The Voice of Insurance

Ep190 Paul Brand, Convex: Execution is everything

Today’s episode is a real treat. That’s because I’m talking to an underwriter with encyclopaedic knowledge and over thirty-five years in the insurance industry.But what makes this interview special is that I am talking to someone with huge experience but very specifically the opportunity to put all that experience into practice for a second time.Paul Brand was Chief Underwriting Officer at Catlin for almost thirty years.Just under five years ago he founded Convex Stephen Catlin, taking over the CEO role in in the summer of 2022.Convex is proof that there’s nothing like knowing what to do and how to do it to help with speed of execution. It took over 30 years to get Catlin group to a GWP of just under $6bn. As Convex approaches its 5th birthday its likely to surpass $4bn in GWP this calendar year. But listening back, this podcast is really about underwriting. It’s about how to be a good underwriter but more importantly how to build and scale an excellent underwriting business. Paul Brand is someone who has spent most of his career outside the limelight and it’s really enjoyable to witness him moving to the centre stage and making his distinctive voice heard.He’s very considered and thoughtful but at the same time full of dry humour.He’s also incredibly generous with his time and highly tolerant of me and my constant questioning. LINKS:We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:https://www.advantagego.com/We also thank our audio advertiser, Aventum GroupPlease contact them on: voi@aventumgroup.com

Ep189 Tom Hoad Howden Ventures: Professionalising Innovation

Innovation is something we all talk about but something that is notoriously hard to do in insurance. That’s hardly surprising because in our industry we prize and incentivise all the things that are the effective opposite of innovative. We reward stable and predictable when, at least at the beginning, most innovative ventures are likely to be highly volatile and unpredictable. And then we wonder why it’s so hard to bring new ideas to fruition in our sector!To be fair to ourselves, in the past few years insurance has started to invest in people who have the word innovation in their job title and whose performance is measured more on whether they can bring the products of the future to market rather than on their initial loss ratios.Tom Hoad, of is one of this select but growing band. He moved to Howden to set up Howden Ventures, which he describes as a vehicle for professionalising innovation. Here Tom is combining seed and venture funding with distribution and the ability to underwrite through the Howden Group’s DUAL underwriting platform.In this almost breathless podcast Tom is hugely energised at the prospect of having all the tools at his disposal to remove the main roadblocks in start-up insurance business’s paths. This is a lively chat with a real expert in innovation and a master of herding the cats of the market behind a common vision.It’s also an episode that I hope will give you a lot of inspiration and make you feel that the London-based insurance ecosystem is in rude good health and highly likely to be the crucible in which many of the insurance products of the future are going to be forged.NOTES:I mentioned I would link to Tom’s first podcast with The Voice of Insurance. Episode 124 is here: https://thevoiceofinsurance.podbean.com/e/ep-124-tom-hoad-innovation-is-really-about-doing-stuff/I also mentioned an episode earlier in the year with DUAL:https://thevoiceofinsurance.podbean.com/e/ep163-richard-clapham-luis-munoz-rojas-of-dual-group-get-the-ham-not-just-the-bone/Tom mentions a Julia at Airmic. Airmic is the UK’s Risk Management trade body and Julia is Julia Graham, its CEO.LINKSWe thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:https://www.advantagego.com/

Ep188 Nick Cook BMS: Pedal Flat to the Floor

Given the nature of the people I talk to on this show, it’s fair to say that most of my guests are moving pretty fast.Well, in a fast-paced industry today’s guest someone who is moving noticeably faster than others. Nick Cook of BMS Group has trebled the size of this broking business in four years.And BMS has just completed a major refinancing deal that will enable it to go even faster.In this breathless podcast we cover the full spectrum of BMS’s strategy and examine the international specialist insurance and reinsurance intermediation landscape in extraordinary detail. It’s great stuff. To keep the momentum going BMS is going to push hard in reinsurance to create a unified global broker with a single point of contact that will be able to challenge the big three in select areas. At the same time it will push even harder in London wholesale and accelerate its acquisition strategy in specialist international retail markets, as well as re-evaluating its MGA proposition. What’s clear from this lively and good-humoured exchange is that Nick’s energy and passion for the job is wholly undiminished since we last spoke two and a half years ago If anything he just seems to be getting started.It’s a real tour de force in which we discuss all aspects of growing a global reinsurance and specialty intermediary. Nothing is off the menu and Nick’s enthusiasm is infectious, so I can highly recommend a listen.NOTES:We discussed BMS’s recently-completed equity financing deal with new investor Eurazeo and existing partners BCI and PCP, as well as the appointment of Emmanuel Clarke as Chairman. The details are here: https://www.bmsgroup.com/news/bms-announces-completion-of-eurazeo-investment-and-appointment-of-emmanuel-clarke-as-chairmanLINKS:We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:https://www.advantagego.com/

Ep187 Alistair Wood CEO Hampden Capital: Selling an improved Lloyd’s product

Today’s guest runs a business that has been a cornerstone of the Lloyd’s market for a generation and has a pedigree that stretches a long way further back than that.Alistair Wood is the CEO of Hampden Capital and also Hampden Agencies, the largest of the Lloyd’s Members’ Agents, with over £2 billion in funds under management. Because Hampden is a dedicated investor into Lloyd’s there is no-one better to talk to if you are trying to understand the best opportunities and the most pressing threats affecting the 300-plus year old marketplace today. This is a really enjoyable conversation, not just because Alistair is one of the Lloyd’s Market’s best analysts whose insights are highly valuable, but more because of the progressive and dynamic nature of the business he is running. A Lloyd’s Members’ Agent is an incredibly traditional business in many ways, but that doesn’t mean Hampden is standing still. Hampden has long been a sought-after adviser to corporate, as well as private capital and its efforts to hep build and promote entirely new routes for investors into the Lloyd’s market are highly innovative and encouraging. In the past Lloyd’s has sometimes been perceived as slow to react to new forms of capital, but now that couldn’t be further from the truth.With listed vehicles, cells in London Bridge 2, Syndicates in boxes, follow Syndicate capacity, or innumerable other structures, wherever there is an opportunity it seems that Hampden and the wider Lloyd’s ecosystem is seeking to make the most of it. Alistair is also a great guest – intelligent and completely on top of his brief but unfailingly polite and good-humoured and completely transparent and direct with his answers. He’s a great blend of all the virtues of the traditional Lloyd’s market with something a little more contemporary. Listen on for valuable tips and nuances and a strong idea of where the market is heading.From our encounter Lloyd’s and the wider wholesale specialty and reinsurance markets seem to be in rude good health. NOTES: With hindsight Alistair felt he had slightly oversimplified Lloyd’s London Bridge 2 structure while trying to explain it in plain English to me. Here’s a link to a fully comprehensive presentation about London Bridge 2 from Lloyd’s itself, so use this for hard reference: https://assets.lloyds.com/media/70d4d759-2ade-4569-b804-d7dcc9fd39b2/An-Introduction-to-London-Bridge-2-PCC-FINAL.pdfLINKS:We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:https://www.advantagego.com/We also thank our audio advertiser, Aventum GroupPlease contact them on: voi@aventumgroup.com

Ep186 Todd Davison & Keir Cox of Purbeck Insurance: Introducing Personal Guarantee Insurance

Normally I interview well-known senior executives in the global insurance industry, often with long and distinguished track records and a public persona within our sector, but today I’m talking to two people who I would expect only a few of the regular Voice of Insurance listeners to know. They’re here because I think what they have achieved to date is interesting and genuinely unique and deserves to be brought to wider attention. Todd Davison (Managing Director – left) and Keir Cox (Director of Operations - right) of UK MGA Purbeck Insurance Services are pioneers in Personal Guarantee Insurance. This is insurance looking to cover the personal guarantees that are often required by financial institutions of directors when lending to small businesses. When I first met Keir and Todd and heard what they are doing I loved the idea.Firstly, that I know of, no-one else is doing this and secondly, this idea goes to the core of what insurance does best. Directors running exciting small business are often put off seeking the finance they need to make their growth plans a reality because of these guarantees that are almost always backed by the equity in their homes. You’ve read too many biographies of successful entrepreneurs if you think everyone wants to take that kind of risk. Meanwhile lenders might lend more if they knew an insurer was aligned with them and had done the additional diligence needed to become comfortable underwriting the risk. Here it’s insurance that is the big economic enabler, helping fast-growing dynamic businesses get the finance they need to drive the economy forwards. I like it when we’re the good guys. So listen on and prepare to be enlightened about a whole new class of business that I’m sure will be a standard product in decades to come. Just remember that you heard it hear first from Keir and Todd.NOTES: Some Abbreviations made it through: PCC is Protected Cell Company – these are used to form captives and ILS vehicles, among other things.API is Application Programming Interface –  Something that connects different computer systems together.Todd and Keir mention Dean Cox and Neil Wadsworth as key figures in the founding of Purbeck.LINKS: https://www.purbeckinsurance.co.ukWe thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:https://www.advantagego.com/We also thank our audio advertiser, Aventum GroupPlease contact them on: voi@aventumgroup.com

Ep185 Paul Bantick, Global Head of Cyber Risk, Beazley: Providing for Cyber growth

Cyber is rightly never far from the news. It’s a class of business that’s only 15 years old, but is already producing annual income in the billions of dollars for many insurers and reinsurers. Today’s guest is Paul Bantick, Global Head of Cyber Risks at Beazley Beazley’s gross cyber income was already well over a billion dollars in 2022 and is still growing strongly into this year on the back of seemingly insatiable demand, despite a near trebling of rate over the last three years. And this is demand that is picking up globally well outside the core market of the US. A lot of the cyber buck therefore stops with Beazley, and so what Paul has to say is really important for the future direction of the market. And we’ve got a huge amount to talk about.Cyber is at a crossroads. Rate has come off recently as underwriters have benefited from the pricing re-set of 2020 to 2022 and posted some very healthy combined ratios. The question now is whether we are going to descend into a difficult-to-comprehend downwards spiral like has happened in D&O or whether core discipline will hold.At the same time Beazley and others have pushed to impose much greater clarity around cyber war coverage, something that has sent waves through the market.In the meantime the work to get reinsurers and capital markets more comfortable with its view of systemic risk and supporting a cyber catastrophe market has continued in earnest with Beazley sponsoring a cyber cat bond - Cairney - at the beginning of 2023, a cover that it has since topped up twice with subsequent issuances. We talk about all this and an awful lot more besides.Happily Paul is really easy to talk to - and easy to follow. So if you want a comprehensive update on the insurance world’s most exciting class of business from one of its best-known lead underwriters, listen on. LINKS:We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:https://www.advantagego.com/
We also thank our audio advertiser, Aventum GroupPlease contact them on: voi@aventumgroup.com

Ep184 Ekhosuehi Iyahen Secretary General of the IDF: Putting valuable insurance knowledge to good use

Often when we go to a conference a CEO will pop up to give us an inspiring pep talk about how nothing good in the world happens without insurance and how our industry is one with a genuinely useful moral purpose that has a positive effect on everything that it touches.We may nod along and then think little more of it. But today’s guest is living proof that those CEOs are right to feel inspired. That’s because Ekhosuehi Iyahen, Secretary General at the Insurance Development Forum’s (IDF) job is to harness the strong purpose of insurance to good effect in some of the countries in the world that can most benefit from it. Insurance is a business that brings together a vast array of different skills from science and engineering to statistics and finance all to try and prevent bad things from happening and to fix them when they do. But our skills and experience around prevention and risk mitigation are often lacking in developing countries that haven’t yet grown sophisticated financial systems and that’s where the IDF comes in, acting as a convener between the insurance industry, the aid community and international sovereign governments and local authorities on the ground. For instance how does a developing country know where to site its critical infrastructure if its country hasn’t been properly modelled for natural hazards? Ekhosuehi is a really interesting and intelligent guest. She’s also a very rare example of an academic of high intellect who has moved from the world of ideas to one of putting theory in practice on the ground.There are a lot of misconceptions to dispel – the first of which is the idea that what the IDF is doing is a form of charity. Nothing could be further from the truth – from this encounter you’ll learn very quickly that the IDF’s work is all about developing the vast new insurance markets of the future – and that these are long-term profitable commercial opportunities that will give rise to even bigger opportunities as they take hold. So listen on – if you have ever felt disillusioned at work and wondered whether what you do makes a difference, what you are about to hear should put a spring in your step.NOTESThe IDF’s website is here:https://www.insdevforum.org/Get in touch via email: info@insdevforum.orgLinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/insdevforum/X (formerly Twitter): @InsDevForumLINKS: We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:https://www.advantagego.com/

Special Ep: The State of (Re)insurance 2023

This Monte Carlo Rendez-Vous was very different from last year’s. Last year it was all about reinsurers and brokers getting the clearest message possible across to buyers that the market was going to re-set in a major way at the first of January 2023. That made it pretty straightforward to report upon – for me or anyone listening to last year’s inaugural reinsurance documentary episode the message was obvious. And then, if the intentions of mortals weren’t clear enough, the insurance Gods chipped in with major Florida landfalling Hurricane Ian only days later. The message may or may not have got through but a huge lack of certainty for buyers was the result. Everyone could see that prices and attachment points had to rise and terms and conditions had to improve, but it was hard to find out specifically what that meant in firm terms from the market until very late in the day. This was traumatic and painful for many and put relationships under an enormous amount of strain. I’m recapping all of this because the trauma of the recent past meant that a reasonable part of this year’s Rendez-Vous necessarily dealt with looking back and trying to heal some of that scar tissue, repair fractured alliances and rationalise some of the changes that were made after everybody had last met in 2022. Reinsurance is a people and trust business and human emotions ran high at 1.1.23 so there was much more of the past tense than you would usually expect from a forward-looking gather such as this. Things are much calmer now and the word you’ll hear most in this podcast is orderly. But only once that pain of 1.1 23 was got out of the way was this a Rendez-Vous where we could look forwards and try to answer some of the big questions looming in 2024: Were the major changes of the-once-and-done variety or was more to come?Or conversely would the favourable reinsurance market conditions replenish appetites and attract new capital that would unleash renewed competitive forces in a way that has happened so many times in the past?Would this allow cedants to begin the slow process of chipping away at what reinsurers had gained at the last renewal? Would anyone be willing to look at selling a product to ease the increased burden on cedants’ earnings?And after a year marked by back-year deterioration, current inflation and painful US court awards, whether Casualty Reinsurance was likely to be subjected to the kind of re-set that had happened to property markets a year earlier?What follows will cover all of this and a lot more besides. My promise to you is that if you weren’t lucky enough to be down on the Med in mid-September, listening to this podcast will be the absolute next best thing to having been there in person, in the room with me as I canvas the views of a very large number key industry figures.Give me the next hour and I’ll give you the State of (Re)insurance.LINKSWe thank our sponsor Stephens Rickard:www.stephensrickard.com

Ep183 Richard Brindle: If you’re good enough, you’re old enough

The Voice of Insurance podcast was very much made with guests like Richard Brindle in mind. A lot of people talk about being independent, but very few live it in the way today’s guest has done. And by that I mean independence of mind, thought and action, sometimes including independence from your reinsurers. Mr Brindle has always spoken his mind but he has also backed up his strong opinions with equally strong conviction and financial support for his views. Today’s market was made for underwriters like him, willing to do deals while others aren’t sure, and able to move quickly and give meaningful support to clients willing to trade on his terms. And now that Fidelis MGU is formally separated from its balance sheet Richard is even more energised and intensely focused on the world’s underwriting opportunities than at probably any time since his early days in Lloyd’s. So we have the ideal guest in an ideal situation, in a fascinating market in a real world that is presenting unique challenges almost daily. The result is one of the best podcast interviews the Voice of Insurance has managed so far. There’s no need to list out everything we talk about because it’s all here. We recorded this down in Monaco on September the tenth. We often moan about the Reinsurance Rendez-Vous in Monte Carlo and whether it is still relevant in the 21st century, but when it throws up opportunities to spend valuable time with some of its most singular industry leaders, it becomes obvious that it is easily worth the effort.If we didn’t have a world forum like this we would surely have to reinvent it, but if we needed to reinvent another Mr Brindle, I’m not quite sure we could. Listen on to see what I mean.
NOTES:Richard mentions Fidelis involvement in the Howden-brokered insurance programme covering the UN-sponsored plan to clean up and secure the FSO Safer supertanker decaying off Yemen’s Red Sea coast.
More information is available from the UN here: https://www.un.org/en/StopRedSeaSpillLINKS:We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:https://www.advantagego.com/

Ep182 Tim Gardner & Bob Bisset Lockton Re: Let revenue take care of itself

I last spoke to today’s guests as part of last year’s The State of Reinsurance Special Episode from Monte Carlo.In that documentary-style podcast I spoke to over 20 people, so a one-on-one with this duo to look more closely at their still relatively young business was long overdue.Tim Gardner (left) and Bob Bisset (right) of Lockton Re have been very busy in the last four years since the project to build a challenger reinsurance broker began in earnest. The business has hired over 300 staff, run through $200mn in revenues and became profitable last year and in this episode we check in on how the reinsurance broker’s expansion plans are progressing.We also take the temperature on this still relatively hot reinsurance market. The result is a very lively and good-humoured encounter. Tim and Bob are buzzing and are clearly enjoying the considerable challenge of building out and scaling a global reinsurance broker. This is a task others have tried and failed to do and if you listen carefully I think you will hear the tiniest sense of relief in Tim’s voice that much of his early vision has been vindicated.I also think that this episode will give you a lot of insight into what Tim and his team are trying to do that is subtly different from some of Lockton Re’s peers. Tim and Bob say that getting the people, culture and capabilities right is the key and if you do that the revenue and profit will take care of themselves. That is to say they are just a byproduct and not the goal in itself. Lots of people say these kinds of things, but rarely have I met an executive team that really sounds like they mean it. So listen on and see if you hear what I hear.
LINKS:We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:https://www.advantagego.com/