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Insurance is a maze. Don’t get lost. Mark Geoghegan asks directions from all the top people in the Global Insurance and Reinsurance Industry
Episodes
Tuesday Mar 12, 2024
Tuesday Mar 12, 2024
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 with
I 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/
Friday Mar 08, 2024
Friday Mar 08, 2024
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.
LINKS
Quotech https://quotech.io/
Tuesday Mar 05, 2024
Tuesday Mar 05, 2024
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).pdf
Natalia and James can be contacted at https://www.kita.earth/
LINKS:
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
Tuesday Feb 27, 2024
Tuesday Feb 27, 2024
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/
Tuesday Feb 20, 2024
Tuesday Feb 20, 2024
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 questions
are 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/
Friday Feb 16, 2024
Friday Feb 16, 2024
Today I’m talking to someone with an incredibly long and varied career at the intersection between science, technology and insurance and reinsurance, on both the broking and underwriting sides of the business.
Now Mike Steel is General Manager of Moody’s RMS and is serving all facets of the industry from an independent perspective.
The legacy RMS business effectively invented the insurance and reinsurance modelling industry and from the evidence that follows, it has been reinvigorated by its acquisition by global ratings agency and data and analytics firm Moody’s.
I often liken the business of modelling to being a precision arms manufacturer when there’s a war on – demand for your products is insatiable. These days as formerly secondary perils become indistinguishable from primary threats and new digital and environmental ones are being created all the time, it is clear that the insurance war is opening up on multiple new fronts.
Being part of Moody’s is giving this business a whole new perspective on the world of risk, as well as far greater operational and financial capabilities to help measure and analyse those risks.
This could manifest itself in developing new products for non-insurance financial institutions and governments, or trying to codify Environmental Social and Governance factors in a format that the insurance industry can easily adopt.
What follows is a fascinating run through of what is in Mike’s very varied inbox.
It is important and valuable work that is going to keep Moody’s RMS and Mike very busy for decades to come.
Near the end of this Podcast I remark that Mike has a really interesting job.
And after a listen to this episode, I’m pretty sure you’ll agree
LINKS:
https://www.rms.com/
Tuesday Feb 13, 2024
Tuesday Feb 13, 2024
Today’s guest is Tom Clementi, CEO of UK Government-backed terrorism reinsurer, Pool Re.
Now over thirty years old, Pool Re has been through a lot of recent changes that have reflected its growing maturity.
It has been classified as a Central Government Organisation by the Office for National Statistics and the UK Cabinet Office designated it as an Arm’s Length Body of the UK Treasury.
To add to that formalisation, which reflects its public role and unlimited State guarantee, Pool Re is moving from its tariff-led facultative reinsurance structure to a more sophisticated treaty relationship with its members.
Add to this the heightened sense of geopolitical risk in the world in 2024 and new UK legislation around safeguarding against the terror threat and Tom and I have lot to talk about.
This is a really lively discussion that covers the state of the global terrorism market, a frank assessment of the UK’s terror threat and Pool Re’s continued role in making and growing a private market well-funded enough to relieve pressure on the strained public purse.
Tom’s a great guest and his insights will give anyone wondering how successful public-private partnerships can be fostered a lot of excellent pointers.
NOTES:
We mentioned the UK Cyber Monitoring Centre. The recent Episode with James Burns has all the details:
https://thevoiceofinsurance.podbean.com/e/ep192-james-burns-cfc-classifying-cyber/
LINKS:
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
We also thank our audio advertiser, Aventum Group
Please contact them on: voi@aventumgroup.com
Tuesday Feb 06, 2024
Tuesday Feb 06, 2024
Today’s guest is Robert Wiest CEO of MS Re.
After a long and distinguished career in both insurance and reinsurance, much of which was spent at Swiss Re, Robert took on his latest role in September 2022.
With prominent career roles in both P&C and Life - in Europe and Asia Robert is an extremely well-travelled and well-rounded professional and this broad experience shines through in the podcast.
Robert is comfortable on any subject and he’s the sort of person with whom anyone could strike up a rapport.
MS Re has rebranded and re-set the image it wishes to project out into the market and because of that we talk a lot about this mid-sized reinsurer’s strategy, appetites and growth plans.
It’s clear from this meeting that the business has a strong idea of how to differentiate itself and maximise the benefits of the fertile reinsurance markets of 2024.
But we also talk in detail about long-term big-picture topics as far-ranging as market digitisation artificial intelligence and how the industry should be attacking the problem of insuring the transition to net zero.
Robert’s definitely one of us and is very generous with his insights.
Listening back this encounter is packed with the learnings of a distinguished career and buzzes with the energy of someone with unambiguous ideas and lots of experience combined with the time and clear opportunity to execute upon them
Robert’s clearly enjoying his new role and I think you’ll really enjoy this episode.
NOTES:
We mention Charlie Goldie, MS Re’s CUO.
Charlie features in the State of (Re)insurance 2023 Episode: https://thevoiceofinsurance.podbean.com/e/special-ep-the-state-of-reinsurance-2023/
LINKS:
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
We also thank our audio advertiser, Aventum Group
Please contact them on: voi@aventumgroup.com
Friday Feb 02, 2024
Friday Feb 02, 2024
Today’s episode showcases a really important advancement in the provision of technology to the insurance industry.
Back in the early days of computerisation we installed different systems in our businesses to do different jobs. We didn’t expect them to talk to each other. And because each was made of proprietary tech – they almost certainly didn’t.
Nowadays we want systems to ingest data sources and the output of other systems and we expect these new outputs to be easily ingestible further down the chain by our own suppliers and all the different departments of our business as well as regulators and other essential third parties.
Common standards and modern connectivity are allowing this to happen.
I suppose this is the difference between computerisation and digitisation.
But this begs a change in the way technology providers go about their business. Either they will try to be all things to all people and produce their best attempts at solving every problem and answering every question that the insurance industry is trying to answer, or they will have to be more realistic and pragmatic.
In a world brimming with excellent providers of increasingly specialist solutions, many are realising that the best outcomes for customers are going to come about when they are provided with a wide array of choice and ease of operation.
A customer should be able to run different tools on the same platform without having to become an expert in plugging them all together themselves. Tech providers should be doing this for them and making their lives easy.
There should also be the possibility of choosing between different competing options for certain tasks.
This strategy is called an ecosystem approach and it is what we are going to be getting deep into today.
To help us I spoke to Ian Summers Global Business Leader of AdvantageGo and Jeff Cohen who is a Senior Vice President at Zywave.
Ian and Jeff are vastly experienced in their fields.
Ian is the architect of the AdvantageGo ecosystem idea and Zywave is a core member of this affiliation.
You absolutely don’t have to be a techie to find this discussion useful and Ian and Jeff are really approachable and good at explaining things to laypeople like me.
Half an hour with these two and I guarantee you’ll be excited about the possibilities that a genuinely digitised insurance world are going to open up for all of us, not least in a brave new AI-enabled world.
NOTES AND ABBREVIATIONS:
We mentioned ISO, which is the Insurance Services Office.
API is Application Programming Interface.
ECF is the Electronic Claims File used in the London Market.
LINKS:
Learn more about AdvantageGo’s ecosystem here:
https://www.advantagego.com/ecosystem/
Expect more additions as time progresses.
Tuesday Jan 30, 2024
Tuesday Jan 30, 2024
Today’s guest is a big personality in the UK insurance sector who has been working in and around our industry for almost 25 years.
After a working as an insurance lawyer, an ombudsman, a consultant and a Director at the Chartered Insurance Institute Melissa Collett brings a really well-rounded level of experience to her current role as the inaugural CEO of Insurtech trade body Insurtech UK.
In this podcast we talk about why Insurtech UK has been set up and what items are top of its agenda.
There’s a huge amount going on. The UK’s Insurtech scene is the largest outside of the US and the body already has a hundred active members.
There’s a lot to lobby on, from the speed and effectiveness of regulation to the many unfair quirks of the UK tax regime.
There are also Government grants to help distribute and international agreements to be struck.
Melissa is incredibly busy.
But Insurtech UK is a very broad church and is trying to be quite a lot more than a lobby group representing members’ interests. It wants to be a club or an ecosystem that convenes Insurtechs, investors, service providers and incumbents to further the goal of fostering innovation in UK insurance via technology.
Melissa is incredibly enthusiastic and bursting with energy and drive. I really enjoyed my time with her and I think you will too.
After half an hour you’ll certainly be in no doubt as to what Insurtech UK is all about and how you can get involved.
LINKS:
https://insurtechuk.org/
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
We also thank our audio advertiser, Aventum Group
Please contact them on: voi@aventumgroup.com
Tuesday Jan 23, 2024
Tuesday Jan 23, 2024
As CEO of Beazley, Adrian Cox runs one of our sector’s fastest-moving and best-rated insurance businesses and so any time I can get him behind a microphone and talking to me is time well spent.
In the past year this firm has pioneered the placement of cyber cat bonds, undergone a major restructure with the formation of a US excess and surplus lines insurance company and made the most of the new opportunities being thrown up in North American property by more than doubling its underwriting volume there.
In this podcast we talk about all these and an awful lot more.
Adrian is excellent company and exudes the kind of confidence that senior brokers complain that they sometimes find lacking in the modern insurance and reinsurance market.
In our talk we get a clear sense of Adrian’s insurance philosophy
Here is someone with a clear way of understanding the insurance world and the confidence and authority to go and execute when he feels the time is right.
Given the rare series of opportunities the global market is presenting brave and decisive underwriters in 2024, I can highly recommend a detailed listen.
NOTES
Adrian mentions Lloyd’s and now Beazley itself as being ‘A-fifteen’ in size. This a reference to AM Best’s fifteen-point Financial Size Category scale.
XV is the largest size, denoting Capital and Surplus of $2bn or more.
LINKS
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
We also thank our audio advertiser, Aventum Group
Please contact them on: voi@aventumgroup.com
Thursday Jan 11, 2024
Thursday Jan 11, 2024
Today’s podcast carries on where we left off after the State of the Reinsurance Market Special Episode which was released after the Monte Carlo Rendez-Vous of 2023.
At Monte Carlo what everyone said they wanted after the great re-set of a year ago was orderliness.
Buyers and sellers alike wanted a period of rational calm after the storm which could be used to clear some of the debris and to rebuild strained relationships.
And calm and rationality is what everybody got.
Reinsurance capital, profitability and crucially, confidence all recovered and we ended with a largely flat renewal overall.
The aim of this podcast is to see how this bodes for the year ahead and the longer-term strategic direction of the reinsurance market for those who work with it, buy from it and invest in it.
The big question is how long can the good times last for the newly-re-set and now highly profitable reinsurance world?
Have reinsurers hauled themselves up to a peak, only to start sliding quickly down the other rockface, or have they scaled up the side of a ridge onto a new highly profitable plateau upon which they will stay encamped for as long as they can?
To help me answer this, I have been able to speak to representatives from three of the top four reinsurance broking groups.
David Priebe, Chairman of Guy Carpenter (pictured left) and James Vickers Chairman of Gallagher Re International (middle) are two of the longest-serving senior executives in the business and David Flandro Head of Industry Analysis and Strategic Advisory at Howden Tiger (right) is one of the sector’s longest-tenured analysts.
They have all been providing insightful commentary on the industry for longer than I have been an insurance journalist and I have been interviewing them all for almost 20 years.
I really had fun with these three interviews and the subsequent time spent blending this highly accomplished and eloquent trio’s thoughts together.
It was a bit more work that usual, but I think it’s good value-added exercise and I hope you find it as useful as I did.
NOTES
Here are links to the reports and commentary I mentioned:
Howden Tiger - A New World
https://www.howdengroupholdings.com/sites/g/files/mwfley1156/files/2023-12/a-new-world-2024.pdf
Gallagher Re – What a Difference a Year Makes
https://www.ajg.com/gallagherre/news-and-insights/2024/january/what-a-difference-a-year-makes/
Guy Carpenter - January 1, 2024 Reinsurance Renewals Reflect a Motivated Market with Increasing Capital
https://www.guycarp.com/company/news-and-events/news/press-releases/january-2024-renewals.html
David Flandro mentioned Charlie Goldie, CUO of MS Re. He appeared prominently in both the 2022 and 2023 Monte Carlo Special Episodes – check the 2023 one out here:
https://thevoiceofinsurance.podbean.com/e/special-ep-the-state-of-reinsurance-2023/
ABBREVIATIONS
WACC = Weighted Average Cost of Capital
TIV = Total Insured Values
SPONSOR
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
Friday Jan 05, 2024
Friday Jan 05, 2024
Today’s guest is Paul Templar, CEO of insurance technology solutions specialist VIPR.
VIPR started out in the London Market 14 years ago and it’s best known for providing software solutions to the endless administrative problem of the ingestion and checking of data in the Delegated Authority (DA) space.
And this goes right to the heart of what Paul and I are going to talk about today.
This year is highly significant for carriers writing Delegated Authority business in the London Market because DDM – the system that they use to process this business into Lloyd’s - is going to be retired in September.
LIMOSS - the not-for-profit body in charge of sourcing and operating common services for the London Market has confirmed the change.
So, in just under nine months, a method of underwriting that produces around 40% of London Market premiums is going to take a big step into the unknown.
There is an awful lot at stake and a huge amount of work has to be done between now and the autumn.
And that’s why I am really grateful to have Paul as an expert guide through this potential maze.
Paul is a great ambassador for his company and the wider market and I can’t think of a better-qualified advisor as the market transitions from a centralised service model to one that is likely to be driven by data standards.
NOTES:
DDM is an abbreviation of Delegated Data Manager. It traces its origins back to the DA Sats system.
LIMOSS stands for London Insurance Market Operations & Strategic Sourcing
LINKS:
https://viprsolutions.com/
Tuesday Dec 19, 2023
Tuesday Dec 19, 2023
Today’s guest has just become the CEO of a business writing over $7 billion in gross premium a year, which if it were a standalone company, would make her one of the most powerful female CEOs in the global insurance industry.
This is a major business unit that has been through a substantial amount of change and re-focusing of strategy in recent times, but which is now well placed to resume profitable growth as favourable market conditions continue.
The business is QBE North America and the executive is Julie Wood.
Julie has an insurance career in its third decade with senior management experience in broking as well as underwriting.
This gives her a well-rounded perspective on all facets of our industry and means that our discussion spans a broad spectrum of what is happening in the North American insurance market as well as everything that QBE is doing to maximise its opportunity there
Julie is really engaging and down-to-earth and has a very approachable manner which helps fill this podcast full of insights and candid exchanges.
So if you are looking for a detailed update on the largest insurance market in the world from an important and dynamic participant in that market, I can highly recommend a listen.
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
We also thank our audio advertiser, Aventum Group
Please contact them on: voi@aventumgroup.com
Tuesday Dec 12, 2023
Tuesday Dec 12, 2023
We tend to take the institutions that serve our industry for granted. It almost seems that the hundreds of industry trade and standards bodies have always been there.
So that’s why this episode is so interesting.
Today’s guest is working on setting up the world’s first cyber loss classificatory body that from 1.1.2024 will serve the UK insurance and reinsurance industry and the wider UK society that it is supporting.
We don’t do this very often so my chat with James Burns, Head of Cyber Strategy at UK-headquartered cyber and specialist MGA CFC is a unique chance to be in on the ground floor as an industry leader seeks to solve an emerging problem in the risk landscape.
The cyber world and its insurers need be able to classify the severity of the systemic loss events that it is facing if they going to be able to continue to grow and fufill the needs of customers and society as a whole.
But just how do you go about creating a pan-industry pan-societal body with a mission to work in the best interests of all?
James’s answers to this question are fascinating. His expertise and gravitas, mixed with optimism and idealism are a highly effective and infectious combination.
So if you are feeling jaded and thinking that what insurance does is sometimes a little uninspiring I can highly recommend a listen.
This is an Episode to remind you that our industry is absolutely essential for solving some of the biggest problems of our age.
LINKS:
The Cyber Monitoring Centre doesn't have a website yet
But James is happy to be contacted by anyone looking to get involved. Here is a link to a very well-circulated article he posted to LinkedIn. You can connect to him via his profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/solving-systemic-risk-cyber-markets-number-one-priority-james-burns%3FtrackingId=poupsOrSSTOlgB8stV6E4g%253D%253D/?trackingId=poupsOrSSTOlgB8stV6E4g%3D%3Dhttps://www.linkedin.com/pulse/solving-systemic-risk-cyber-markets-number-one-priority-james-burns%3FtrackingId=FADb4wFXTYaPoFKgLIEjHw%253D%253D/?trackingId=FADb4wFXTYaPoFKgLIEjHw%3D%3D
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
We also thank our audio advertiser, Aventum Group
Please contact them on: voi@aventumgroup.com
Tuesday Dec 05, 2023
Tuesday Dec 05, 2023
Today’s guest is a well-known and respected senior underwriter with a career going back forty years.
Simon Bird, Group Executive Underwriter and Active Underwriter of Brit Insurance’s Syndicate 2988, is someone who I’d heard of thirty years ago when I was a broker, but I only ended up meeting him twenty-nine years later.
Regular listeners will have heard his wise contributions to the last two Monte Carlo State of Insurance and Reinsurance episodes.
The rushed timetable of Monte Carlo made me wish that we could have a longer and more relaxed meeting to be able have far more detailed and nuanced conversation.
And here it is. This is another vintage episode with someone who has spent a generation leading carriers through markets, variously benign, indifferent, soft, hard and completely dislocated.
Very few people can put today’s market and the issues of our times into the kind of context that Simon can.
But of course Simon isn’t some kind of museum piece or insurance and reinsurance historian, he is a hands-on underwriting leader who is very much in touch with the market.
He is also great company and his insights and thoughts on topics as far-ranging as Ai to the structure of the syndicated insurance marketplace are highly original and valuable and I can highly recommend a listen.
LINKS:
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
We also thank our audio advertiser, Aventum Group
Please contact them on: voi@aventumgroup.com
Tuesday Nov 28, 2023
Tuesday Nov 28, 2023
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 Group
Please contact them on: voi@aventumgroup.com
Tuesday Nov 14, 2023
Tuesday Nov 14, 2023
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.
LINKS
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
Tuesday Nov 07, 2023
Tuesday Nov 07, 2023
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-chairman
LINKS:
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
Tuesday Oct 31, 2023
Tuesday Oct 31, 2023
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.pdf
LINKS:
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
We also thank our audio advertiser, Aventum Group
Please contact them on: voi@aventumgroup.com
Tuesday Oct 24, 2023
Tuesday Oct 24, 2023
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:
www.purbeckinsurance.co.uk
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
We also thank our audio advertiser, Aventum Group
Please contact them on: voi@aventumgroup.com
Tuesday Oct 17, 2023
Tuesday Oct 17, 2023
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 Group
Please contact them on: voi@aventumgroup.com
Tuesday Oct 10, 2023
Tuesday Oct 10, 2023
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.
NOTES
The IDF’s website is here:
https://www.insdevforum.org/
Get in touch via email: info@insdevforum.org
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/insdevforum/
X (formerly Twitter): @InsDevForum
LINKS:
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
Tuesday Oct 03, 2023
Tuesday Oct 03, 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.
LINKS
We thank our sponsor Stephens Rickard:
www.stephensrickard.com
Tuesday Sep 26, 2023
Tuesday Sep 26, 2023
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/StopRedSeaSpill
LINKS:
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
Tuesday Sep 19, 2023
Tuesday Sep 19, 2023
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/
Tuesday Sep 05, 2023
Tuesday Sep 05, 2023
Today’s guest is exactly the right person to have on the show at exactly the right time.
The reinsurance world is about to head down to Monaco for its annual global Rendez-Vous.
So ahead of that, speaking to the CEO of the reinsurer that according to AM Best is now the second largest writer of gross non-life reinsurance premium in the world, producing almost $26bn in P&C top line, has got to be a good call.
A business of that scale has visibility into every nook and corner of the insurance value chain.
So I am delighted to be welcoming Jean-Jacques Henchoz CEO of Hannover Re back to the podcast.
But not just because of Hannover Re’s scale and strategically important position in the market, but also because of its, and Jean-Jacques’, straightforward approach to communication.
Hannover Re is a massive player but it has always spoken to the market in a very direct style that has always struck me as being far more intimate and approachable than its more formal peers.
I think that reflects the down-to-earth, no-nonsense nature of this still fast-growing and high performing business and it makes for a very valuable listen.
From this conversation I think we can expect a much less dramatic and far more stable renewal season than the radical and revolutionary one we have just had.
Jean-Jacques calmly answers all my questions, with no omissions or deviations and exudes all the smarts, coolness, stability and continuity that all cedants are really buying into when they seek out a major reinsurer like Hannover Re’s support.
In fact I don’t think I have met a CEO yet who better personifies his company’s brand.
LINKS:
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
Friday Sep 01, 2023
Friday Sep 01, 2023
Today’s guest is an insurance technology entrepreneur with a great story to tell.
Arun Balakrishnan started his career at sea but went back to business school, became an internet entrepreneur and ended up captaining Berkshire Hathaway’s foray into the Indian insurance market.
Ten years ago he founded Insurance technology firm Xceedance and the growth has been rapid.
But that’s just a bit of background because the main purpose of today’s podcast is to talk about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and in particular the generative AI that has exploded onto the world’s consciousness in the past six months.
When something has been this hyped having someone like Arun on the show is an absolute godsend.
Arun is a great explainer and first helps educate me about what the terms bandied around in AI really mean.
Then we start to get to work on decoding what the best applications are going to be in the insurance world.
This is fascinating stuff and we soon get down to the fundamentals of what machines and humans are really best at.
I won’t spoil anything by saying that the humans in insurance really shouldn’t worry about being made redundant by this new technology – there are some things that AI can’t do well, and even if it could, we probably wouldn’t want it to do them for us.
This is far more about improved accuracy and vastly increased productivity. Arun says we should think of it a bit like being allocated a smart intern, apprentice or an indefatigable underwriting assistant.
Arun is a great teacher and I can highly commend this episode to anyone feeling bewildered or daunted as to how to start to engage with this exciting new technological development
NOTES, ABBREVIATIONS AND FURTHER READING
Arun mentions Word2Vec, which comes from ‘word to vector’, a technique whereby words are transformed into a numerical representation – ie. a vector, and is at the heart of the development of this new form of Artificial Intelligence.
Another concept mentioned and worth reading up about further is Zero-Shot classification, which is all about creating a tool that can do a job that it hasn’t been specifically trained to do. An example might be for the AI to have learned a lot about football and then use this insight to classify an article about basketball, upon which it has never been trained.
LINKS & CONTACT
https://xceedance.com/
As Arun said, you can contact him directly on arun@xceedance.com
Tuesday Aug 29, 2023
Tuesday Aug 29, 2023
The older we get the more we lament the passing of the great personalities in the marketplace. Over an after-work drink we tend to reminisce about the entrepreneurial characters of old and how we wish there were more of their kind today. I know I do.
Well, today’s guests are proving that this is a myth caused by old age because they are some of the most singular insurance people I have had on the programme to date.
Craig Kingaby CEO of Meridian (Left) and Mark Heath CEO of Acies MGU (Right) both have vast London market and international insurance and reinsurance experience but what the Meridian business are trying to achieve is something different and a little special.
For instance, they are trying to build a London-based diversified specialist insurance group, but one that is almost sitting outside the market.
They have big growth plans and are moving fast but are doing so because the opportunity is in front of them, not because they have to satisfy the ambitions of impatient investors and hit target numbers.
They don’t have an eye on an exit, but instead on building a generational business which will stop growing if it ever hits conflicts that might affect its clients.
They are largely self-funded and wholly management controlled and they have even decided to spend a lot of time building their own technology platform.
I told you that they’re a bit different.
They’re also ideal interviewees because they can sign off on their own quotes.
So what follows is one of the most frank exchanges about how to build a differentiated broking and MGA business I have ever had.
This is a duo that has spent decades learning how things should and shouldn’t be done and becoming experts in the insurance game – the thing is that now they have decided to play their own game.
Craig and Mark are great communicators and I think they are onto something interesting, so listen on for a very refreshing and challenging chat about what this new game is all about.
Mark speaks first.
NOTES:
Craig mentions a Marcus at insurance placement platform, Whitespace. That’s Marcus Broome, its chief platform officer.
LINKS:
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
Friday Aug 04, 2023
Friday Aug 04, 2023
Today’s guest is someone pretty unique for our sector because he’s a software engineer who became a senior actuary and then founded his own insurance-focused technology business.
Amrit Santhirasenan, Co-founder and CEO at hyperexponential’s story is a classic of the entrepreneurial genre:
Frustrated with a lack of an insurance-specific decision-making platform to bring together underwriters, actuaries and the exponentially growing datasets that an increasingly digital world is producing, Amrit decided to build his own.
The longer I am around, the more I find that an unorthodox combination of skills and experience often unlocks extra value and Amrit is a great example of this.
He’s also not a stereotypical actuary because, amongst his many talents, he has the sort of communications skills that would put many top brokers to shame.
So this podcast is an incredibly eloquent summing up of hyperexponential’s business model and a wider and very detailed examination of the state of insurance today.
Ironically you could argue that underwriters and actuaries used to work closer together until technology started to get in the way.
Amrit is on a mission to bring back a much tighter feedback loop between the actuaries who interrogate the data to uncover insights and the underwriters who have to take those insights and turn them into decisions out in the real world.
Pricing is at the intersection of all the most exciting things that are happening in insurance today – it’s where data, brain power and market savvy all come together to try and give carriers an edge over their competitors.
Amrit’s great company and a dream guest, so technologists and technophobes alike do listen on as we set the world to rights.
You certainly don’t need any tech knowledge to get the benefit of Amrit’s insights.
LINKS:
www.hyperexponential.com
Tuesday Aug 01, 2023
Tuesday Aug 01, 2023
Today’s guest is someone with a fascinating story to tell.
Today Antony Erotocritou is the CEO of Ardonagh Specialty but he has ridden the Ardonagh story all the way from its origins in the debt-for-equity swap for troubled UK retail consolidator Towergate in 2015.
Ardonagh has since been on a journey to build its specialty and international operations, which included 2021’s transformational deal to buy the newly-formed Corant Global Group, comprising the brokers Ed and Besso.
The organic and inorganic investment continues at high speed. Over the last eight years, perhaps the only part missing from this story has been a clear narrative from the broking group itself. It has given the impression that it is too busy with its head down to worry about what others might think of it.
Ardonagh seemed happy to leave a vacuum that many of its peers have been eager to exploit.
It’s fair to say that media coverage of the group in the past few years has been chequered, with as many negative stories of team defections as positive ones around new hires or acquisitions.
Well, this podcast gives me the sense of being the start of the group getting out on the front foot.
Ardonagh Specialty has consolidated its many brands into Price Forbes and Bishopsgate and Antony has a very positive growth story to tell.
As a former CFO he is absolutely on top of the numbers and strategy and we have a very detailed discussion about the economics of scaling up an expansive broking platform.
He’s excellent company and as someone who arrived to rectify one of UK broking’s most serious mis-steps, here is someone who knows in great detail how expansion should not be done.
Here we learn how he thinks it should be done properly and given his unique experience, it’s really worth hearing him out.
There’s a lot to learn and plenty of myths to be exploded.
LINKS:
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
Tuesday Jul 25, 2023
Tuesday Jul 25, 2023
Today’s guest is someone I should have had on the show a long time ago, but I’m really glad has finally got an episode to himself.
Tony Ursano is the Managing Partner and Co-founder of Insurance Advisory Partners and is someone who has been right at the top of deal-making in our industry for more than three decades.
With roles at blue-chip firms on Wall Street and at Insurance brokers, he’s one of the few people who really excels at making the connection between the insurance industry and the global investment community and has had a hand in a large proportion of the most significant M&A transactions of the last 20 years.
Because of this he is a fount of knowledge and is someone whose counsel and analysis it is always worth seeking out.
For example if I ask:
What will it take for investors to come back to reinsurance in significant volumes?
Will higher interest rates take the shine off broker valuations?
Or whether the boom in MGAs will run out of steam?
With Tony I know I am going to get straight answers and a real feel for where the market is headed that comes from direct and constant experience. He’s also now his own boss and that independence just seems to make it easier for him to speak his own mind.
In this discussion I asked all these questions and a lot more besides, and I wasn’t disappointed. And neither will you be.
I’ve interviewed and chaired Tony many times over the years and I think our easy and good-humoured rapport comes across clearly in this conversation.
So, sit back and get ready for a vintage episode with a real market player.
Whether a buyer or seller - or a business looking to raise debt or equity finance or an investor looking for good opportunities in the insurance sector, Tony one is of the first people I’d advise anyone to call.
NOTES:
I let an abbreviation through. It was SaaS, which stands for Software as a Service.
LINKS:
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
Thursday Jul 20, 2023
Thursday Jul 20, 2023
Today’s guests are Paul Templar CEO and Sebastian Prosser, Head of Account Management at insurance technology solutions specialist VIPR.
VIPR started out in the London Market 14 years ago. From day one its core offering was to provide a software solution to the endless administrative problem of the ingestion and checking of data in the Delegated Authority (DA) space.
With around 40% of the business at Lloyd’s transacted this way, it started life in a very fertile environment that was drowning in a mass of spreadsheets, emails and stray documents.
Today it has grown enormously to be the largest player in this segment with over 400,000 bordereaux processed annually relating to around £5 billion of gross premium.
This business is at the real coal face of digitisation in our industry and its development is following a ruthless logic: If you can ingest, verify and cleanse insurance data on a large scale, the next step is to start to analyse that data and gain genuine insights into the business you are writing.
And once you can do all this you can also speed up the process of onboarding new partners from a compliance perspective.
My chat with Paul and Seb comes as VIPR is making large strides internationally into the US and European markets on the back of significant new blue-chip investment.
With digital initiatives gaining traction and prominence all over the insurance world it’s an exciting time for the market and for VIPR.
Here we talk about the prospects for a far more efficient, digital and data-driven marketplace, the world of insurance software ecosystems and the exciting expansion opportunities opening up for VIPR and its clients.
Paul and Seb are great company and I recommend this episode to anyone looking to learn how to climb the first rung of the digital ladder.
NOTES
Naturally we mention DA a lot. That’s the abbreviation for Delegated Authority.
There is also TPA, which stands for Third Party Administrator (usually for claims).
LINKS
https://viprsolutions.com/
Tuesday Jul 18, 2023
Tuesday Jul 18, 2023
Today’s guests are Warren Downey Group CEO and Lee Anderson, Group Deputy CEO of UK-headquartered intermediary Specialist Risk Group (SRG).
Warren was last on the show as part of two very early Special Episodes that SRG sponsored over three years ago.
Back then SRG was just about to get a new private equity backer in the form of HGGC. Since that change of ownership the growth has been impressive, with SRG increasing its intermediated premium threefold via a combination of organic and inorganic growth.
So far this makes SRG sound like it is treading a well-worn path of PE-backed consolidation, but that would be to fundamentally misunderstand what Warren and Lee are trying to do with this singular organisation.
SRG is a fast-growing broking and MGA platform with very high ambitions, but it is in no way a conventional scale-up play on the hunt for market leverage and cost removal.
SRG is best described as a growing collection of very specialist businesses that are all operating in niches where it is the depth of its specialist knowledge and relevance to very specific markets and not its scale that allows it to compete.
Warren and Lee are a brilliant double act and this is a fascinating and fun insight into a broking group that is building something intentionally different and going out of its way to do unexpected and surprising things.
From being agnostic about channels to market, doing M&A differently, running a shadow board or giving staff access to accelerated management programmes and share ownership, there is a huge amount to admire in what this duo is trying to achieve.
So listen on – Warren and Lee talk about preferring to show people what they have already done as opposed to telling them what exciting, but as yet unexecuted, plans they have for the future and this podcast is full to the brim of excellent examples.
And on a personal note I don’t think I have had a more fun, lively and down-to-earth duo on the podcast in a very long time – the time will fly by.
NOTES:
Warren refers to growth to 600 million in premium volume.
That’s in £ pounds, or $785mn in US Dollars.
LINKS:
SRG’s website is here: www.specialistrisk.com
You can contact Warren Downey at Warren@specialistrisk.com
Tuesday Jul 04, 2023
Tuesday Jul 04, 2023
Today’s guest is Chris Killourhy, Managing director of QBE Re.
The reinsurance market has been through some comprehensive changes in the last 12 months and so has QBE Re.
In this podcast we delve right into the evolving appetites and re-vamped strategy at this well-respected medium-sized reinsurer.
In the past QBE Re was viewed as a highly competent and nimble trader in the markets in which it operated.
Today it is evolving into a player that is looking to become a long-term across-the-board partner for the right kind of cedant.
Chris hopes that this strategy will deliver a growing, balanced portfolio and a more predictable and less volatile level of earnings than in the past.
Chris is a qualified actuary and has had a really varied career to date, which has already included multiple roles within the wider QBE group.
But, unlike the apocryphal actuary to be found as the butt of hundreds of insurance jokes, he lays out his stall with great eloquence and his ideas on how to build a more balanced portfolio make for fascinating listening.
Listen on for many wise insights and a clear vision for how a mid-sized reinsurer should navigate this market and how it can best compliment and benefit from its ownership by a major global insurance parent group.
NOTES:
Chris refers to a Jamie. That’s Jamie Cook, QBE Re’s Chief Partnership Officer.
LINKS:
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
Tuesday Jun 27, 2023
Tuesday Jun 27, 2023
Asta is the largest third-party manager of Lloyd’s Syndicates by quite a long way.
As such, today’s guest Lorraine Harfitt CEO of Asta, almost certainly has a better view of what types of new business entrepreneurs and major insurers alike are looking to set up.
She also has the best view of Lloyd’s changing appetites around what type of businesses it is looking to allow into - and keep out of - the marketplace.
So this podcast is a great temperature gauge on the Lloyd’s and wider international insurance and reinsurance markets.
I’m happy to report that I found Lorraine full of optimism and enthusiasm, with a long and diverse pipeline of business in prospect on many fronts, be it new Syndicates in boxes, Captive Syndicates, traditional syndicates, other alternative vehicles or MGAs.
As Lorraine puts it, there is always a fear that the appeal of the Lloyd’s and London Market may one day wane. On this showing there is no evidence of this happening any time soon.
Lorraine is a an industry professional of vast experience who has worked her way from the Lloyd’s Policy Signing Office in Chatham all the way up into the heart of the market. She knows this business inside and out, she’s great company and this podcast is packed with lots of really nuanced observations.
NOTES:
Lorraine mentions a Julian. That is of course Julian Tighe, former CEO of Asta and now its Group Director and Chief Commercial Officer at Davies Insurance Services.
ICAS, the UK forerunner of the Solvency II regime, stood for Individual Capital Adequacy Standards.
LINKS:
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
Tuesday Jun 20, 2023
Tuesday Jun 20, 2023
Today’s guest is someone who has had a career now into its fifth decade and is someone who I have been interviewing on an off for just under 20 years.
He has held senior roles in broking businesses, underwriting firms and right in the heart of Lloyd’s.
Today Julian James is CEO of Global Markets Commercial P&C Insurance at Sompo International.
This is a global role that encompasses everything relating to commercial P&C in the Sompo organisation that is outside Japan or North America.
Few executives could cope with a role that is this international, stretching from the far east all the way across to Brazil.
But it is a job that suits someone like Julian down to the ground because he is someone who has been a globe-trotter for as long as I have known him and has a global outlook on the insurance business
But just because I and many of you know already him, it doesn’t mean that Julian has lost the ability to surprise.
In this interview I find someone energised and enthused about the challenge of creating and presenting a consistent and coherent Sompo offering to worldwide clients. With myriad jurisdictions, systems, brokers, languages and cultures to deal with, this is extremely hard to do.
I also meet someone heading a business that has been discreetly increasing many of its risk appetites while most others have been moving in the opposite direction and which has grown quickly as a result.
I also meet a global representative of a huge business that as recently as 5 years ago was not at all well known or understood outside its core Japanese market and has a large amount of communicating to do.
Listening back this is a remarkably broad and fun conversation that covers a vast array of topics and lifts the lid on Julian and the wider Sompo organisation’s strategic thinking on the key issues facing the market.
We even briefly touch on Eastern and Western philosophy.
NOTES
We spoke about some ancient history and I promised to put something in the notes about it.
Julian worked at Sedgwick (a major UK-headquartered broker) early in his career. Sedgwick was acquired by MMC in 1998, at the height of what was then an unprecedented wave of consolidation that established MMC and Aon as the first genuinely global broking houses: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB904040627273832000
LINKS
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
Tuesday Jun 13, 2023
Tuesday Jun 13, 2023
Today’s guest is James Drinkwater, the President of Amwins.
James is one of the most successful broking entrepreneurs of his generation.
But he is also someone who doesn’t give a lot of interviews and so I have been working to get him on the show for quite some time.
I am really glad I finally did because this is a really lively and fast-paced interview with someone right at the top of our industry and at a fascinating time in the marketplace.
A massive wholesale broking business like Amwins gets to see where all the stress points are in the market far sooner than anyone else and here we identify these and point to the most likely solutions.
But it’s in our broader conversation that I think we learn the most about this leading wholesaler and its global strategy.
Transforming from being the largest US wholesaler to being a dominant global player will require a clear strategy and a lot of time.
And that’s why it’s refreshing to hear James talk about this because unlike many in our business, he certainly gives the impression that he has the patience to play the long game and refuses to compromise the group’s wholesale identity and culture.
Also as a Londoner it’s heartening to hear that the group’s London operations are set to play a key role in its global expansion.
James is always frank and a straight-talker and our half-hour chat rattles by in no time.
LINKS
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
Tuesday Jun 06, 2023
Tuesday Jun 06, 2023
It's great to have Clive Washbourn back on the show. The Episode I recorded with him two years ago has been the most downloaded of any so far, so it’s obviously going to be good for business to do a follow-up.
But it’s more than that. Clive is one of those people who is famous in the market. He is someone who people tell stories about, so you’ve heard about him even if you haven’t met him.
So when he founded his Navium MGA it was a no-brainer to ask him on the show. I had no idea what to expect. What happened was Clive being an absolute force of nature and one of the most revealing and fun interviews I have ever been a party to.
We did that one under a lockdown over a video call. This time we are face-to-face in Navium’s office on Lime Street in the heart of the London market.
It makes a huge difference to be physically in the room with someone like Clive. He really comes alive.
What follows is another tour de force which reveals what is driving this remarkable marine MGA and what has pushed it to produce an amazing $360mn in gross written premium.
We talk about the market, Clive’s business philosophy and where Navium is heading and how it fits in with Pine Walk and the wider, and now restructured, Fidelis operation.
But because this is Clive, we get into something that we rarely talk about elsewhere:
Listening back, we grapple with the true art of underwriting and how to play yourself into a strong market position. We learn how you can be a really technical underwriter without being the least bit boring and how you need to be ultra-selective and teach yourself to maximise opportunities whenever they arise.
We also get an idea of how you can turn down large amounts of under-priced business but at the same time make the brokers keep coming back to see you.
After two interviews I’ve got my own theory. I think people come to see Clive because they really enjoy his company.
I think he is someone you could talk to about anything and he would make it an interesting conversation and an honest an unflinching exchange of views. I get the feeling Clive makes all the people he talks to feel understood and special.
Here Clive even reveals a historical interest in the battle of Waterloo and burnishes his prog rock credentials by bursting straight into song!
We both had a lot of fun – and I learned a huge amount - and so will you.
NOTES
Abbreviations:
TLO is a Hull insurance abbreviation for Total Loss Only.
ULR is the Ultimate (Net) Loss ratio.
Rinku Patel is mentioned as being in the room with us. He is CEO of Navium’s incubator Pine Walk and is also now COO of Fidelis MGU as well as being its UK CEO.
The quote ‘No battle plan survives the first shots of war/first contact with the enemy’ has been attributed to many, including Napoleon, but probably dates back to an 1871 paper by Prussian Field Marshal, Helmuth von Moltke.
And finally, here’s a link to the 1973 progressive rock classic Karn Evil 9 by Emerson, Lake & Palmer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLS0Med0s6E the original had to be split into 3 parts so that it could fit on a vinyl LP! Clive’s part comes in at 8’40”…
LINKS
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
Tuesday May 30, 2023
Tuesday May 30, 2023
Given its 50% share of global premiums, it’s probably fair enough that we spend an awful lot of our time talking about the US market, but sometimes it’s refreshing to broaden our horizons a little.
So today we’re going to be looking at Australia.
And luckily we’re going to be guided by a real expert and pioneer in this territory. This is someone with an enviable track record and also a very strong grounding in global wholesale insurance.
Simon Lightbody has had a very successful 30-plus year career which started as a broker and then an underwriter in London, but really took off 18 years ago when he helped found Miramar, an Australian MGA backed by the growing Steadfast distribution group.
Steadfast went public ten years ago and these days its MGAs write well over a billion in annual premiums.
After a recent career break Simon is back with Rhodian - a brand-new MGA incubator, set up with support from Amwins.
When someone of Simon’s experience and success starts something new it’s always exciting and a chance to find out what opportunity it is they have seen or what gap in the market they have spotted.
So what follows is an excellent tour around Simon’s big idea and the opportunities available in the Australian and wider Asia-Pacific markets.
Simon’s someone I knew back in my own broking days in the 1990s and I think some of that familiarity comes through in this really friendly and relaxed meeting.
But most importantly this is an encounter with a highly successful entrepreneur who knows the MGA business from top to bottom.
And because of that I think this Episode has an awful lot to offer any listener, whether they have a particular interest in the Australian market or not.
NOTES
APRA is the Australian prudential regulator, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority.
ASIC is the conduct regulator, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission
LINKS
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
Tuesday May 23, 2023
Tuesday May 23, 2023
Aegis London is one of the most consistently top performing syndicates in the Lloyd’s market. It’s also one of the least volatile.
The business has a new CEO, Alex Powell and so it was only natural that I should invite him onto the show for a catch-up.
Alex has been with Aegis since the year 2000 when it was a fledgling syndicate so he knows this firm inside and out – to use his own phrase, he’s been sheep-dipped in this business’s culture.
It’s clear from this meeting that we shouldn’t expect radical departures from Alex – but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t expect Aegis London to be radical.
Because this is a radical business at heart. It’s found a way of putting into practice what many preach but what is enormously difficult to do – grow when you can and preserve capital when you can’t – and all the while maintaining a healthy balance that brings genuine diversification benefits.
It’s also pioneered the digitisation of specialist business classes with a large degree of success, which is something many would not have predicted.
In this meeting we spend a lot of time examining the market and going over the secrets of Aegis’s success. I don’t want to spoil it for you, but a bit like his predecessor David Croom-Johnson, Alex seems to be a good living example of the culture he wants to engender in his staff.
He is easy-going, curious, smart and charismatic and is open and honest about his strategy and what has and hasn’t worked over the years
He’s not prone to hyperbole and gives a strong impression that he would be an excellent person to work for.
And perhaps that is the real secret as this business looks to make the most out of what remains of this hard market.
But don’t take my word for it. You should hear it for yourself.
LINKS
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
Friday May 19, 2023
Friday May 19, 2023
Today’s guest is one of the best qualified senior insurance and reinsurance executives I have ever had on the show.
That’s because in a forty-plus year career David Cabral has been in both claims and underwriting, crossed the divide between Life and Health and P&C and worked at brokers, both in good times and in very bad times.
He’s also been in charge of a company in run-off and he has overseen debt and equity capital raisings on the private and public markets. He’s built and run operations, done M&A and has worked at the biggest incumbents as well as the smallest start-ups.
His resumé includes amongst many other names: Starr Excess, Marsh, Endurance, Frank B Hall, Lloyd’s and latterly sustainable finance-focused start-up Parhelion Capital.
He’s also been a longstanding advocate of business and cultural change and the adoption and application of the best technology in our sector.
I don’t know anyone with a more 360-degree understanding of our business than David.
That long preamble is important because it means that what he has to say about the fundamental issue of ESG should carry an enormous amount of weight.
This is someone with the right combination of intellectual heft and real-world experience to see exactly where we are going wrong as an industry on the biggest challenge our sector has ever faced.
To his brains and experience I should also add a fearlessness in telling things exactly as he sees them.
If ESG represents the greatest re-set of risk since the industrial revolution, here is someone who has thought things right though to their logical conclusions and wants to help build an insurance sector that is fit for purpose in a world of ever more dynamic risk and exponentially-growing real-time data.
David is an outspoken communicator and a great advocate for our sector and the transformative power it wields across the global economy and wider society.
I have rarely interviewed someone able to express themselves so freely and this is what I think makes this Episode something a little special
NOTES
Abbreviations.
ESG stands for Environmental Social and Governance
IoT is Internet of Things.
A Julian is referred to. That is Julian Richardson, CEO of Parhelion Underwriting.
LINKS
We thank our Special Episode sponsor Stephens Rickard:
https://www.stephensrickard.com/
David Cabral: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-v-cabral/
Tuesday May 16, 2023
Tuesday May 16, 2023
One of the only real qualifications for my job is to be good at getting on with all sorts of people – I really couldn’t do it if I was too cranky or too shy.
In contrast some of the people I talk to aren’t natural communicators but as their careers have progressed and they had to take on more public-facing duties within their organisations, they have been forced to learn that particular skill.
Happily today’s guest is an insurance professional who is a natural born communicator. Because of this I think this Episode contains way more content per minute than the average.
Simon Wilson is President of Markel International and is responsible for a business that operates in 13 countries and counting on three continents. It’s also incredibly diverse, spanning micro retail all the way to the biggest ticket London Market wholesale business placed at Lloyd’s.
Simon’s comfortable talking on an extremely broad range of topics – from specialty classes and the effects of the hard reinsurance market and the discipline of writing net lines in dislocated markets, to casualty reserving and comparative strategies for global business building and the development of highly specialised industry vertical niches.
We even dissect ESG and the opportunities that vast swathes of green investment are throwing up for the industry.
It’s a breathless encounter that rattles through an enormous amount at a very fast pace.
Simon’s clearly enjoying his role and his intelligence, insights, passion and excellent humour shine through every minute of this episode.
Listen on, I think you’ll be impressed and you’ll learn an awful lot.
LINKS
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
Tuesday May 09, 2023
Tuesday May 09, 2023
The more time we spend in this industry the more we learn that there is very little that is genuinely new.
Take the insurtech community’s recent discovery of the idea of embedded insurance.
To read some of the posts about this on social media, this is an idea forged in the white heat of technology and so recently-minted that it’s still hot to the touch.
Well, today’s guest puts that idea into considerable perspective.
Keith Meier is Chief Operating Officer of US-headquartered Fortune 500 insurer Assurant and has spent a career of over twenty-five years working in the business to business to consumer insurance space – or B2B2C as it is more often called.
Operating in 21 countries, there is almost nothing that Keith and Assurant don’t know about embedding insurance right into the heart of the product offerings of the world’s largest consumer brands.
So this is a very mature sector and what follows is a masterclass on how to succeed in this specialist niche of the industry.
Keith’s absolute customer-centricity will be a revelation to many listeners from the wholesale world.
What’s clear is this is a long-term business that needs the right cultural approach to work for all parties. You have to offer real value or you just won’t last.
But when it works, it really works. The insurer grows profitable business and service revenues, consumers get great service and added-value products and the consumer giants get new revenue streams and more loyal and better-quality customers.
What’s also clear is that technology is enabling this segment to be so much more responsive than it has been in the past, with new products configurable at scale in a matter of days and weeks at negligible cost.
That’s clearly the part that’s exciting the insurtechs – and the growth prospects are indeed considerable.
But here is one embedded incumbent who is way ahead and is going to be very, very hard to disrupt!
LINKS
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
Tuesday May 02, 2023
Tuesday May 02, 2023
Today’s guest is back on the show in a role he has only recently accepted – that of Chair of the London Market Group (the LMG).
Sean McGovern is probably the market’s best qualified incumbent for this job, and in this podcast I found Sean completely on top of his brief;
Pushing the UK political establishment hard for changes to the UK regulatory regime to make it more accountable and conscious of the market’s global competitive position;
banging the drum to attract talent and develop market-wide initiatives that benefit all participants, big and small;
and helping to create consensus around and drive adoption of the London Market’s ongoing technological reform processes.
We talked about everything – there were no taboos – not even Brexit!
In my dealings with him over the years, Sean has always been incredibly direct and often surprisingly candid and this encounter is no different.
This episode will get you up to speed on what’s topping the LMG’s agenda and what Sean, and the rest of the team are doing on the London Market and its clients’ behalf to make sure what everyone needs to happen, happens.
I also think it’ll make any London Market practitioners listening feel particularly lucky to be so well represented.
Well, see what you think.
NOTES
We refer to a Caroline. That of course is Caroline Wagstaff, CEO of the LMG, last on the show in Episode 141.
LINKS
We mentioned the London Insurance Life website:
https://londoninsurancelife-lmg.com/
I can highly recommend everyone forwards this to any young person looking for a job, whether they are specifically interested in a career in the London Market or not.
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
Friday Apr 28, 2023
Friday Apr 28, 2023
Today’s episode is a real treat because we are doing something that we rarely do.
That something is to undertake a genuine appraisal of what has gone well and what hasn’t in a business in the time since we last spoke.
I often interview tech-focused entrepreneurs who have visions of how to transform the industry for the better.
But what I almost never do is get them back on the show to examine in detail how their ideas fared when the came in direct contact with the often harsh reality of the industry as it is today.
But I suppose James York, the founder and CEO of Peaccce is not like other insurance entrepreneurs. In fact I have never met anyone quite like James.
Two years ago he was on the show espousing insurance reviews as a way of achieving a new type of consumer insurance platform sitting somewhere between search and price comparison.
Now he’s back on the show to report in graphic detail how that experience went – and how he has adapted to the realities of the marketplace.
It’s honest, sometimes brutally so.
In tech everyone is always going on and on about how it’s so important to nurture the ability to fail fast and iterate – except almost no-one will admit to having done so.
Just because your idea is right it doesn’t mean that it will be accepted with open arms.
But James a robust enough character to take setbacks on the chin and re-focus. His latest idea on how to advance his vision is spectacularly simple and incredibly useful and his enthusiasm and energy is completely undiminished.
This is an incredibly valuable conversation because it is borne form hard experience.
It’s also one that anyone interacting with the Insurtech world will easily relate to and learn a huge amount from.
LINKS
CAR QR: https://peaccce.com/carqr
Peacce: https://peaccce.com/
Tuesday Apr 25, 2023
Tuesday Apr 25, 2023
Todays’ guest is a broking pioneer with a very clear vision and an even clearer plan for how to achieve that vision.
Steve McGill founded McGill and Partners almost four years ago and first appeared on this podcast about a year into the firm’s existence.
It’s been over two years since he came on the show. Two years is a long time for anyone, but for a start-up business it is practically a lifetime.
In two years the Steve on this podcast hasn’t change a bit, but the global business he runs has really taken shape.
With revenues exceeding $170mn and the core build-out of the firm’s global infrastructure largely complete, the focus is unrelentingly on continuing and trying to accelerate growth from here on.
Steve remains hugely focused and the strategy and vision remains the same from day one – acquire talent and customers, not businesses, and stay narrow and deep in specialisms while avoiding head on competition with the biggest global generalist brokers.
In this podcast we take stock of how far the firm has come in a short period of time, against a backdrop of broking upheaval caused by attempted M&A, a global pandemic and major armed conflict.
We also get insights into the transformed reinsurance landscape, the revolution in insurance distribution through the hybrid carrier and MGA incubator phenomenon and the logical consequences of increased digitisation on the market from one of the finest strategic broking minds in the business.
LINKS
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
Tuesday Apr 18, 2023
Tuesday Apr 18, 2023
My career in insurance was spent largely as a generalist and that’s why when I meet a specialist I really enjoy it.
There is something amazing about the level of nuance and detail that specialists can reach into that adds enormous value to the rest of us if we have time to get all of the details out of them.
Today’s specialist is James Boyce CEO of Global Specialties at Guy Carpenter which means we are in for a treat because we are getting the best of both worlds.
That’s because Guy Carpenter can share as broad a global view of the market as is possible but at the same time we get an incredibly deep level of specialist knowledge and understanding.
In today’s show we are focusing primarily on the retro markets. James and his colleagues have been in the thick of it and in this Episode we really clear the decks about where the market has landed after one of the most turbulent renewal periods in its history.
I think that the picture that emerges is quite positive.
The market has made rational changes that will set it in good stead for seasons to come, but although the product has fundamentally repriced right to the top of its useful range, the market is clearing and is a lot more predictable than it was at the end of last year.
The underlying health of the market has also been buoyed by the news that despite Hurricane Ian and the Ukraine conflict, the retro market managed to post a profit in 2022 and has moved decisively back up the value chain, well away from attritional exposures.
James is excellent company – well, he is a broker after all – and after this episode you’ll be right up to speed with the mood of underwriters and their capital backers in this the highest, but often least understood end of the capital stack that underpins the global insurance industry.
LINKS
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
Tuesday Apr 11, 2023
Tuesday Apr 11, 2023
I really enjoy talking to people who are full of energy because some of that energy rubs off.
Bob Kimmel CEO of K2 Insurance Services’ return to the podcast with K2 CAT’s Head Underwriter David Carson is a case in point.
Here we find Bob buzzing with the possibilities that significant new investment from Warburg Pincus can afford the firm as it looks to accelerate growth and double in size to a $3bn GWP platform over the next 4 to 5 years.
David’s also full of energy after the decisive rupture in the reinsurance market at 1.1 has produced what he describes as the best market in property cat since 1993.
This is an incredibly candid and fluid discussion.
Bob is very open about the potential squeeze that may be coming for MGA and other intermediaries’ margins as reinsurers and carriers push back hard on commissions and trim underperforming agencies from their portfolios.
But he’s also really happy about having fresh dry powder to make the most of cooling valuations and special situations as interest rates rise and debt-heavy buyers are priced out of out of a hitherto frothy M&A market.
Bob also explains why being a hybrid carrier with a balance sheet was great when K2 was smaller and needed to incubate underwriting talent, but became a distraction to the core business as the group scaled to the $1.5bn of gross premiums it now underwrites on behalf of the market.
This is fascinating under-the-hood stuff and no aspect of the market and K2’s plans is left uncovered.
It’s also delivered at an almost breathless pace and with great rapport between the Bob, David and this interviewer.
If you want to get well ahead of emerging trends in the fast-developing MGA world, this is absolutely essential listening.
NOTES:
Bob speaks first.
The abbreviation LOC snuck in. It means a Letter of Credit.
LINKS
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
Tuesday Apr 04, 2023
Tuesday Apr 04, 2023
Today’s guest is Andrew Horton Group CEO of QBE insurance.
His job is to run a global insurer and reinsurer that writes over $20bn in gross premium that originates from almost every market in the world.
The business has just posted a very solid set of results and at the same time issued guidance for this good run to continue in 2023.
Andrew has been in post for around 18 months and in this podcast it becomes clear that he has had enough time in charge to start to execute some of his own vision.
It’s not wholesale change, but it is quietly radical.
QBE has been built and integrated by his predecessors over the last 20 years, so the job today is not about filling in gaps with acquisitions.
The group is already global and hugely diversified.
Today’s job is about optimising the business’s global processes, product and people to create a consistently profitable, and innovative firm that can continue to grow organically.
This is clearly easier said than done, particularly in a business run as three divisions and present in almost every time zone on the planet.
And that is the core of the interview today.
Andrew is a very thoughtful and very accessible leader.
His ideas on how to make a large global business more cohesive, coherent and consistent while at the same time being fast-paced, nimble and efficient are extremely valuable.
He is trying to bring a small enterprise mindset to a huge global insurance group and that is a radical goal to try and pursue.
From today’s talk I wouldn’t bet against him.
I can highly recommend a close listen.
LINKS
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/