The Voice of Insurance

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/

Ep206 Duncan Dale CEO Dale Underwriting Partners: Excited by the Opportunities

Today’s podcast is a real tour de force with the founding CEO of a maturing Lloyd’s market business that is starting to come into its own in its eleventh year of trading.
Fresh from a takeover by blue-chip private equity investor CVC and now boasting a sub-90 percent combined ratio and $450mn in capacity for 2024, Duncan Dale, CEO of Dale Underwriting Partners, is full of confidence and is excited about the opportunities that the Market is currently throwing up for his firm.
In many ways Dale Underwriting partners is a microcosm of the Lloyd’s of the last ten years. The market of the twenty-teens was a difficult one in which to start up, but patience and persistence have finally started to pay off.
The investment by CVC last year was rightly reported as a re-affirmation, not just of Duncan’s business, but of the continued attractiveness of the Lloyd’s platform itself.
This discussion is fun and is a wonderful dissection of the state of the market.
It’s also an underwriting masterclass with a canny trader sharing his long experience and deep understanding of the US casualty insurance and reinsurance market, the discussion and debate of which has been hogging the headlines for most of the last 24 months.
Listen on and hear about the opportunities that are exciting Duncan now that he has grown the underwriting platform and attracted the capital to make the most of them.
NOTES:
When Tom Bolt was at Lloyd’s his job title was Director of Performance Management.
LINKS
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/

Ep205 Serene Davis & James Orchard of QBE: Stars aligning for Innovation

How do you get big, globally diversified insurance companies to innovate? It’s something that we all know is way easier said than done.
That’s what today’s podcast is really all about.
Today I’m joined by two senior executives who are working together to implement change, improve efficiency and do new things at global insurer QBE.
Global Head of Cyber Serene Davis has been tasked with creating a global offering for cyber at QBE, where up to now development has been patchy, with different strategies playing out in various markets across the world.
And CEO of QBE Ventures James Orchard runs a small team whose job it is to assist senior executives like Serene in realising their vision through the partnerships and strategic investments that will build up the tech providers that will help them achieve their goals.
It’s a fascinating conversation and one that embodies QBE’s relatively new CEO Andrew Horton’s plan to imbue a culture of innovation across the group globally.
Indeed Mr Horton may not be on the show himself in this Episode, but his presence never seems to be far from the surface.
It’s clear from this lively chat that if you want to instil change and a culture of innovation you have to lead from the top and you have to resource it and be strong enough to accept that there will be many twists and turns on the road to eventual success.
Listen for yourself – for anyone who is grappling with the challenge of keeping a large insurance business up to speed and relevant, without throwing out the parts of its culture that have already got it to where it is, this will be a valuable listen.
NOTES
I let the abbreviation KPI through. It stands for Key Performance Indicator.
LINKS
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/

Ep204 What do Teenagers Think about Insurance?

Today we’re doing something completely different. We are going to try to look into the future.In this Episode none of the people we are going to talk to are senior insurance leaders. But they might be the insurance leaders of the future. We in insurance know that we’re not likely to be at the top of young people's wish lists when it comes to a future career. But it’s only recently, as we have focused more on talent gaps, that we have started to do something about remedying this problem.That’s where today’s episode comes in. There is a wonderful talent accelerator called Startup Sherpas that goes out and engages with young people via paid work experience cohorts that are funded by industry. These projects, which take a hundred young people each, are called Supersquads.Last summer Allianz, Aviva and the London Market Group (the LMG) sponsored one of these Supersquads and three of today’s guests are graduates of that scheme. Startup Sherpas calls them Sherpees.In that project the Sherpees were asked to come up with ideas to help the Insurance sector better get the attention of young people and make them more likely to think about a career in insurance. The Sherpees came up with a huge number of ideas and these were whittled down to the best, three of which you’re going to hear about today from their creators. Howden Ventures and its insurer innovation partners are sponsoring the next Supersquad and it was the Head of Howden Ventures and recent Voice of Insurance guest, Tom Hoad who was the person who got me involved. Today’s recording happened in the Lloyd’s Lab at a live event I chaired in which the Sherpees pitched their idea to an audience of industry people. I grabbed five minutes with the presenters Chelsea Abili (Bottom left), Amaan Patel (Top Left) and Funta Olenrewaju (Top Right) just before they went on stage. But first I spoke to Dan Wyllie (Bottom Right) Managing Director & Chief Operating Officer at Startup Sherpas to set the scene LINKS: https://startupsherpas.org/Here’s the report that came out of the first Supersquad:https://startupsherpas.org/register-interest-insurance-time-machine-report-2023We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:https://www.advantagego.com/

Ep203 Greg Hendrick Vantage Risk: Best Talent, Best Insights, Best Decisions

Greg Hendrick is a dream guest. He’s smart, incredibly knowledgeable and experienced, but also really easy and fun to talk to. He’s also still only in the fourth year of building out a major insurer, reinsurer and capital markets partner completely from scratch. For Greg and Vantage Risk, time moves a lot faster and experience is accelerated and compressed compared to the rest of us. There’s a huge amount to talk about and that’s why I was delighted to be able to spend so much time talking to him again. Here we catch up on how Greg’s strategy has evolved against plan and get into great detail about the state of the market all the way across the insurance value chain. But I’m glad we also spend a lot of time looking at how technology is shaping the future of underwriting and completely re-organising the way that we all work and interact with our colleagues day to day. After all, not many people get to the chance use all their experience to design a whole new business from scratch following a contemporary Blueprint with no legacy issues to deal with. Greg sounds like he’s really enjoying this opportunity and I think you’ll enjoy it too. NOTES:Greg mentions a Dinos. That is of course Dinos Iordanou, Vantage Risk’s non-executive Chairman.LINKS:We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:https://www.advantagego.com/

Ep202 Kate Markham Hiscox: Do More, Do it Better, Do it Cheaper

Today’s guest has one of the biggest jobs in the London Market.Kate Markham is CEO of Hiscox London Market and the last time we spoke she had just brought her business unit through a remediation strategy that was beginning to bear fruit.Eighteen months later, and the results have been stellar. Today the best are looking to invest and grow and get out on the front foot and lean into the opportunities that a still very strong market has to offer. And this podcast is all about that. This is a business very much looking to the future.Our conversation came about because Hiscox has been one of the first to experiment with artificial intelligence to help speed up and enhance the lead underwriting process and so I wanted to dig right into the detail of what Kate and her teams had done and what the results had been like. So we spend much of this discussion going deep into this and examining where the next steps are going to lead. It’s a very heartening and positive message. Underwriters aren’t going to be out of a job because they will be freed up to add real value in the assessment of risk and to enhance the service that they give brokers and innovate to improve the relevance and quality of the cover that can give their ultimate customers.The emergence of a fully connected digital value chains is also going to make it much easier for a much larger share of world business to access the London Market. After all if underwriters make it really simple to send something to London, and turnarounds are almost instant, why wouldn’t many more brokers seek quotes?Kate is full of energy and enthusiasm and our conversation is fun and rattles along at a fast pace.Kate is also one of those leaders who has the gift of instilling confidence in the people they come in contact with and this podcast put a spring in my step about the quality of the London Market’s future if it can grasp the unique opportunities it is currently presented withI got a lot out of this chat and I think you will too.NOTES:I let the abbreviation D&F get through. It stands for Direct and Facultative and is big-ticket property business.
LINKS:We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:https://www.advantagego.com/

Special Ep Guillaume Bonnissent of Quotech: Solving pain points you didn't know you had

Today’s guest is one of the most remarkable and exceptional people I have had on the show. Guillaume Bonnissent is the CEO of Quotech, a business he founded just over four years ago. With over 20 years in underwriting Guillaume can boast one of the most eclectic resumés of any of his peers.He’s written almost every class going, via almost every distribution channel in the insurance value chain, spanning specialist insurance, treaty reinsurance, portfolio underwriting and an MGA. This gives him a unique perspective on the needs of underwriters of all shapes and sizes, and indeed brokers too.But the really remarkable bit is that he has always been a technologist. He learned coding as part of a business degree and has kept his skills up to date. This meant that when in his last role he was looking for some software that it turned out didn’t exist, he was able to write a prototype version of what he needed himself. The tool worked and he quickly saw the potential for a new software business and Quotech was born. It’s a remarkable story which is really all about giving teams everything they need to do their jobs better. It’s a very rare story of software made by an underwriter for underwriters.In this podcast we’ll certainly learn all about Guillaume’s original inventions, which are being adopted by some very influential market businesses, but we’ll also have a really deep and far-ranging discussion about the long-term consequences of digitisation and artificial intelligence on the insurance value chain.Guillaume is a real London Market original and I found it really easy and fun to talk to him. Listen on and I think you will find it as enlightening and enjoyable as I did.LINKSQuotech https://quotech.io/

Ep201 Natalia Dorfman & James Kench of Kita: Gross Written Carbon

Most of my interviewees are good at using insurance to solve problems, but today’s guests Natalia Dorfman and James Kench of Lloyd’s Lab Alumnus Kita are taking this to a whole new level. This is because the problem Kita wants to help solve is what most would say is the biggest of our generation: Climate change.Kita’s still going to do this by solving client problems and making underwriting profits but it is inventing a whole new class of insurance to do so. Carbon credits are key to the world hitting its 2050 net zero targets, but as a major and highly valuable asset they need high quality insurance to be able to scale up at the speed that is needed if a meaningful positive climate impact is to be made.If we think of a carbon credit in its simplest terms as a physical asset like a forest that has been planted to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, the amount of things that could go wrong is enormous.The trees could burn down or blow over or die from drought, pests or disease. The grower might go bust or run off with your money and not plant anything. Your carbon credit could be nationalised by a foreign government, or it could be wiped out by a change in the methodologies of those who calculate these things or it could just turn out that the trees you have planted might not sequester as much carbon as expected.There’s a lot of moving parts and my example is the simplest of many increasing complex and technical solutions. If we are to make a big dent in climate change we are going to need to scale a currently tiny industry many hundred times so that it grows as big as the Oil and Gas sector is today. That’s where the multiplying effect of insurance comes in. If a project is insured, a fund might be able to buy into three projects instead of one and a bank will be able to lend much more using the same amount of capital. By finding out what could go wrong the hard way Insurance also helps spread best practice and adds another layer of due diligence. Whichever way you look at it, what Natalia and James are building is one of the most exciting new classes of insurance to emerge since cyber. And it’s the good kind – insurance with a strong moral purpose, so any profits can come guilt-free.Natalia and James are really impressive and I think you’ll find this podcast informative and inspiring. Half and hour with these two and you’ll have a spring in your step and you’ll be recommending a career in insurance to every young person that you meet.NOTES:Here’s the link to the report we mention. This is well worth a read: https://resources.oxbowpartners.com/hubfs/202402%20Kita%20%20Oxbow%20Partners%20-%20Gross%20Written%20Carbon%20Report%20(05.02.24).pdfNatalia and James can be contacted at https://www.kita.earth/LINKS:We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:https://www.advantagego.com/

Ep200 Renaud Guidée CEO AXA XL Re: Much more than just a transaction

Today’s guest has just taken over the running of a reinsurance business that, like many other in the sector has been right-sizing and re-focusing its underwriting over the past few years. But now Renaud Guidée and AXA XL Re are clearly out the other side and are looking to grow from their $2.5bn global premium base.In this podcast we focus on the state of the reinsurance market, Renaud’s plans for the business as well as the question of how this reinsurer fits in strategically at one of the world’s largest insurance groups.With executive experience in investment banking and with a challenging AXA Group role already under his belt, Renaud brings a refreshingly broad perspective to our conversation. Renaud combines high intelligence with great charm and you’ll learn a lot from time spent in his company.LINKS:We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:https://www.advantagego.com/

Ep199 Kera McDonald Swiss Re Corporate Solutions: Trendspotting and Avoiding Passivity

Today’s guest has had one of the broadest and most diverse careers of anyone I have interviewed. Today Kera McDonald is the Chief Underwriting Officer of Swiss Re Corporate Solutions but over more than 25 years she has been an actuary and a pensions consultant, a risk manager, an aviation underwriter and a senior executive in an internal audit team. I’d say that unique blend of experience is an excellent preparation for her current role, particularly as Swiss Re Corporate Solutions moves out of its remediation phase into a period of sustainable growth.Kera is direct and easy to talk to and in this podcast we discuss the state of the global insurance market and Corporate Solutions’ strategy within it as well as this unique business’s position within its wider group and the applications of technology and artificial intelligence as the market digitises.She doesn’t duck any difficult questions and is excellent and incredibly well-informed company. I really benefitted from my time with Kera and I think you will too.NOTES: This interview was recorded on 22 February 2023 and so questionsare based on Swiss Re's Q3/9-month 2023 results.
A couple of abbreviations slipped through:PYD stands for Prior Year claims Development.And of course, CorSo is an abbreviation of Swiss Re Corporate Solutions itself..LINKS:We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:https://www.advantagego.com/