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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
Friday Mar 31, 2023
Friday Mar 31, 2023
Welcome to a very special episode because today’s guests are MGA royalty.
Luis Muñoz-Rojas (pictured left) is the founder and Richard Clapham (right) is the CEO of the global MGA DUAL Group, which is part of the Howden Group.
DUAL is now a business that writes more than $3bn in premium and employs 1,300 people in 19 countries.
And the firm is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year.
Luis and I have a bit of history – in the 1990s we both worked for the biggest broker in Spain, Gil y Carvajal.
Aon took over Gil y Carvajal in 1998.
For me that was the cue to change career and go off and become a journalist, but for Luis it fired the starting pistol on an incredible entrepreneurial journey with a friendly London wholesale broker called David Howden.
I’ll let Luis tell the full story later on.
But I don’t want you to think that this is a backward-looking podcast, celebrating the achievements of the past quarter century.
There’s a bit of the origin story, because it’s a remarkable one. But this is just as much about the here and now of the reality of today’s market and the direction that DUAL and the MGA sector will head in in the next 25 years.
Nothing is off the agenda.
25 years ago MGAs were absolutely not in fashion. But today we seem to be on the third or fourth wave of a revolution in how commercial insurance is underwritten and distributed where MGAs always seem to be at the cutting edge.
Who better to be our guides than today’s guests?
They have built a global insurance underwriting and distribution machine that can bring geographical and product diversification to even some of the largest carriers, and from the tone of this talk, it feels like they have only just got started.
You be the judge, but because I’ve known one of the subjects so long I also think it allows us to have a much more open, candid and fun conversation that we might otherwise have had.
NOTES:
Luis mentions the DGS. The DGS is the Dirección General de Seguros, the Spanish insurance regulator.
LINKS
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
Tuesday Mar 28, 2023
Tuesday Mar 28, 2023
Sometimes CEOs can be a little evasive.
Of course they’re nowhere near as evasive as politicians, but, particularly if they are the CEO of a public company, they do have to be quite careful what they say to journalists.
That can make interviews with them a little unengaging.
All this makes today’s guest a real breath of fresh air. SiriusPoint’s various twists and turns in strategy and changes in senior management have made it a little hard to follow in the last couple of years.
Was the firm a hedge fund reinsurer or was it a hybrid venture capital-style incubator and investor? Or was it actually a fairly traditional international specialist insurance and reinsurance business?
In the past it may well have been all three of these and more, all at once.
But Scott Egan is here to do something about all of that. Relatively quickly into the role he has acted decisively and communicated very clearly what his plan for the business is going forward.
This podcast lays everything out really concisely. Scott let me ask all the questions I wanted to ask and answered them all very clearly where he could.
So if you’ve been scratching your head about what Siriuspoint’s strategy has been all about, allow 35 minutes of Scott’s straight talking to make things clear.
Scott’s incredibly direct and engaging and his communication couldn’t be more plain.
It’s disarming and refreshing and I highly recommend a listen.
LINKS
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
Tuesday Mar 21, 2023
Tuesday Mar 21, 2023
Today’s guest is returning to the show after a 2-year gap.
For most that would be a reasonable time difference between appearances on the podcast, but today it’s different because Greg Hendrick is the CEO of the start-up Vantage Risk and two years in the lifetime of a company that is less than 3 years old is practically a lifetime.
We’ve got a lot of catching up to do and this episode sets everything straight at a really fine pace. Greg has always been confident and accomplished in his encounters with the media and this meeting is another vintage performance.
Nothing is off menu and we rattle through where the firm feels it is performing against its original business plan and the big strategic calls Vantage has made, particularly on property cat.
We examine some of the early fruits of the group’s big bet on the application of data analysis and technology in core underwriting decisions and also look at how the hard reinsurance market is affecting the insurance market and Vantage’s own development plans.
We also discuss possible medium-term avenues for the firm’s original investors and the Group’s attitude to M&A.
Vantage is likely to push through a billion dollars of gross written premium in 2023 and is starting to get up onto the plane as Greg would describe it.
Greg himself is always on the plane and this is an energising and fun encounter that will get you right inside the mind of one our sector’s biggest thinkers and most dynamic actors.
I highly recommend a listen.
LINKS
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
Friday Mar 17, 2023
Friday Mar 17, 2023
One of life’s great paradoxes is that when something is so core to everything that you do that you can’t imagine being able to do your job without it, that’s often when take it a little for granted.
And I think that’s what the insurance industry is guilty of when we think of loss adjusters and other trusted third party claims professionals.
That’s why I’m delighted I was able to have such an in-depth and probing conversation with Andrew Bart CEO of International Operations at Crawford and Company.
It’s clear after our meeting that while many in the sector will regard Crawford’s services as a given and a constant, Crawford itself does anything but.
This may be a market-leading business with a very strong position globally, but it is constantly challenging, reinventing and disrupting itself as the world develops.
For instance, how does an adjuster scale up and scale down flexibly in the face of ever more frequent, severe and global loss events? And what about when these events occur simultaneously at different points in the world?
How does an adjuster rise to the challenge of new developments like parametric insurance, the huge increase in intangible assets and social phenomena like the gig economy?
And how about resurgent inflation and the mega-trend of ESG and the transition to net zero which is going to change fundamentally how insurers and their customers deal with all claims in the future?
Well, the answers are all here. And they involve a huge amount of technology and data and an enormous amount of collaboration as well as a subtle shift in focus from hindsight and learning historical lessons to foresight, prediction, prevention and prescriptive actions.
You may not have thought of all these things, but I can assure that Andrew has very deeply.
The result is a fascinating podcast that will give you a clear idea of what the third part claims professionals of the future are going to look like.
And I think that after this you won’t take loss adjusters for granted ever again.
Tuesday Mar 14, 2023
Tuesday Mar 14, 2023
Today’s guest is returning after a very busy couple of years during which he has re-shaped, re-branded and now floated the business he runs on the public markets.
Andrew Robinson came to this meeting fresh from presenting Skyward Specialty Insurance Group’s maiden results.
Perhaps understandably Andrew was buzzing with energy, insight and good humour in this encounter and our conversation is at times breathless and interspersed by his characteristic directness.
Here we examine in a lot of detail the prospects for the US E&S markets in the light of the major re-set at the last Reinsurance renewal as well as Skyward’s ongoing strategies and growth plans within them.
We also set the insurance world to rights. I certainly enjoyed our talk.
This podcast will run by very quickly and will give you a very good feel for where Skyward and the wider market is heading in 2023 and beyond.
LINKS
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
Friday Mar 10, 2023
Friday Mar 10, 2023
Today’s guest is John Neal CEO of Lloyd’s, back on the show after an absence of more than two years.
Back then he described an ambition to put the Lloyd’s halo back in place.
Well, two full years of underwriting profitability later and the market has regained a huge amount of its cachet and prestige and begun to reap the rewards of its painful remediation process.
But this podcast is as far as you can imagine from a triumphal romp through the market’s considerable achievements of the past couple of years.
It’s about the here and now of this still-transitioning market and the major opportunities it is throwing up for Lloyd’s underwriters.
It’s also about a culture change on one Lime Street.
Engaging positively with and backing smart businesses with good ideas and being more principles rather than rules-based, while at the same time remaining hyper-vigilant on any backsliding on hard-won improvements in rate and terms and conditions.
And it’s about delivery and leadership – delivery on tech reform and leadership on the big calls around systemic risk and on the massive challenges and opportunities being thrown up by ESG and the transition to net zero
We even make time to talk about the culture and work environment of the London Market in the post pandemic world.
I’ll stop myself there because there’s a danger that these intros become just a shopping list of the topics we address.
Take my word for it, we talk about literally everything on the global insurance and reinsurance agenda today and nothing is off limits.
But ultimately this is a great opportunity to spend 45 minutes in a very relaxed and intimate conversation with a leader of a very important segment of our global insurance ecosystem.
As you’d expect, he’s in great form and it’s clear to me that he is growing in confidence.
The confidence and conviction was there before, but there’s nothing like good results to add positive reinforcement.
Here is someone who is getting through to the market and clearly feels he is going to be able to carry the market along with him to face the challenges of the future – and do so from a position of relative strength.
We haven’t had a Lloyd’s CEO in this sort of position for at least a couple of decades – and that’s why what he says here has more meaning than in the past.
The fact is that because of the credible delivery of the objectives of the first phase of his tenure, John’s thoughts about what comes next carry more weight than before.
And that’s why I highly recommend a detailed listen.
Tuesday Mar 07, 2023
Tuesday Mar 07, 2023
Today’s guests are a pair of broking executives clearly relishing an opportunity to lead a business through a period of accelerated growth in a market that is extremely favourable.
James Baird (pictured left) and Paul Richards (right) are co-CEOs and Managing Partners of Consilium, the wholesale and specialist insurance and reinsurance broker that is part of the expansive Aventum group.
Aventum Group CEO David Bearman laid down a marker back in Episode 82 almost two years ago and it’s worth re-listening to that podcast to put this one into context:
https://www.thevoiceofinsurance.com/podcast/episode/33b1d9c1/ep-82-david-bearman-ceo-aventum-dont-walk-into-a-crowded-room
This encounter is a tour de force. Whilst both James and Paul have worked together for most of their long careers they are relatively new arrivals to the Aventum fold.
But you wouldn’t know from listening in here – the two are brimming with enthusiasm for their new home.
Consilium already places $500mn of Gross Written Premium and has incredibly ambitious growth targets, but what is refreshing is that we aren’t talking about a familiar tale of private Equity backing, debt leverage, M&A and exit multiples.
Here we are only using those terms to define what Consilium isn’t.
And that’s what’s so fascinating. Consilium is a young broker with an average age way below that of these two interviewees and this interviewer.
It has a progressive mindset on the application of tech in broking, much of which it develops in-house, yet in other ways it is incredibly traditional, balking at debt leverage, external equity investment and M&A for volume.
The calculation here is that by growing organically whatever it loses in leverage the broker wins culturally, because it only hires people it feels will fit in and buy into the intermediary’s more stable culture.
It also banks on that solid environment being a plus for customers who benefit from continuity of service.
It’s definitely different. And with 30% organic growth on the cards, it certainly seems to be doing something right!
Listen on for a really interesting and refreshing encounter. James speaks first.
NOTES:
Some Abbreviations.
GL is General Liability and the ULR and ILR are respectively the Ultimate and Incurred Loss Ratios.
LINKS
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
Friday Mar 03, 2023
Friday Mar 03, 2023
Today's podcast is slightly shorter than many. At first I was wondering why. but listening back just now it’s actually quite clear.
Long conversations come about because there are complicated structures, products and new ventures to explain.
Or sometimes it’s because the people I talk to say things that I am not expecting them to say and then we have to spend time clarifying exactly what they mean.
With Trevor Carvey CEO of Conduit Re, it isn’t like that.
First of all Conduit was founded on the simple premise of being an uncomplicated pure reinsurer and that plan hasn’t changed just because the market has. There are no new platforms or initiatives to dissect here.
Conduit is staying true to its original business plan, although better-than-expected market conditions may allow the firm to execute that plan a little quicker than expected.
And the relative brevity is also down to Trevor himself. He’s concise and gets to the point and always answers questions head-on and in the most transparent and open way.
It’s refreshing and this means that in a short time you can learn an awful lot about the exact state of the reinsurance market and where the best opportunities currently lie within it.
There’s a lot of highly valuable detail and strategic insight in here coming from someone whose experience is very difficult to match in the industry today.
I highly recommend a listen.
LINKS
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
Tuesday Feb 28, 2023
Tuesday Feb 28, 2023
Today’s guest is someone you might not know but I think he is someone you should definitely listen to.
That’s because Killian McDermott, Co-Founder & Executive Partner of POP Holdings is someone who is quietly innovating and applying technology and the analysis of data to the business of underwriting.
Killian is an insurance professional with a long pedigree and so doesn’t come from the school of insurance disruptors.
Indeed he believes that successful insurers have been married to the smart analysis of data since time immemorial and that the term insurtech will eventually have to be retired.
He is an insurance person whose career would be typical of many in his peer group and recognisable to all of us, but who has learned to focus on the technology side of the business, not the other way around.
What is also fascinating is that, in a world where so much tech innovation is going on in personal lines where numbers are large and premiums very low, his focus is on applying data ingestion and analysis, artificial intelligence and machine learning, digitisation and automation to highly specialist classes of business such as M&A insurance and financial lines.
The firm’s ambition is also substantial.
Fusion Specialty Insurance and io.insure are the group’s main operating business with licences in many major insurance jurisdictions globally and Killian is targeting a billion dollars of Gross written premiums within five years.
So if you want to hear from someone who instead of talking about innovation and insurtech is quietly getting on with making it all a reality, I highly recommend you listen on.
LINKS
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
And our advertiser Bolton Associates:
https://www.bolton-associates.co.uk/
Tuesday Feb 21, 2023
Tuesday Feb 21, 2023
In many ways today’s guest is an archetype of a traditional Lloyd’s Managing Agency business and the lifeblood of the London Market.
It’s specialist, not generalist, it’s not too big but not too small. It’s nimble and agile, but also rarely strays from its chosen areas of expertise.
And it’s also fiercely independent and supported - but not controlled by - its capital backers.
Duncan Dale is CEO of Dale Underwriting Partners, a business in its tenth year of operation that is set to write around $400 million dollars in gross premium in 2023 following a one third pre-emption in its capacity from 2022.
We discuss the recalibration in the market following the 1.1 reinsurance renewals, the opportunities this is throwing up and how long these opportunities might last for.
We look at the firm’s expansion plans and the continued merits or otherwise of the London Market as a base, the effects of increased inflation on underwriting and we dissect Duncan’s own personal ambitions for the business he founded.
But most importantly we get under the skin of a very singular London-headquartered underwriting business with a very clear vision of what it wants to do and where it wants to be.
Duncan is on excellent form and I think this podcast proves that these days there is absolutely no such thing as a Lloyd’s archetype.
Every market participant has a different approach and a very different philosophy and set of appetites – and I think that bodes very well for the health of the London Market as a whole.
LINKS
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
And our advertiser Bolton Associates:
https://www.bolton-associates.co.uk/
Tuesday Feb 14, 2023
Tuesday Feb 14, 2023
Todays’ guest is a CEO who has just started in post at one of the London Market’s longest-running independent broking houses.
As one would expect James Hands of Miller is full of energy and ideas on how to continue the broker’s impressive run of growth.
James is a broker’s broker and our discussion rarely beats around the bush. He tends to get straight to the point.
Miller is going to grow organically and by acquisition, but it is going to keep a laser-like focus on client need, culture and playing to the broker’s specialist wholesale insurance and reinsurance strengths.
We run through how the tough market is playing out for Miller and its clients, whether third party capital backing has changed the firm’s culture and how the group is reacting the major technological changes that are transforming the way business is done across broad swathes of the market.
James is excellent company and gives the impression of an open-minded and pragmatic leader very comfortable with where his business is and where its strategy is likely to be taking it in the future.
LINKS
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
And our advertiser Bolton Associates:
https://www.bolton-associates.co.uk/
Friday Feb 10, 2023
Friday Feb 10, 2023
Imagine a world where your underwriters can design their own insurance products in front of their eyes.
A world where you don’t wait months for developers to come back to show you things they have built that end up bearing no relationship to what you asked them to do.
In this world if you don’t like it you can just dump it and start again. And in this world the idea of legacy technology is meaningless- it simply ceases to exist.
Here your only development cost is a monthly subscription.
Well, it turns out this world is already here and not many of us know about it.
I think you can tell from these words that today’s Episode is one that I found incredibly liberating and enlightening to record.
I love it when I learn something new, especially when its something I have been hearing other people talk about for a while, but I’ve been too busy or perhaps too embarrassed or scared to ask them to explain it to me.
The world of no-code software is one of those things that I’ve been hearing about for a few years, but haven’t really understood in any detail.
So it was brilliant to meet Risto Rossar CEO of Insly, which is a business that has been running a no-code platform for the insurance industry for the best part of a decade.
Risto is one of us – he’s an insurance guy. His first business was a digital insurance broker he launched around the turn of the millennium.
Back then to do this you had to create all the tech yourself because it simply didn’t exist. That firm became very successful in the Baltic States and was sold on.
But Risto soon realised he was onto something. Scaling brokers globally was hard but scaling software is a lot easier. He decided his next venture would be a tech business that helped to digitise the insurance sector
That is how Insly was born. Now it’s working with 40 carriers and MGAs and around 4,000 brokers from around the world.
Listen on for an inspiring conversation with someone who understands that the only way to unleash real innovation is to liberate insurance folk from the need to learn how to code and allow us to get genuinely creative with insurance for the first time in our history.
In our discussion we also slay a lot of the myths around other tech buzzwords such as Blockchain and the idea of the moment: Embedded Insurance.
Risto is great company and I can highly recommend a listen – you’ll learn a huge amount and hopefully end by feeling inspired and invigorated.
LINKS
Find out more about Insly here: https://insly.com/en/
And connect with Risto here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ristorossar/
Tuesday Feb 07, 2023
Tuesday Feb 07, 2023
Today’s Guests are Richard Watson and Stuart Bridges of Inigo
This podcast is a really enjoyable encounter wholly because of the unexpected way these two executives decided to conduct themselves.
In the build up to an interview like this I usually circulate some sample questions beforehand. This is to get the subjects comfortable and to be able gather their best thoughts before we start recording.
But the night before this recording Richard emailed me suggesting that we ditch my list of questions and that he and Stuart should interview me instead.
A bit of broking later and we ended up with elements of both ideas. I hope you enjoy it. Listening back it’s definitely something different. But then no-one in the 153 Episodes preceding this interview has ever suggested we do any like this.
I think what follows is a great advert for the business Richard, Stuart and their teams are building.
The two are different, they’re original and they’re free thinkers who are happy to share their ideas and quite a lot of their own unique personalities.
They’re clearly also having the time of their lives running a business that is looking to underwrite in excess of 1.2 billion dollars of premium in its third year, which is, perhaps unsurprisingly, ahead of the original plan.
NOTES:
Richard speaks first.
The abbreviations 10-Q and 10-K are respectively a US-listed company’s quarterly and annual results, as filed to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The figures and letters refer to the statutory forms the companies have to use.
LINKS
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
And our advertiser Bolton Associates:
https://www.bolton-associates.co.uk/
Friday Feb 03, 2023
Friday Feb 03, 2023
Today’s guest is a real insurtech innovator with a story that is all the more remarkable because is bringing cutting edge tech to one of the oldest and most traditional lines of insurance, cargo.
Ben Hubbard CEO and co-founder of Parsyl is an insurance outsider, who now finds himself running a Syndicate in the beating heart of the global cargo market – Lloyd’s of London.
How did he get there?
The other remarkable part of the Parsyl story is that it is unlike other insurtechs, who see fusty old insurance as ripe for disrupting, Parsyl is born from the idea that it is insurance that completes the tech side of the business because it allows economic incentives and enhanced coverage to be offered to customers to make them change behaviour and run their businesses better in the interests of all.
So Instead of just selling technology it is also coming to take on a client’s risk – and that is something much more useful.
To give you an idea of the firm’s progress and its potential, the business has just announced a strategic partnership with Lineage Logistics, the world’s largest temperature-controlled logistics solutions provider whose customers spend around $500mn a year on cargo insurance.
Ben is a really friendly character who has the charisma and empathy needed to succeed in a multi-brokered market and I think his approach shows the way forward for how best to apply technology in the wholesale insurance value chain.
So listen on – you may find inspiration for how to adapt Ben’s approach into your own chosen specialist lines.
LINKS
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
And our advertiser Bolton Associates:
https://www.bolton-associates.co.uk/
Tuesday Jan 31, 2023
Tuesday Jan 31, 2023
Today’s guest is Phil Hobbs President & Managing Director at Liberty Specialty Markets.
In the past Liberty Mutual businesses used to be run allowing a lot of autonomy and sometimes geographical and operational overlap.
But these days Liberty is a business that has undergone a huge amount of work to unify in structure and present much more of a united front globally.
And when you hear that Specialty Markets now produces 24 billion dollars of gross written premium, making it one of the largest commercial P&C insurers in the world, you can see why it makes an awful lot of sense to project and leverage that sort of scale out in the marketplace.
That’s what makes this such an interesting discussion. When Phil joined Liberty 15 years ago he had a role in the group’s Lloyd’s Syndicate. Now he has a completely global view and only half of the premium he overseas is written in London.
And because the business is a buyer and seller of reinsurance and retro, very few other organisations have such a joined up view of the insurance value chain in its entirety and with such breadth and depth.
Given the turbulent state of the market Phil’s view is extraordinarily valuable.
Here we talk in depth about how the recent reinsurance reset might affect market dynamics in insurance, as well as grappling with the state of play in core London specialty political risk and violence classes, Cyber, resurgent inflation, ESG and the post-pandemic work environment.
Phil is very articulate and his calm and easygoing demeanour permeates our exchanges.
He is also very good at making very complicated processes and dynamics much easier to understand and that is why I think a listen today will be very well rewarded.
LINKS
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
And our advertiser Bolton Associates:
https://www.bolton-associates.co.uk/
Friday Jan 27, 2023
Friday Jan 27, 2023
Todays’ guest is from Insurtech royalty. He’s part of a select club of executives running youthful insurance businesses with valuations exceeding a billion dollars.
Bolttech and its Group CEO Rob Schimek have been in a hurry, building technology and a licensed ecosystem that is connecting large companies and their customers, brokers and other intermediaries, carriers and thousands of their insurance products in 30 markets across three continents.
It’s done this from a standing start in only 2020 and today billions of dollars of premiums are quoted through the fluid connections that the business facilitates.
I’ve been around insurance and technology long enough to know that getting this kind of traction this quickly is something special and that is why I wanted to get Rob on the show.
In the last two decades insurance investment graveyards have been filled with big bold ideas like this and I wanted to get to the heart of what Bolttech is trying to do differently.
It turns out that far from disruption the firm’s approach is to bring collaboration and flexibility to everything it does. It is also incredibly focused on the hard and unglamorous technical yards of Insurance that many more naïve insurtechs make the mistake of overlooking.
Dealing seamlessly with the complex regulatory aspect of distributing thousands of products in different markets, perhaps through unlicensed entities, is an enormous challenge that this business takes just as seriously as the tech side of things.
With a very senior insurance career already under his belt Rob really is one of us.
So listen on for an idea of what the future of general insurance distribution is going to look like.
And if you were ever dying to learn what all the fuss surrounding embedded insurance is really all about, then you have absolutely come to the right place!
NOTES
A couple of abbreviations smuggled themselves in:
OEM = Original Equipment Manufacturer - eg. Samsung for mobile phones.
API = Application Programming Interface – ie a way of connecting up different computer systems
LINKS
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
And our advertiser Bolton Associates:
https://www.bolton-associates.co.uk/
Tuesday Jan 24, 2023
Tuesday Jan 24, 2023
Today’s guests are brokers - a London Market wholesale veteran and a rising star executive.
John Sutton (CEO) and Jonathan Tritton (SVP) work together at Acrisure London Wholesale (ALW). The business does exactly what is says on the tin – it’s fast growing retail broker Acrisure’s London Wholesale operation
It’s almost five years since ALW was formed and for the incredibly acquisitive Acrisure group, it’s a rarity because it is a business that has so far done all of its growth organically.
This is a really lively discussion and one that I think shows this business and the market where it operates in a very positive light.
ALW is finding ways of serving its huge and growing retail, and now wholesale, network with product designed and built in London.
It’s doing this through a combination of old school savvy and expertise and a youthful nimbleness and technological awareness that is refreshing to see.
What’s more as the market has hardened across the board and already hard-to-place covers are becoming even harder to place this duo are adamant that the London Market is standing up and being counted and is rediscovering much of its old creativity and entrepreneurial spirit.
NOTES
One abbreviation. PV stands for Political Violence.
LINKS
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
And our advertiser Bolton Associates:
https://www.bolton-associates.co.uk/
Tuesday Jan 17, 2023
Tuesday Jan 17, 2023
I’m delighted to say that todays’ guest is a returning visitor and he returns very much the insurance executive of the moment.
Adrian Cox is the CEO of Beazley which since we last spoke has cemented its reputation as the most dynamic and pioneering of the London-headquartered global specialty insurers and reinsurers.
Late in 2022 Beazley raised fresh capital to deploy into the hard reinsurance market.
It did this in an environment when almost nobody else could get financing away.
And just as we were about to do the recording the firm announced it had placed the first ever Cyber cat bond.
So perhaps understandably Adrian was absolutely buzzing in this episode.
The firm’s core markets have all reset and Beazley’s positions within them look extremely attractive
In this crackling podcast we cover the market resets in property reinsurance, specialty and cyber classes and where Beazley fits in with them, as well as the ongoing ESG transition, the prospects for rising tech efficiencies in insurance and the emergence of new ways of working in the post-pandemic world.
LINKS
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
And our advertiser Bolton Associates:
https://www.bolton-associates.co.uk/
Tuesday Jan 10, 2023
Tuesday Jan 10, 2023
Today’s podcast carries on where we left off after the State of the Reinsurance Market Special Episode which was released after Monte Carlo.
We already knew this renewal was going to be difficult, but the subsequent intervention of Hurricane Ian stiffened reinsurers’ resolve further.
The result was a bruising and often frustrating encounter. You should already know the headline numbers by now:
Dedicated reinsurance capital shrank by the most since the global financial crisis of 2008
Global property catastrophe pricing was up 37% - the largest 1.1 increase since 1992
And there was a 50% increase in retro pricing, which means this highest echelon of reinsurance is now 165 percent more expensive than in 2017
The aim of this podcast is to put all of this into historical context, ask the big questions about who the winners and losers were and to examine what the change means for the 2023 outlook and the long-term strategic direction of the market and those who invest in it.
To help me I have representatives from three of the top four reinsurance broking groups.
David Priebe is Chairman of Guy Carpenter and brings experience and a global market view that few can match, although James Vickers Chairman of Gallagher Re International should certainly feel he is a peer.
Finally David Flandro Head of Analytics at Howden brings his unique research-focused mind to bear and to give us a bigger macro take on what has been happening.
A quick note. You must read Gallagher Re and Howden’s respective 1.1 reports as an essential accompaniment to this podcast. Both are hugely informative and insightful and are wholly complementary to each other
Links to both are below.
This was a bit more work than usual but I really enjoyed my three interviews and the subsequent time spent blending this highly accomplished trio’s thoughts together.
I think it brings the renewals to life and will be useful for anyone wanting to navigate the re-set markets of 2023
ABBREVIATIONS
IRR: Invested Rate of return
EVA: Economic Value Added
D&F: Direct and Facultative
NOTES:
David Flandro acknowledged the work of principal Howden 1.1 report author, Head of Research, Julian Alovisi.
LINKS
The Howden report is called The Great Realignment:
https://www.howdengroup.com/news-and-insights/the-great-realignment-2023
The Gallagher Re report is called Market Turns:
https://www.ajg.com/gallagherre/news-and-insights/2023/january/gallagher-re-first-view-market-turns/
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
And our advertiser Bolton Associates:
https://www.bolton-associates.co.uk/
Thursday Dec 22, 2022
Thursday Dec 22, 2022
Todays’ guest is a highly experienced broker.
And since right now is a market absolutely made for brokers of his calibre and experience, in this podcast Alastair Swift and I get stuck straight into the reality of the global specialty insurance market and the ultra-hard reinsurance market.
Alastair is Head of Corporate, Risk & Broking Global Lines of Business at WTW and is CEO of Willis Limited, so has a view of the state of play in London that is hard to match.
Listen on and you’ll hear:
How net lines and greater syndication are the order of the day as insurers’ outwards reinsurance renewals stall
Why the market is like an open pair of scissors – up where there are aggregation, and therefore reinsurance-related, issues and down where there aren’t.
You’ll learn why clients have had enough, and alternatives such as captives and parametric solutions are booming.
How the cyber market has stabilised and is ready to continue its exceptional growth.
And why some insurers may choose to increase market share by absorbing higher reinsurance costs themselves and not passing them on.
Alastair’s been on the show before and it shows through in his confidence and the concise way he answers all the questions I throw at him
So listen on for an intensely concentrated description of the state of the market today, right from the eye of the storm, with someone completely on top of their brief.
LINKS
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
Friday Dec 16, 2022
Friday Dec 16, 2022
Today’s guest is Alex Blanco, CEO of Vantage Insurance.
Alex has been dealt a rare hand in the insurance world, because he has had the chance to build something from scratch with no legacy.
What would you do if you could start a specialist insurance business from a clean piece of paper, and in a pretty favourable insurance market environment?
What lines would you start with? How would you use technology?
Would you stick to the E&S market or would you add admitted capabilities?
How would you approach alternative distribution such as MGAs?
Would you go international?
These are the core questions at the heart of this podcast and Alex puts his multi-decade executive experience to providing the answers.
Alex is a great guest and this is a really robust and far-reaching conversation. I can highly recommend a listen.
LINKS
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
Tuesday Nov 22, 2022
Tuesday Nov 22, 2022
Today’s guest is one of the smartest people in the insurance sector and I am really lucky to have been able to spend time talking to him fairly regularly over the course of the last few years.
I first got to know him just as the whole insurtech movement started to really take shape in around 2016 to 2017 and ever since that time he’s always been open and honest about the way he appraised the new wave of technological investment sweeping through the industry.
He never lost his critical faculties and never got caught up in the hype that defined part of that era.
But that doesn’t mean he’s a sceptic either – he’s actually quite a rare animal – an enthusiastic but realistic adopter and promoter of better ways of doing the business of insurance.
Today’s episode is one I am really pleased with because it does the job of a podcast properly. Over the years I have had many enlightening conversations with Adrian just like the one you are about to hear.
But up until now I had never recorded one.
So prepare yourself for a masterclass in what the smart money thinks about the state of insurtech. Embedded insurance, insurtech bubbles – whether they existed and whether they have now burst – how the hard reinsurance market will affect start-ups and even the very logic of the phrase insurtech itself are all addressed in the discussion.
I’ll wager you’ll get more benefit from listening to Adrian for 45 minutes than you will from attending any 3-day Insurtech conference.
LINKS
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
TRANSCRIPT
https://www.thevoiceofinsurance.com/post/ep145-adrian-jones-transcript
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The views expressed are the views of Adrian Jones as of the date hereof. Hudson Structured Capital Management Ltd. (“HSCM”) undertakes no responsibility to advise you of any changes. Neither the podcast nor any of the information contained herein constitutes an offer to sell, or a solicitation of an offer to buy, any security or instrument in or to participate in any trading strategy or investment vehicle.
Past performance is not indicative of future results. There can be no assurance that any objectives can be achieved or are realistic in any given market condition.
This podcast may contain forward-looking statements; such statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties. Forward-looking statements reflect our views as of such date with respect to possible future events. Actual results could differ – perhaps materially – from those in the forward-looking statements.
The HSCM Public InsurTech Index (HPIX) tracks the price movements of a portfolio of common equity securities listed in the last 10 years by companies operating in the United States insurance sector with novel business models differentiated by technology. The HPIX components, currently 22 companies, describe themselves as having novel business models differentiated by technology. The Index components also meet certain criteria, defined in the Index Guideline (available at Solactive.com), concerning minimum size, length of public listing, geography, and certain other aspects of the business model. The chart illustrates the price movements of HPIX starting with an initial value of 100 on the first trading day of 2020.
Solactive AG (“Solactive”) is the licensor of HSCM Public InsurTech Index (the “Index”). The financial instruments that are based on the Index are not sponsored, endorsed, promoted or sold by Solactive in any way and Solactive makes no express or implied representation, guarantee or assurance with regard to: (a) the advisability in investing in the financial instruments; (b) the quality, accuracy and/or completeness of the Index; and/or (c) the results obtained or to be obtained by any person or entity from the use of the Index. Solactive does not guarantee the accuracy and/or the completeness of the Index and shall not have any liability for any errors or omissions with respect thereto. Notwithstanding Solactive’s obligations to its licensees, Solactive reserves the right to change the methods of calculation or publication with respect to the Index and Solactive shall not be liable for any miscalculation of or any incorrect, delayed or interrupted publication with respect to the Index. Solactive shall not be liable for any damages, including, without limitation, any loss of profits or business, or any special, incidental, punitive, indirect or consequential damages suffered or incurred as a result of the use (or inability to use) of the Index.
For more information about HSCM, including risks and other disclosures, please refer to www.hscm.com.
Tuesday Nov 15, 2022
Tuesday Nov 15, 2022
I think Talbir Bains is one of the most single-minded and driven people I have ever had on the show.
He is also moving incredibly quickly.
Since the last time I spoke to him back in 2020 his Volante Global business has grown premium substantially, found new ownership as part of the Acrisure Group and launched a Syndicate at Lloyd’s.
I just had to get him back to make sure we kept up with all the things that have happened in the last 24 months.
And I am really glad I did, because despite the apparent whirlwind surrounding him and his fast-growing business, it is Talbir’s rock-solid convictions that permeate every minute of this podcast.
Volante is a business with a focus on underwriting profit that is bordering on obsession and five minutes with Talbir can leave you in no doubt that this company’s uncompromising philosophy and culture originates directly from him.
Talbir has also been through a life-changing personal experience since we last met and that only heightened the intensity of talking to him face to face once more
I can’t help thinking we could all learn an awful lot not just from listening to what Talbir has to say, but by studying precisely what he has done to position Volante as an underwriting business that is so consistently highly rated and respected by its peers and stakeholders.
Of course, living and breathing underwriting discipline is far easier said than done, so listen on and see if you can get some of Talbir’s passion and belief to rub off onto you.
LINKS
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
We also thank this Episode’s advertising supporter Oxbow Partners
https://oxbowpartners.com
Tuesday Nov 08, 2022
Tuesday Nov 08, 2022
Today’s guest is one of the original poster children of the Insurtech movement and has been applying technology to solve insurance problems since long before the phrase insurtech was coined.
Back when the first insurtech conferences were getting started he was a highly sought-after speaker. If you listen today you’ll soon understand why.
Chris Cheatham founded RiskGenius in 2012 and in 2020 that business was absorbed by fellow insurtech and online exchange Bold Penguin
Very soon afterwards the enlarged Bold Penguin became part of the American Family Insurance group.
Chris’s story is one of entrepreneurship and a path into insurtech maturity. Unlike many in the first wave and many of the speakers at those early conferences, neither RiskGenius nor Bold Penguin made any claim to be insurance disruptors intent on revolution and disintermediation.
Instead these businesses were industry partners, looking to remove friction and pain points, largely for existing insurance entities.
As the tech funding climate cools it is their model that is the one gaining traction and adoption from some of the most traditional elements in the insurance value chain.
Today’s discussion is really valuable because it mirrors the growing maturity of the insurtech scene and shines lots of light on where things are heading in the short, medium and long term.
Chris has been on a remarkable journey – and from this encounter I feel he’s just getting started.
No matter where you are sitting in the insurance value chain I think the next half hour will be a very valuable investment of your time.
NOTES:
Chris mentioned a cool electronic paper tablet called a reMarkable. It does indeed look really cool – any remaining paper junkies should have a look: https://remarkable.com
LINKS
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
We also thank this Episode’s advertising supporter Oxbow Partners
https://oxbowpartners.com
Tuesday Nov 01, 2022
Tuesday Nov 01, 2022
Today we have a live market where reinsurance capacity has dried up and investors are utterly fatigued or are openly on strike, and so every dollar of spare capital feels twice as valuable as it did last year
But at the same time we have a highly sophisticated legacy market that is well capitalised and, because of its relatively solid recent track record, has access to more funding if it needs it.
Also legacy infrastructure is probably better equipped to handle anything the live market can throw at it than at any time in its history.
Surely in today’s market every live dollar than can be freed up to write new business at tomorrow’s better prices, will be freed up?
Now is clearly a great time to be talking to today’s guest.
Luke Tanzer is CEO of RiverStone International, a business at the heart of the Lloyd’s and UK company legacy market.
RiverStone has a new owner, fresh capital and focus and ambitious international expansion plans.
Luke is one of the most engaging members of the legacy community and if you haven’t met him before, I think you’ll find him incredibly insightful and refreshing.
And if you still have any outdated ideas about what run-off is in the 2020s, a few minutes in Luke’s company will set you straight.
Given what is happening in the live market, Luke and his peers’ profiles are very likely to be raised a notch or two in the next couple of years as excess demand seeks out his capital and expertise, so get ahead of everyone else and listen on.
NOTES
A couple of unexplained abbreviations.
RITC is reinsurance to close, a key part of the Lloyd’s three-year accounting process.
DD is of course due diligence.
LINKS
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
We also thank this Episode’s advertising supporter Oxbow Partners
https://oxbowpartners.com
Tuesday Oct 25, 2022
Tuesday Oct 25, 2022
Normally I have C-suite guests on the programme who are working for companies with tens, hundreds and sometimes low thousands of employees. They generally write between the tens, hundreds of millions or single-digit billions in annual gross premiums.
But today’s guests are working on behalf of a marketplace that directly employs 47,000 people and many more offshore.
It writes well over a hundred billion dollars in gross premiums and that is a number set to rise sharply as the market continues to harden.
This is because together CEO Caroline Wagstaff, and Chairman Matthew Moore, run the London Market Group, the LMG.
The LMG is the London Market’s trade body bringing together Lloyd’s and its constituent underwriting businesses, the London company market and the brokers to represent the whole London insurance and reinsurance Market to the outside world and to lobby on its behalf.
London is facing a demographic squeeze where its stock of over 50-year-olds exceeds its number of those under the age of thirty.
In this lively episode Matthew and Caroline recount the nature of this problem and, more importantly, articulate the plan they have formulated to address it.
We also talk about the prospects for the UK regulator to have to take the market’s competitive position into consideration when making and implementing new rules as key financial services reform legislation makes its way through the UK Parliament.
The agenda includes the prospect of the UK seeking to develop a ‘red carpet’ welcome to rival that of more nimble and proactive jurisdictions such as Bermuda and Singapore.
The continuing iterations of ongoing work to further the London Market brand under the London Makes it Possible banner are another topic of discussion.
Matthew and Caroline are passionate and really engaging speakers and this episode will give you a great sense of where the market’s collective marketing and lobbying efforts are being channelled both now and in coming years.
LINKS
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
We also thank this Episode’s advertising supporter Oxbow Partners
https://oxbowpartners.com
Friday Oct 21, 2022
Friday Oct 21, 2022
Regular listeners will know that I really rate today’s guests and what they are trying to do for the market.
I also find them really good company – they are fun, smart infectiously enthusiastic and are always brimming with new ideas. Every time I have a meeting with them I come away with something new to think about. Listen on and you will too.
The Insurtech Gateway has been a pioneer in the insurtech space, providing early stage investment as well as licences, insurance knowledge and industry support and connections to entrepreneurs trying to put innovative insurance ideas into practice.
It’s just come through an important milestone. Its inaugural fund is maturing and it second fund has now been raised.
In a cooling tech investment climate this as clear a validation of the Gateway’s business model as you’ll need.
My conversation with director and co-founder Stephen Brittain (bottom right) and CEO Richard Chattock (top right) is valuable because it brings together everything the Gateway has learned from the cutting edge of insurance investment from the past six years.
None of this is theoretical – this is all hard-won experience earned by the risking of real capital in the real world with real people.
We examine what has worked and what hasn’t and look at the emerging trends that are going to drive the successful insurtechs of the future.
Richard and Stephen make a great pairing. Stephen has been on the podcast many times before but Richard hasn’t.
Yet it is Richard who will be familiar to many listeners as he is an insurance lifer with a high profile and long and successful underwriting career who has made the move to venture capitalism. Meanwhile Stephen is an outside innovator looking inwards to insurance.
This is an excellent combination and makes for a really relaxed, highly enjoyable and insightful listen.
I’m pretty sure you’ll find it both inspiring and useful.
LINKS
Tuesday Oct 18, 2022
Tuesday Oct 18, 2022
Today’s guest is someone who is bringing a rigorous and effective management style that the London Market might not previously have been accustomed to.
Kate Markham brings extensive business experience to the role of running Hiscox London Market. Some of this comes from entirely outside our industry as well as the retail insurance space.
Her work in restoring top performance to this Lloyd’s blue-chip and keeping it there has entailed a lot of new management thinking and not inconsiderable culture change to embed a performance mindsight that is bottom-up rather than top-down.
It’s refreshing and this podcast dives right into the issues facing Hiscox and the wider London Market on immediate concerns about reinsurance renewals and how they will affect coverage such as property cat, and classes such as specialty and cyber.
We also talk about the bigger picture, addressing digital transformation, algorithmic underwriting and the diverse talent requirements of the market of the future.
Kate is personable, eloquent and concise as well as being direct and this is a really enjoyable exchange with someone who is right on top of their brief.
LINKS
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
We also thank this Episode’s advertising supporter Oxbow Partners
https://oxbowpartners.com
Tuesday Oct 11, 2022
Tuesday Oct 11, 2022
Mark Cloutier is a dream guest.
And that’s not just because he’s the person some of the smartest financial minds in the industry turn to to shepherd and shape their strategic turnaround investments.
Mark Cloutier knows the insurance industry inside and out and from top to bottom, but what makes him a great podcast guest is his openness and willingness to talk about how the insurance, reinsurance and capital markets fit together and interact with each other.
He’s also one of the most easygoing people you’ll meet. His job must involve huge stresses and strains, but you would never know if you met him.
Well today you do get to meet him and together we’ll go on a grand tour of Aspen and its place in the most dynamic and challenging markets for a generation.
Mark’s long career and perspective combined with Aspen’s multi-faceted business model bring a really great insight into this jittery and completely plastic market environment.
Inflation, industry capital and investor appetites, property cat, specialty in a post-Ukraine world, the explosion in hybrid carriers, how to handle the ESG challenge – there is valuable understanding and a calm authority backing every statement.
LINKS
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
We also thank this Episode’s advertising supporter Oxbow Partners
https://oxbowpartners.com
Friday Oct 07, 2022
Friday Oct 07, 2022
Building a fully digital marketplace for insurance in London has been a tantalising long-term goal for all of my 30-year career.
Only too often this has proved a mirage that has turned to sand as the market got close.
Dare I say it but this time things seem very different. Now robust core standards are providing foundations of solid rock upon which the market can build with greater confidence.
Technology is also more advanced and more readily available at a much more reasonable cost. Today even the smallest player can jump ahead without busting the bank.
Indeed the biggest obstacle to accelerated change is now cultural.
And that is where the biggest transformation has taken place – in the minds of market leaders.
Now instead of the technologists trying to drag the market kicking and screaming towards modernisation change is starting to be demanded of technologists from practitioners themselves.
The stars are finally coming into alignment.
That’s why I am delighted I could talk to three highly experienced insurance technology experts about this.
Kirstin Duffield is CEO of Insurance software business Morning Data and is an advisor to the London Market Data Council, Hélène Stanway also advises the Data Council and is a strategic adviser at r10 Consulting as well as being a senior counsel to numerous other tech bodies. Finally Marcus Broome, is Chief Platform officer at insurance trading platform Whitespace.
All have experience providing technological solutions to the Insurance market going back to the early-to mid-1990s.
These people have been at the heart of London’s digital journey for the last 25-30 years.
They are technologists steeped in deep insurance understanding and their cumulative knowledge of every step and mis-step that the market has taken in that period is second to none.
Luckily for you and me they are also a trio of concise and passionate communicators who know how to speak to laypeople.
So what follows is a really useful run through of the current market modernisation programmes that dispels a lot of myths and clears up a lot of misunderstanding we might all have about what exactly the latest reforms are and the benefits they might bring to the market.
I found it really inspiring and helpful and I’m sure you will too.
After this encounter I feel much more confident that the first fully digital fruits of the last 30 years’ labours may finally be within our grasp, particularly if these three have anything to do with it.
NOTES:
Two acronyms got through unexplained.
PAS is a Policy Administration System
And GLRC standards refer to the Global Reinsurance and Large Commercial Carrier electronic standards produced by ACORD.
LINKS
We thank Whitespace for its support today
https://www.whitespace.co.uk/
Tuesday Oct 04, 2022
Tuesday Oct 04, 2022
Anyone keeping an eye on the overarching trends in the global wholesale and speciality insurance and reinsurance markets of the last few years cannot have failed to notice the explosive growth of the hybrid insurance carrier.
Burgeoning Billions of dollars of premium are being directed in new and interesting ways through a cohort of businesses that ten years ago didn’t really exist.
Regular listeners to this podcast will know that this has been a repeated topic of conversation with guests on the show.
I think today’s guest will be able to put this topic into context better than almost anyone else.
That’s because Bill Jewett CEO of Obsidian Insurance Holdings boasts a more than forty-year career right in the heart of the US and Bermuda reinsurance community.
This means Bill is very much one of us and can speak our language.
He can also articulate what is happening on the ground because he is personally one of the architects of the hybrid carrier revolution and what looks very much to be a secular change in the distribution of commercial insurance.
I had known Bill since his decade at Endurance and was really glad to catch up with him again after such a long time. I’m sure many of you out there will similarly be re-acquainting yourself with an old friend from the business.
Bill’s got a great story to tell and this podcast will dispel any lingering myths or doubts you have about the major changes afoot in how many MGAs will source their capital in the future.
LINKS
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
We also thank this Episode’s advertising supporter Oxbow Partners
https://oxbowpartners.com
Friday Sep 30, 2022
Friday Sep 30, 2022
Regular listeners will know that usually I talk to one person at a time, but over the course of four days in Monte Carlo I managed to record over 20 short interviews with industry leaders.
This means this podcast is an in-depth documentary on the state of global insurance, reinsurance and the insurance-related capital markets.
It’s a document detailing the state of mind of key actors that make and influence the market.
The great thing about Monte Carlo is that a consensus can emerge, even from thousands of disparate voices. This year that definitely happened
This is without doubt the toughest and most dynamic (re)insurance market since late 2005 – and I should know because I have been to every Monte Carlo gathering from then onwards.
My aim is to try and capture the essence of what it is like to be in the room with the top decision-makers.
You will experience a tough market consensus emerging and be able to hear the different harmonies and minor discords from within this great chorus of voices.
Enjoy this very special podcast!
LINKS:
We thank our Special Episode Sponsor, Stephens Rickard:
https://www.stephensrickard.com
Tuesday Sep 27, 2022
Tuesday Sep 27, 2022
Some people seem to have things happen to them, while others make things happen.
Richard Brindle (pictured right) and Dan Burrows (pictured left) of Fidelis are in the latter category and are about to make history by becoming the first traditional balance sheet insurance company to split its underwriting and its capital into two independent entities.
It’s a typically bold and fascinating move and one which throws up many questions.
Are they doing this because valuations of balance sheets are so low and those of MGAs are so high, or are there other motives for going through such a painful process?
The answers are all here.
Richard also unloads a huge amount of his insight on the state of the reinsurance and specialty markets as we head into the 1.1 renewal season.
It’s the toughest talk I’ve heard in my career and that includes the post Katrina Rita and Wilma market of 2006, into which Lancashire was born.
This all adds up to one of the best podcasts you’ll listen to this year, or any year.
NOTES
One slip of the tongue on an acronym. SRT stands for Significant Risk Transfer not Strategic Risk Transfer.
LINKS
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
We also thank this Episode’s advertising supporter Oxbow Partners
https://oxbowpartners.com
Friday Sep 16, 2022
Friday Sep 16, 2022
Anyone listening to this podcast over the past couple of years can’t have failed to notice the way that Environmental, Social and Governance or ESG has moved quite quickly to the top of the industry agenda.
Taking into consideration the Environmental Social and Governance impacts of all of our customers, all of our investments, all of our suppliers and all of our own activities is something that may be a little too much more many of us in the industry to get our heads around.
Once regulators get involved, and it is only a matter of time before they do, ESG will become the biggest potentially existential threat to insurers since the implementation of Solvency II.
That’s why it is important to seek expert advice.
And that’s why I am delighted to introduced Miqdaad Versi, a principal at Oxbow Partners.
Oxbow Partners is a management consultancy specialising in the insurance industry.
And Miqdaad focuses on insurance, reinsurance and ESG and sustainability and has authored a first-of-its-kind report on ESG in conjunction with the Bermuda Business Development Agency (BDA).
This podcast lays out his credentials as well as the scale of the problem.
If you have been too scared even to start thinking about what to do about the enormous ESG challenge ahead, this is an excellent place to begin.
Miqdaad is smart, eloquent and passionate on this topic. He’s also very optimistic that the insurance sector has the skills to navigate ESG’s threats as well as to be able to make the most of the huge opportunities that it is going to throw up.
This podcast is also full to the brim of useful information and easy-to-follow advice.
NOTES and LINKS
Miqdaad Versi’s email is mversi@oxbowpartners.com
The report we mention is ESG in Bermuda: The Rising Tide – The maturity of ESG on the island and what it means for the (re)insurance industry
You can access it here: https://oxbowpartners.com/blog/esg-in-bermuda-the-rising-tide/
Find out more about Oxbow Partners at:
https://oxbowpartners.com/
Friday Sep 09, 2022
Friday Sep 09, 2022
What an absolute blast this episode was to record!
I often interview irrepressible, energetic and ultra-enthusiastic executives on the podcast – it goes with the territory after all.
Indeed I have had both of today’s guests on the show before, but there is something about bringing them together that caused sparks to fly and brought a different dynamic into play.
David Howden of Howden Group and Rod Fox of TigerRisk Partners are both founders of their respective businesses and are two of the most successful broking entrepreneurs of their generation.
The two are combining their firms in an M&A deal that is creating a highly credible challenger reinsurance broker to the big three.
This podcast is almost like a metaphor for what they are trying to achieve together.
One and one seem to add up to quite more than two and both were already larger than life before we started!
No questions were off the table. It’s all here.
There’s nothing left out.
LINKS
Howden Re has an excellent Reinsurance Market report out.
It's called Reinsurance - A Tipping Point
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
We also thank this Episode’s advertising supporter Oxbow Partners
https://oxbowpartners.com
Tuesday Sep 06, 2022
Tuesday Sep 06, 2022
Today’s guest is someone who, despite being the CEO of a very prominent publicly-quoted global speciality insurer and reinsurer, has been keeping himself out of the media spotlight for the last couple of years.
This is because like many other leaders in our world, Albert Benchimol CEO of AXIS Capital has been busy overseeing underwriting remediation and a wholesale re-set of his business’s strategic positioning as the market has transitioned.
Now I’m delighted to announce that he has come out the other side and has agreed to be on the show.
The Albert I encountered in this episode was someone looking forward to the future with a lot of energy, optimism and enthusiasm.
No subjects were off the menu, so after swiftly polishing off the elephant in the room topic of Axis’s widely publicised decision to pull out of property reinsurance, we expanded out into a really broad discussion that encompasses, rate adequacy, the rise of the MGA, inflation, ESG and industry diversity to name but a few.
Albert’s now been CEO of AXIS for over a decade and it’s that experience and sense of authority that I think shines through every minute of this lively encounter.
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
We also thank this Episode’s advertising supporter Oxbow Partners
https://oxbowpartners.com/
Friday Sep 02, 2022
Friday Sep 02, 2022
Today’s guests are InsTech CEO Matthew Grant (pictured top right) and Research Analyst Henry Gale (bottom right).
Regular listeners will know that the InsTech team are my go-to experts from the world of Insurtech. I rely on them to keep me informed and connected with the most important developments in that burgeoning field.
Matthew Grant has spent over 30 years at the intersection of technology and insurance.
Since he co-founded the InsTech events and intelligence platform five years ago, it has grown into an extremely active global community of around 25,000 industry professionals which has worked with over 200 companies.
As this unique community has grown, so has its manpower and the sophistication of its output.
Instech’s regular research reports are essential reading for incumbent insurance folk, tech investors and entrepreneurs.
And it is the latest InsTech report that we are focusing on today.
No-one will have managed to ignore the Parametric Insurance phenomenon as it has exploded into our consciousness, particularly over the past couple of years as eye-catching launches and multi-million-dollar fundraisings have made the headlines.
With such an explosion of new ideas and potential partners, the subject is a potential minefield. Who to partner with? Which avenues to pursue and which to avoid?
Thankfully Instech has produced a comprehensive and highly practical report on the subject.
Matthew has been personally involved with parametrics for over 25 years and Instech has been closely engaged with all of the most interesting players in the space since it was founded.
One of the aims of InsTech is to connect incumbents, investors and entrepreneurs around workable ideas that have the best chance of succeeding in the real world and this makes for a very focused podcast.
And important for me, Matthew and report author Henry may be supremely well connected and clued up, but they have their feet on the ground and explain their ideas with great enthusiasm but expressed in plain English in an easy-going manner.
This means you don’t need to have any specialist knowledge or interest to learn an awful lot from this conversation
Enjoy the podcast
NOTES
As Matthew alludes to at the start, he has been hosting the InsTech podcast since 2018. He has notched up over 200 episodes with a cross-section of the insurtech community. Check them out on your favourite podcast app or here: https://www.instech.co/podcasts
LINKS
The report is called Parametric Insurance in 2022: the 150+ Companies to Watch
Here's the link: https://www.instech.co/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=21
If you want to follow up on the offer Matthew makes towards the end of the podcast, please email hello@instech.co
Check out all of InsTech’s latest reports, podcasts and online and in-person events at https://www.instech.co/
Tuesday Aug 30, 2022
Tuesday Aug 30, 2022
Today’s guest is a former Microsoft, CIA and Goldman Sachs employee who, perhaps unsurprisingly, has found his way to somewhere very close to the top of the Cyber Insurance tree in the past few years.
With a billion dollars in run-rate GWP after just five years, major VC funding, aggressive international expansion plans and now a newly-acquired US admitted carrier, Coalition and its CEO Joshua Motta have quite a story to tell.
With his deep cyber security background it was likely that Coalition was going to build something very different from incumbent insurers and indeed the firm’s offering is much more of a joined-up full service than many of its competitors.
As Joshua puts it, Coalition “owns the repair shop” and that helps an awful lot with risk engineering and loss mitigation. And so far the results have been excellent.
The grand tour of the Coalition modus operandi is really interesting but it is when the conversation spreads to more weighty industry topics that I think this podcast really takes off.
Joshua has some really strong views about how fears around systemic risk in cyber have been overblown and how to unlock the capacity that cyber will need if it is to continue its fast growth without hitting capacity constraints.
Now you may say that he would say that, but now that Coalition is funding more of its own underwriting, Joshua is clearly happy to put his money where his mouth is. Coalition is also putting some of its own modelling work out on open source to help others get comfortable with its view of risk.
I definitely recommend a listen for anyone nervous about committing capital to cyber reinsurance for fear of earth-shattering systemic risk – the counter-arguments made here are pretty convincing.
LINKS
Here is the announcement about Coalition buying Admitted lines carrier Digital Affect Insurance Company
This coincided with our podcast recording and as you will hear, it was definitely news to me. With hindsight I should have probed a lot more. Next time!
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
We also thank this Episode’s advertising supporter Oxbow Partners
https://oxbowpartners.com/
Friday Aug 26, 2022
Friday Aug 26, 2022
Today we are going to be doing something completely different.
We’re not going to talk about insurance.
Regular listeners will know that AdvantageGo has been a great supporter of the Voice of Insurance since the early days of the podcast.
But you might not have known that this excellent technology company is also an important backer of UK military charity, ABF The Soldiers’ Charity.
AdvantageGo is an associate Sponsor of The Soldiers’ Charity’s Annual fundraiser, the Lord Mayor’s Big Curry lunch at the Guildhall in London, which is a fixture attended and supported by many in the London Insurance market.
It’s the Soldiers’ Charity’s work we want to showcase here, particularly a highly successful programme the charity funds in the field of pain management.
So I’m going to introduce two services veterans, Russ Kirby (pictured bottom right) and Bernie O’Toole (top right) who have both been through the programme.
Russ is a Navy veteran and Bernie was in the Army.
You may find parts of their accounts distressing, but I would encourage you to continue because you will be rewarded with a great story of empowerment and optimism.
The pain management programme has given them their lives back and you will feel their positive energy as they recount drastically reducing the painkillers, or dispensing with them entirely and regaining the confidence and optimism to look forward to productive and satisfying future lives.
As Bernie says – the programme works and it’s worth its weight in gold.
NOTES
For worldwide listeners, B&Q is a major UK DIY store.
LINKS
If you want to get more closely involved with ABF The Soldiers' Charity, please contact Katy Wildman on kwildman@soldierscharity.org
or email lmbc@soldierscharity.org
Please donate if you can here:
The Lord Mayor’s Big Curry Lunch website: https://events.soldierscharity.org/event/lmpjbc-2022?lightbox=/event/lmpjbc-2022/donate
Or here:
ABF The Soldiers’ Charity website: https://soldierscharity.org/donate/make-donation/
SSAFA is the Armed Forces charity.
Russ also mentions other UK Armed Services charities The Poppy Factory and Help for Heroes
Russ’s private business is called Russ Mounts Stuff
We thank AdvantageGo for organising this very special podcast:
https://www.advantagego.com/
Tuesday Aug 23, 2022
Tuesday Aug 23, 2022
Today’s guest is someone I’m delighted to be welcoming back to the podcast after just under two years.
Back then he was the relatively new CEO at Hannover Re and some of my questioning probed what sort of things he might do differently from his predecessors.
Now into his fourth year in charge and Jean-Jacques Henchoz is the seasoned boss of a reinsurer that has not skipped a beat since its leadership transition.
Very strong growth has continued and results have been excellent.
In the first question in this podcast I dared ask if Hannover Re’s growth streak could continue now that the already 3rd largest reinsurance group in the world is far closer to the number two spot than the number four is to it.
The answer was a very frank “yes for now” and that set the tone for everything that was to follow.
I learned a lot about a huge range of topics, including views on the Ukraine war, Florida, resurgent inflation and the prospects for Cyber ILS.
I also discovered how the strong growth environment has created the conditions that have made Covid reinsurance disputes far fewer in number than we thought they might have been two years ago.
Jean-Jacques is clearly at the top of his game and I couldn’t recommend this episode more highly as not only a crystal-clear view into the reinsurance industry’s standout performer of the past fifteen years, but a really useful primer for the autumn conference season and the testing end of year renewals to come.
LINKS
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
We also thank this Episode’s advertising supporter Oxbow Partners
https://oxbowpartners.com/
Sunday Aug 07, 2022
Sunday Aug 07, 2022
Today’s guest is Sean McGovern CEO, UK & Lloyd’s at AXA XL.
Sean was first on the show a year and a half ago when he was less than a year into his first industry CEO role.
When we last spoke he was in the middle of a root-and-branch remediation of AXA XL’s book, the severity of which had taken many by surprise.
As a senior Lloyd’s executive and spokesperson Sean had been in the public eye for many years, so everyone knew he would be able to handle that side of the job.
But if anyone had any doubts about his ability to lead a tough underwriting turnaround, they were dispelled as AXA XL’s Syndicate 2003 posted a vintage 75% combined ratio in 2021 – that’s a 59-point improvement on the previous year.
I think the difference between the two podcasts is palpable. Here is a confident and forward-looking executive with growth on his mind in all areas of his business.
As a result this is a really positive discussion with one of Lloyd’s largest players about today’s opportunities as well as the major issues affecting the London Market as a whole.
I can highly recommend a listen.
NOTES
A couple of abbreviations:
AIRMIC stands for the Association of Insurance and Risk Managers in Industry and Commerce and is the UK’s Risk Manager trade body.
NZIA stands for the Net-Zero Insurance Alliance, a global industry body which has been convened by the UN.
LINKS
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
We also thank this Episode’s advertising supporter Oxbow Partners
https://oxbowpartners.com/
Friday Jul 29, 2022
Friday Jul 29, 2022
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.
LINKS
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
We also thank this Episode’s advertising supporter Oxbow Partners
https://oxbowpartners.com/
Tuesday Jul 26, 2022
Tuesday Jul 26, 2022
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.
NOTES
The 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.
LINKS
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
We also thank this Episode’s advertising supporter Oxbow Partners
https://oxbowpartners.com/
Tuesday Jul 19, 2022
Tuesday Jul 19, 2022
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.
LINKS
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
We also thank this Episode’s advertising supporter Oxbow Partners
https://oxbowpartners.com/
Friday Jul 15, 2022
Friday Jul 15, 2022
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 Values
Also 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.
LINKS
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
We also thank this Episode’s advertising supporter Oxbow Partners
https://oxbowpartners.com/
Tuesday Jul 12, 2022
Tuesday Jul 12, 2022
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.
LINKS
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
We also thank this Episode’s advertising supporter Oxbow Partners
https://oxbowpartners.com/
Tuesday Jul 05, 2022
Tuesday Jul 05, 2022
Jonathan Zaffino, President of Ascot Group is one of the industry’s great thinkers
Ascot 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.
LINKS
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
We also thank this Episode’s advertising supporter Oxbow Partners
https://oxbowpartners.com/
Friday Jun 24, 2022
Friday Jun 24, 2022
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.
LINKS
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
We also thank this Episode’s advertising supporter Oxbow Partners
https://oxbowpartners.com/
Tuesday May 24, 2022
Tuesday May 24, 2022
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.
NOTES
I 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.
LINKS
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
Tuesday May 17, 2022
Tuesday May 17, 2022
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
NOTES
One 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.
LINKS
We 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.com
daniel.ellis@mentattechnology.co.uk