removed from the day-to-day solving of problems for clients.
David’s job is to be as close to the client as possible, finding out what their real problems are and therefore what they really need.
It’s then his job to make sure that what VIPR are providing those customers with is exactly what’s required – and more importantly that customers have all the training and support to make sure they can get the maximum benefit out of a product and can adapt and reconfigure it effectively as their business develops.
All this means is that he probably has his finger closer on the pulse of what is worrying carriers in the market than almost anyone around.
So as the market digitises and looks to analyse the new data pools that it is collecting and apply new technologies like AI at many different points in the value chain, it is people like David who are going to be doing all the heavy lifting.
David is a technology specialist with just under 30 years’ experience and his insights into how to make the most of all the exciting new tech at our disposal or just coming onstream, is hugely valuable.
He’s also a really friendly person who has spent much of that long career explaining complicated ideas in ways that are really easy to understand and that’s why I can heartily recommend a listen today.NOTESI promised to look up what the common computing term BUS stands for:
BUS is an acronym for Binary Unit System. These are used to used to transfer data around a network (a bit like the way a real-life bus moves people about).

Ep207 Scott Egan SiriusPoint: Chasing the 1%

Today’s guest has quickly shown himself to be one of the industry’s most accomplished leaders.
When he took over at SiriusPoint just over 18 months ago he gave the business a clear but tough turnaround plan that he executed quickly.
Now just coming through the other side of a remarkable change in fortunes, he is brimming with confidence and ambition to move the business he runs further up the performance percentiles.
Scott is a very strong communicator and the next forty minutes are packed with very specific ideas, strategies and clear direction.
With someone like Scott, you get the impression that you will always know where you stand and exactly what he expects of you, but the very detailed nature of his responses shows that he also listens extremely carefully to what questions he is asked.
SiriusPoint is very much marching to his beat and he is a very engaging, disarming and direct podcast guest.
LINKS:
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/