The Voice of Insurance

Ep159 James Baird & Paul Richards Co-CEOs Consilium: Do you pass the barbecue test?

Today’s guests are a pair of broking executives clearly relishing an opportunity to lead a business through a period of accelerated growth in a market that is extremely favourable.James Baird (pictured left) and Paul Richards (right) are co-CEOs and Managing Partners of Consilium, the wholesale and specialist insurance and reinsurance broker that is part of the expansive Aventum group. Aventum Group CEO David Bearman laid down a marker back in Episode 82 almost two years ago and it’s worth re-listening to that podcast to put this one into context:https://www.thevoiceofinsurance.com/podcast/episode/33b1d9c1/ep-82-david-bearman-ceo-aventum-dont-walk-into-a-crowded-roomThis encounter is a tour de force. Whilst both James and Paul have worked together for most of their long careers they are relatively new arrivals to the Aventum fold. But you wouldn’t know from listening in here – the two are brimming with enthusiasm for their new home. Consilium already places $500mn of Gross Written Premium and has incredibly ambitious growth targets, but what is refreshing is that we aren’t talking about a familiar tale of private Equity backing, debt leverage, M&A and exit multiples. Here we are only using those terms to define what Consilium isn’t.And that’s what’s so fascinating. Consilium is a young broker with an average age way below that of these two interviewees and this interviewer. It has a progressive mindset on the application of tech in broking, much of which it develops in-house, yet in other ways it is incredibly traditional, balking at debt leverage, external equity investment and M&A for volume. The calculation here is that by growing organically whatever it loses in leverage the broker wins culturally, because it only hires people it feels will fit in and buy into the intermediary’s more stable culture. It also banks on that solid environment being a plus for customers who benefit from continuity of service. It’s definitely different. And with 30% organic growth on the cards, it certainly seems to be doing something right!Listen on for a really interesting and refreshing encounter. James speaks first.NOTES:Some Abbreviations. GL is General Liability and the ULR and ILR are respectively the Ultimate and Incurred Loss Ratios. LINKSWe thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:https://www.advantagego.com/

Ep158 Trevor Carvey CEO Conduit Re: The Cat tide has lifted all the property ships

Today's podcast is slightly shorter than many. At first I was wondering why. but listening back just now it’s actually quite clear. Long conversations come about because there are complicated structures, products and new ventures to explain. Or sometimes it’s because the people I talk to say things that I am not expecting them to say and then we have to spend time clarifying exactly what they mean. With Trevor Carvey CEO of Conduit Re, it isn’t like that. First of all Conduit was founded on the simple premise of being an uncomplicated pure reinsurer and that plan hasn’t changed just because the market has. There are no new platforms or initiatives to dissect here.Conduit is staying true to its original business plan, although better-than-expected market conditions may allow the firm to execute that plan a little quicker than expected. And the relative brevity is also down to Trevor himself. He’s concise and gets to the point and always answers questions head-on and in the most transparent and open way. It’s refreshing and this means that in a short time you can learn an awful lot about the exact state of the reinsurance market and where the best opportunities currently lie within it. There’s a lot of highly valuable detail and strategic insight in here coming from someone whose experience is very difficult to match in the industry today. I highly recommend a listen.LINKSWe thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:https://www.advantagego.com/

Ep157 Killian McDermott Executive Partner POP Holdings: The opposite of the Palo Alto approach

Today’s guest is someone you might not know but I think he is someone you should definitely listen to. That’s because Killian McDermott, Co-Founder & Executive Partner of POP Holdings is someone who is quietly innovating and applying technology and the analysis of data to the business of underwriting. Killian is an insurance professional with a long pedigree and so doesn’t come from the school of insurance disruptors. Indeed he believes that successful insurers have been married to the smart analysis of data since time immemorial and that the term insurtech will eventually have to be retired.He is an insurance person whose career would be typical of many in his peer group and recognisable to all of us, but who has learned to focus on the technology side of the business, not the other way around. What is also fascinating is that, in a world where so much tech innovation is going on in personal lines where numbers are large and premiums very low, his focus is on applying data ingestion and analysis, artificial intelligence and machine learning, digitisation and automation to highly specialist classes of business such as M&A insurance and financial lines. The firm’s ambition is also substantial. Fusion Specialty Insurance and io.insure are the group’s main operating business with licences in many major insurance jurisdictions globally and Killian is targeting a billion dollars of Gross written premiums within five years.So if you want to hear from someone who instead of talking about innovation and insurtech is quietly getting on with making it all a reality, I highly recommend you listen on.LINKSWe thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:https://www.advantagego.com/And our advertiser Bolton Associates:https://www.bolton-associates.co.uk/

Ep156 Duncan Dale, CEO Dale Underwriting Partners: Everything’s better than we planned for

In many ways today’s guest is an archetype of a traditional Lloyd’s Managing Agency business and the lifeblood of the London Market.It’s specialist, not generalist, it’s not too big but not too small. It’s nimble and agile, but also rarely strays from its chosen areas of expertise.And it’s also fiercely independent and supported - but not controlled by - its capital backers. Duncan Dale is CEO of Dale Underwriting Partners, a business in its tenth year of operation that is set to write around $400 million dollars in gross premium in 2023 following a one third pre-emption in its capacity from 2022.We discuss the recalibration in the market following the 1.1 reinsurance renewals, the opportunities this is throwing up and how long these opportunities might last for.We look at the firm’s expansion plans and the continued merits or otherwise of the London Market as a base, the effects of increased inflation on underwriting and we dissect Duncan’s own personal ambitions for the business he founded.But most importantly we get under the skin of a very singular London-headquartered underwriting business with a very clear vision of what it wants to do and where it wants to be. Duncan is on excellent form and I think this podcast proves that these days there is absolutely no such thing as a Lloyd’s archetype. Every market participant has a different approach and a very different philosophy and set of appetites – and I think that bodes very well for the health of the London Market as a whole.LINKSWe thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:https://www.advantagego.com/And our advertiser Bolton Associates:https://www.bolton-associates.co.uk/

Ep155 James Hands CEO Miller: Always looking through a client lens

Todays’ guest is a CEO who has just started in post at one of the London Market’s longest-running independent broking houses. As one would expect James Hands of Miller is full of energy and ideas on how to continue the broker’s impressive run of growth.James is a broker’s broker and our discussion rarely beats around the bush. He tends to get straight to the point. Miller is going to grow organically and by acquisition, but it is going to keep a laser-like focus on client need, culture and playing to the broker’s specialist wholesale insurance and reinsurance strengths. We run through how the tough market is playing out for Miller and its clients, whether third party capital backing has changed the firm’s culture and how the group is reacting the major technological changes that are transforming the way business is done across broad swathes of the market. James is excellent company and gives the impression of an open-minded and pragmatic leader very comfortable with where his business is and where its strategy is likely to be taking it in the future.LINKSWe thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:https://www.advantagego.com/And our advertiser Bolton Associates:https://www.bolton-associates.co.uk/

Special Ep. Risto Rossar CEO of Insly: How no-code software will unleash an age of insurance innovation

Imagine a world where your underwriters can design their own insurance products in front of their eyes. A world where you don’t wait months for developers to come back to show you things they have built that end up bearing no relationship to what you asked them to do. In this world if you don’t like it you can just dump it and start again. And in this world the idea of legacy technology is meaningless- it simply ceases to exist. Here your only development cost is a monthly subscription. Well, it turns out this world is already here and not many of us know about it.I think you can tell from these words that today’s Episode is one that I found incredibly liberating and enlightening to record. I love it when I learn something new, especially when its something I have been hearing other people talk about for a while, but I’ve been too busy or perhaps too embarrassed or scared to ask them to explain it to me. The world of no-code software is one of those things that I’ve been hearing about for a few years, but haven’t really understood in any detail. So it was brilliant to meet Risto Rossar CEO of Insly, which is a business that has been running a no-code platform for the insurance industry for the best part of a decade. Risto is one of us – he’s an insurance guy. His first business was a digital insurance broker he launched around the turn of the millennium. Back then to do this you had to create all the tech yourself because it simply didn’t exist. That firm became very successful in the Baltic States and was sold on.But Risto soon realised he was onto something. Scaling brokers globally was hard but scaling software is a lot easier. He decided his next venture would be a tech business that helped to digitise the insurance sector That is how Insly was born. Now it’s working with 40 carriers and MGAs and around 4,000 brokers from around the world.Listen on for an inspiring conversation with someone who understands that the only way to unleash real innovation is to liberate insurance folk from the need to learn how to code and allow us to get genuinely creative with insurance for the first time in our history. In our discussion we also slay a lot of the myths around other tech buzzwords such as Blockchain and the idea of the moment: Embedded Insurance. Risto is great company and I can highly recommend a listen – you’ll learn a huge amount and hopefully end by feeling inspired and invigorated.LINKSFind out more about Insly here: https://insly.com/en/And connect with Risto here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ristorossar/

Ep154 Richard Watson and Stuart Bridges of Inigo: Curiosity & Hard Work

Today’s Guests are Richard Watson and Stuart Bridges of Inigo This podcast is a really enjoyable encounter wholly because of the unexpected way these two executives decided to conduct themselves.In the build up to an interview like this I usually circulate some sample questions beforehand. This is to get the subjects comfortable and to be able gather their best thoughts before we start recording. But the night before this recording Richard emailed me suggesting that we ditch my list of questions and that he and Stuart should interview me instead. A bit of broking later and we ended up with elements of both ideas. I hope you enjoy it. Listening back it’s definitely something different. But then no-one in the 153 Episodes preceding this interview has ever suggested we do any like this. I think what follows is a great advert for the business Richard, Stuart and their teams are building. The two are different, they’re original and they’re free thinkers who are happy to share their ideas and quite a lot of their own unique personalities. They’re clearly also having the time of their lives running a business that is looking to underwrite in excess of 1.2 billion dollars of premium in its third year, which is, perhaps unsurprisingly, ahead of the original plan.NOTES:Richard speaks first. The abbreviations 10-Q and 10-K are respectively a US-listed company’s quarterly and annual results, as filed to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The figures and letters refer to the statutory forms the companies have to use.LINKSWe thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:https://www.advantagego.com/And our advertiser Bolton Associates:https://www.bolton-associates.co.uk/

Ep153 Ben Hubbard CEO & Co-Founder of Parsyl: Bringing a good kind of naïveté to insurance

Today’s guest is a real insurtech innovator with a story that is all the more remarkable because is bringing cutting edge tech to one of the oldest and most traditional lines of insurance, cargo.Ben Hubbard CEO and co-founder of Parsyl is an insurance outsider, who now finds himself running a Syndicate in the beating heart of the global cargo market – Lloyd’s of London. How did he get there?The other remarkable part of the Parsyl story is that it is unlike other insurtechs, who see fusty old insurance as ripe for disrupting, Parsyl is born from the idea that it is insurance that completes the tech side of the business because it allows economic incentives and enhanced coverage to be offered to customers to make them change behaviour and run their businesses better in the interests of all. So Instead of just selling technology it is also coming to take on a client’s risk – and that is something much more useful.To give you an idea of the firm’s progress and its potential, the business has just announced a strategic partnership with Lineage Logistics, the world’s largest temperature-controlled logistics solutions provider whose customers spend around $500mn a year on cargo insurance.Ben is a really friendly character who has the charisma and empathy needed to succeed in a multi-brokered market and I think his approach shows the way forward for how best to apply technology in the wholesale insurance value chain. So listen on – you may find inspiration for how to adapt Ben’s approach into your own chosen specialist lines.LINKSWe thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:https://www.advantagego.com/And our advertiser Bolton Associates:https://www.bolton-associates.co.uk/

Ep152 Phil Hobbs President & Managing Director at Liberty Specialty Markets: Meeet the $24bn (re)insurer

Today’s guest is Phil Hobbs President & Managing Director at Liberty Specialty Markets. In the past Liberty Mutual businesses used to be run allowing a lot of autonomy and sometimes geographical and operational overlap. But these days Liberty is a business that has undergone a huge amount of work to unify in structure and present much more of a united front globally. And when you hear that Specialty Markets now produces 24 billion dollars of gross written premium, making it one of the largest commercial P&C insurers in the world, you can see why it makes an awful lot of sense to project and leverage that sort of scale out in the marketplace.That’s what makes this such an interesting discussion. When Phil joined Liberty 15 years ago he had a role in the group’s Lloyd’s Syndicate. Now he has a completely global view and only half of the premium he overseas is written in London. And because the business is a buyer and seller of reinsurance and retro, very few other organisations have such a joined up view of the insurance value chain in its entirety and with such breadth and depth. Given the turbulent state of the market Phil’s view is extraordinarily valuable. Here we talk in depth about how the recent reinsurance reset might affect market dynamics in insurance, as well as grappling with the state of play in core London specialty political risk and violence classes, Cyber, resurgent inflation, ESG and the post-pandemic work environment.Phil is very articulate and his calm and easygoing demeanour permeates our exchanges. He is also very good at making very complicated processes and dynamics much easier to understand and that is why I think a listen today will be very well rewarded.LINKSWe thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:https://www.advantagego.com/And our advertiser Bolton Associates:https://www.bolton-associates.co.uk/

Ep151 Rob Schimek Group CEO bolttech: Cooperate to graduate

Todays’ guest is from Insurtech royalty. He’s part of a select club of executives running youthful insurance businesses with valuations exceeding a billion dollars. Bolttech and its Group CEO Rob Schimek have been in a hurry, building technology and a licensed ecosystem that is connecting large companies and their customers, brokers and other intermediaries, carriers and thousands of their insurance products in 30 markets across three continents.It’s done this from a standing start in only 2020 and today billions of dollars of premiums are quoted through the fluid connections that the business facilitates. I’ve been around insurance and technology long enough to know that getting this kind of traction this quickly is something special and that is why I wanted to get Rob on the show. In the last two decades insurance investment graveyards have been filled with big bold ideas like this and I wanted to get to the heart of what Bolttech is trying to do differently. It turns out that far from disruption the firm’s approach is to bring collaboration and flexibility to everything it does. It is also incredibly focused on the hard and unglamorous technical yards of Insurance that many more naïve insurtechs make the mistake of overlooking. Dealing seamlessly with the complex regulatory aspect of distributing thousands of products in different markets, perhaps through unlicensed entities, is an enormous challenge that this business takes just as seriously as the tech side of things.With a very senior insurance career already under his belt Rob really is one of us. So listen on for an idea of what the future of general insurance distribution is going to look like.And if you were ever dying to learn what all the fuss surrounding embedded insurance is really all about, then you have absolutely come to the right place!NOTESA couple of abbreviations smuggled themselves in:OEM = Original Equipment Manufacturer - eg. Samsung for mobile phones.API = Application Programming Interface – ie a way of connecting up different computer systemsLINKSWe thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:https://www.advantagego.com/And our advertiser Bolton Associates:https://www.bolton-associates.co.uk/