The Voice of Insurance

Ep131 Simon Hedley CEO Acrisure Re Group: Finding a way to get things done

Today’s guest is the sort of reinsurance broker I’d want out broking for me in this tough and difficult to call market. Simon Hedley CEO of Acrisure Re Group is a real broker’s broker. What you see is what you get. By his own admission he is someone not averse to rolling up his sleeves and getting out into the market.He is really down to earth and straight talking. But don’t let this demeanour confuse you – just because he doesn’t talk in management speak it doesn’t mean he doesn’t think deeply about the market and strategy.He’s as sharp as a razor and can see the big strategic picture. He is also really good at explaining his vision in language that people like you and me can understand.Acrisure Re is in a really interesting position. It’s owned by a massive and growing US retail broking network and a big part of its role is to connect up capital and analytics with the distribution and technological muscle of its parent.It’s also at the forefront of the current boom in hybrid carriers and MGAs because it is a major supplier of reinsurance capital to support this expansive sector. All this means our talk gives you everything you need to know about the capital and reinsurance markets and how their changing moods can affect everything else along the insurance value chain. NOTES:A few JV abbreviations in this one. A JV is a Joint Venture.LINKSWe thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:https://www.advantagego.com/We also thank this Episode’s advertising supporter Oxbow Partnershttps://oxbowpartners.com/

Ep130 Clive Buesnel CEO Tysers: Here to make our brokers brilliant

Today’s guest is Clive Buesnel CEO of Tysers. Tysers is one of the oldest broking brands at Lloyd’s, with a history going back 200 years. But the Tysers of today is the product of a lot of recent M&A activity involving the UK arm of Integro and London Wholesaler RFIB, all of which has agreed to be acquired by Australasian broking group AUB. Clive’s background is not as a broker, but as a financial services professional who has spent a career serving the insurance market. He is disarmingly open about this and immediately describes his role as one of an enabler who allows his brokers to be brilliant. And in a market where investment in technology and multi-skilled teams finding new ways of doing business are key to unlocking value, everything that Clive says makes enormous sense.As management and broking are recognised as two separate skills and as brokers become much larger and far more complex entities, far fewer of the brokers of the future are likely to be run by career brokers.But business acumen and technical ability aside, it is Clive’s energy that comes across in this podcast. Tysers is a firm that has been through a lot, but with integration complete and an ambitious new owner behind the group, the overriding impression is of an energised business excited to get to grips with new insurance problems. Clive is concise and direct and that means we cover a large number of topics and detail in a relatively short time. After a listen you should get a really clear idea of how Tysers will develop as a broker in the coming years.See if you find his enthusiasm as infectious as I did.NOTESThe AUB takeover of Tysers is pending regulatory approval.iMRC does indeed stand for the Intelligent Market Reform Contract, that is to say the latest digital iteration of the London Market placing Slip.LINKSWe thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:https://www.advantagego.com/We also thank this Episode’s advertising supporter Oxbow Partnershttps://oxbowpartners.com/

Ep129 Waleed Jabsheh President IGI: A Good Company is a Good Company

Today’s guest is Waleed Jabsheh President at International General Insurance (IGI)Waleed and IGI have a really interesting story to tell. IGI is the twenty-year growth story of a very small regional insurance business founded in Jordan that over time has fully internationalised, re-domiciled to Bermuda and is now present in the major international insurance hubs. It is A-rated by AM Best and S&P and now employs around three hundred staff writing 25 lines. It produces underwriting profits that would be the envy of all but the very best players in our business.Finally, the business listed on the Nasdaq two years ago.Were this a company with different origins I think we would be quicker to celebrate its achievements. But at the moment the market is sceptical.But as I’m guessing Waleed would probably put it – we are who we are and it is what it is. This interview gives a strong idea of what makes this close-knit business tick. Waleed is meticulous and thoughtful in his responses and is excellent company.Here is a firm with a patient strategy that is happy to stay out of the limelight and quietly get on with its business with the confidence that at some point it will eventually get more attention and win greater recognition.It makes for a very interesting thirty minutes.NOTES When Waleed refers to ‘here’ he means London, which is where we did the interview.LINKSWe thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:https://www.advantagego.com/We also thank this Episode’s advertising supporter Oxbow Partnershttps://oxbowpartners.com/

Ep128 Miles Wuller of Ryan Specialty Underwriting Managers: Enabling Masters of their trade

Today’s guest is Miles Wuller, President and CEO of Ryan Specialty Underwriting Managers, the underwriting arm of Ryan Specialty. As such Miles is responsible for more than 20 MGUs, offering more than 150 lines of business and employing around 550 staff in 27 offices who wrote $2.4bn of Gross Premium in 2021.This means he has a fantastic view of the market and where all its pressure points are to be found.A listen to this podcast will definitely get you right up to speed with all the cut and thrust of US and international specialist lines.But Miles is also a great business builder and manager and in our chat we really get to the heart of the Ryan Specialty modus operandi. For instance, how does Miles keep an incredibly diverse business with multiple brands, housing a huge variety of underwriting entrepreneurs within a core strategic Ryan Specialty identity and culture?Very few executives have to maintain and incentivise innovation and creativity on such a scale while at the same time keeping on top of all the compliance and reporting demands of a major unit of a fast-growing public company. Miles exudes a calm competence at every turn and it is abundantly clear that he thinks really deeply about the industry.For instance his thoughts on the effects of inflation on the sector, cyber insurance, his business’s relationship with technology, and the burgeoning hybrid carrier phenomenon are highly insightful. And that’s just to mention four topics among many more.Suffice to say that I learnt an awful lot during this interview and I think that you will too.
NOTES:
A couple of property abbreviations:
TIV=Total Insured Values. SOV=Statement of ValuesAlso a request. If anyone can tell me any significant difference between a Managing General Agent (MGA) and a Managing General Underwriter (MGU), please let me know. After 30 years of head-scratching, I think they are completely interchangeable transatlantic versions of each other.LINKSWe thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:https://www.advantagego.com/We also thank this Episode’s advertising supporter Oxbow Partnershttps://oxbowpartners.com/

Ep 127 Mike Reynolds CEO Oneglobal Broking: Organic builds take longer

It's been two years since I had the CEO of Oneglobal Mike Reynolds on the show. Back then he had just joined and was articulating a vision to build a global specialty broker under the newly-created Oneglobal banner. They always say that no battleplan survives to the first shots of war, so I was really keen to find out how the business had executed on its plan and how it may have iterated its vision in that time. In that 24-month period the specialist broking world has seen more than its fair share of M&A activity and I wanted to put that into context.I found Mike on top form and incredibly candid and lucid about the market and exactly where he sees Oneglobal fitting into it. He outlined the business’s organic build and how some of the firm’s early investments are starting to pay off.Our chat contains some great discussions, not least about sky-high broker valuations and intermediaries’ sometimes difficult relationships with the public markets, But we also spoke about ESG, culture change, technological reform and team-building in broking culture, to name just very few. Brokers are often run by visionaries who need someone else to come and make the vision work to the best of its potential.Mike brings a CEO’s strong vision but tempered with a CFO’s practical experience and in our sector that is quite a rare phenomenon. That’s why I commend this episode to anyone who really wants to learn how to build a specialty broker in today’s market.LINKSWe thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:https://www.advantagego.com/We also thank this Episode’s advertising supporter Oxbow Partnershttps://oxbowpartners.com/

Ep126 Jonathan Zaffino President, Ascot Group: We don’t believe in big bets

Jonathan Zaffino, President of Ascot Group is one of the industry’s great thinkersAscot is one of the Lloyd’s Market’s most successful underwriting outfits of the last 20 years and Jonathan is leading that group’s expansion into the key US market.But his style of expansion is not an aggressive kind that pursues growth by taking big bets. It is a far more nuanced and subtle approach and one that recognises some of the big secular changes that have taken place in the insurance market over the last two decades. Behind the detail in our discussion lots of big themes are lurking. I enjoy how our conversation can start with specifics on trends in areas such as delegated authority but quickly change gear and end up encompassing much loftier themes such as the disaggregation of the insurance value chain as a whole and the advent of new far more mercurial forms of capital provision.Ascot is a business with a strong identity and market presence and we talk about how the firm is looking to distil and preserve that culture as it grows, evolves and seeks new ownership in a fast-changing market. Listening back the most common word Jonathan uses in this podcast is Candidly.And that is apparent all the way through our discussion. This is what he really thinks about the challenges and opportunities in the market today.Learning what the market’s finest minds really think about the world is what this podcast is all about, so I can highly recommend this episode to anyone seeking inspiration and enlightenment. LINKSWe thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:https://www.advantagego.com/We also thank this Episode’s advertising supporter Oxbow Partnershttps://oxbowpartners.com/

Ep 125 Jonathan Turner CEO of Gallagher Specialty UK - Every insurer is talking about growth

Today’s guest is someone I first met almost thirty years ago. In the intervening time he has had a glittering career, most of which has been on the underwriting side of the fence with senior roles at QBE, Brit and most recently at Gallagher’s Pen Underwriting MGA.But now Jonathan Turner is the CEO at Gallagher Specialty UK, he is firmly on the broking side of the box for the first time in his career. In this lively podcast we get to the heart of what is a really vigorous and fascinating market. A market which is managing to be both very hard and very competitive at the same time, depending hugely on line of business and territory.This is also a newly confident market that is in growth mode and not lacking in capital resources in any meaningful way.Gallagher was an early mover in the long wave of London Market wholesale broking consolidation, the highwater mark of which we have been seeing lately, and we discuss how this phenomenon has affected market dynamics.We also reflect on what an underwriter’s experience can bring to running a broker, along with the prospects for market modernisation, not just in technology but in cultural and behavioural change too.Jon’s really smart and is very straight talking throughout our encounter.As a consequence, there are an awful lot of really good things packed into a relatively short period of time. LINKSWe thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:https://www.advantagego.com/We also thank this Episode’s advertising supporter Oxbow Partnershttps://oxbowpartners.com/

Ep 124 Tom Hoad Head of Innovation TMK: Innovation is really about doing stuff

Innovation. We keep reading about it. We keep getting harangued at conferences to do more of it. We also keep getting told that Innovation is really hard to do in insurance. But is it? After all, innovation used to happen perfectly naturally and organically in the past.It’s only in the last decade that we have started to take the business of innovation seriously and given it its own department and made people responsible and accountable for making it happen. What have we learnt so far? Meet today’s guest, Tom Hoad. Tom is Head of Innovation at Tokio Marine Kiln (TMK) and has been in the role since late 2015. That’s a lot of accumulated knowledge about how to go about implanting new ideas into insurance. Tom is bursting with energy and enthusiasm and this podcast packs a huge amount of learning into a very short time. We start the conversation by running through one of TMK’s latest product launches in the clean energy space. This is a really great sounding idea and is what brought Tom to my attention again recently and reminded me to get him on the show.But soon the discussion develops into a really broad one that harnesses all that Tom has learnt about the art and science of bringing exciting new insurance products to market. It’s full of mind-expanding and very useful bits of knowledge that Tom has learnt from six-and-a-half years at the bleeding edge.Anyone who wants to improve their innovation hit rate will find this a fascinating and really useful listen. NOTESI let BAU slip through the Abbreviation filter. This stands for Business As Usual.We talk at the beginning about the Altelium battery warranty insurance deal. Here is the announcement in full We also mention Parametrix cloud outage insurance. The Episode with George Beattie of Beazley is Number 117. I’d recommend listening to these two episodes in conjunction with each other. LINKSWe thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:https://www.advantagego.com/

Ep 123 Ryan Mather CEO Ariel Re: Meet the New Guard

Today’s guest is someone very respected in the industry but who hasn’t spent much time in the limelight – until recently that is. Ariel Re’s CEO Ryan Mather now represents part of the significant new capital that has come into the sector since the global market turn accelerated in the last couple of years. Ariel Re is a specialist looking to be an expert and add value wherever it decides to deploy its capital. It is also highly diverse with divisions insuring clean energy, cyber and professional lines as well as operating in the more traditional property cat arena.What seems to set it apart is a willingness to move towards risks that others are running away from. This obviously takes an open mind and the confidence to invest in the sort of expertise that will give the firm the comfort to issue terms where others won’t. That all points to a business and a leadership team that is very much out of the ordinary.I think this podcast will give you a good idea of how Ariel Re sets about this difficult task and help you start to get to know someone whose industry profile is likely to rise significantly in coming years.Ryan is clearly very smart but he’s far from being dry or academic. He’s very amiable and refreshing company and I can highly recommend a listen
NOTESOne abbreviation that slipped through is SBF, which is Lloyd's shorthand for Syndicate Business Forecast, and an essential part of the market's planning process.LINKSWe thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:https://www.advantagego.com/We also thank our advertiser Anaplan and Conor Donohoe and Daniel Ellis for coming on the show to explain what Anaplan's platform does for the insurance sector. Email contacts: conor.donohoe@anaplan.comdaniel.ellis@mentattechnology.co.uk

Ep 122 Dan Trueman: The only way to be in Cyber is to be an expert

Today’s guest is one of the elder statemen of the Cyber insurance market and a returning guest to the show. Way back in Episode 10 of the Voice of Insurance AXIS’s Global Head of Cyber Dan Trueman made a prediction that the Cyber market was on the cusp of big change and that Cyber insurance would never be sold more cheaply than it was back then. Two years and 111 Episodes later and the hard Cyber market that followed Dan’s comments has rarely been out of the news.I’d use today’s episode as a really good example of the difference between a podcast and a recorded interview. That’s because, instead of being just a series of questions and answers, this encounter is very much a conversation, and a lively one at that! Anyone looking for an update on the highly-pressurised cyber space should look no further.We talk about the re-pricing the sector has gone through and when this might end, loss trends and what cyber criminals are getting up to as well as advances in modelling systemic risk and the potential for unlocking the capital the class is definitely going to need if it is going to meet rising demand without starting to hit supply constraints. LINKSWe thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:https://www.advantagego.com/We also thank our advertiser Anaplan and Conor Donohoe and Daniel Ellis for coming on the show to explain what Anaplan's platform does for the insurance sector. Email contacts: conor.donohoe@anaplan.comdaniel.ellis@mentattechnology.co.uk