Every year for the past four years I have been lucky enough to be given time with Richard Brindle at the opening of the Monte Carlo Rendezvous and every year we have had the sort of conversation that helps set the tone for the rest of the gathering and indeed the rest for the calendar year and into the next. This year was no exception. As ever, Richard was forceful, unambiguous and direct on all topics, from the state of the market and the growth opportunities within it to what The Fidelis Partnership has learnt from its experience with the Russia-Ukraine Aviation War losses and the California wildfires. Richard was joined by John-Paul O’Hare, the Fidelis Partnership’s Group Director of Underwriting. As the discussion took flight and encompassed subjects as diverse as the Application of Ai and algorithmic underwriting to the insurance work ethic, service levels and the return to the office, John-Paul held his own. As a result I can highly recommend this episode for an original and uncompromising view on the opportunities and threats facing the global specialty insurance and reinsurance markets in 2026 and beyond. NOTES: Pine Walk has 16 cells signed up, of which 13 are currently active and is expected to write $1.2bn in premium in 2026. LINKS: We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo: https://www.advantagego.com
Successful insurers have always been in the business of gaining a competitive edge in the form of better information and intelligence. Going right back to the days of early marine underwriters funding improved communication between global ports and ship operators, the best players have always made sure they had the clearest possible view of the risk in front of them both, at a granular, individual level and then at the portfolio level. But there’s more to it than that. The most successful underwriters today are now able to do all of their analysis and assessment at the sort of speed that would have been impossible even a decade ago. Because they can cut turnarounds from days to minutes they can hugely increase the number of submissions they can handle and therefore greatly improve their chances of selecting the best and most optimally profitable risks for their portfolios. It’s clear that with the advent of smart underwriting workbenches that enable underwriting teams and their managers to blend multiple information sources and better dissect and digest risk, we are in the middle of a revolution in the way that underwriting is handled. So join me, Ali Shahkarami Head of Risk Data Solutions - Insurance & Public Sector at Swiss Re (pictured, Bottom) and Simon Fagg, Global Head of pre-Sales Solutions at AdvantageGo (pictured, Top) as we explore what the new benchmark for quality underwriting is going to look like in the digital age. The business unit that Ali runs is at the cutting edge of risk information, providing definitive resources such as CatNet to the global market and Simon is an underwriter who has developed his career to become a pre-eminent advocate of the application of technology to the underwriting process. Between these two excellent guests we have all the expertise we need and what follows is lively and enlightening discussion that will leave you in no doubt as to the industry direction of travel and what you need to do to position your business for differentiated growth in the coming years. LINKS https://www.advantagego.com www.swissre.com
Insurance has a huge amount of specialisms that don’t always cross over, which means that we can go our whole careers as insurance professionals, having a rough idea about what a particular class of business does, but not really ever appreciating the detailed picture. I think Trade Credit is one of those classes and that’s something we should all fix, not least because it’s a product that our clients could probably all benefit from That’s why I’m really glad that an element of this podcast is a really useful primer on the class and that my guest today has one of the biggest single jobs in this line anywhere in the world and has over twenty years’ experience to share with us. Sarah Murrow is President & CEO at Allianz Trade Americas and what follows is a helpful rundown of this global and really useful class of business. This is insurance in its purest and most relevant form – risk taking that allows customers to stick to what they’re best at and also improves their return on capital. This is also a line that provides valuable advice as well as a financial product and is so embedded with its clients that they communicate with it every day. In short all of us in the rest of the P&C world have an awful lot to learn from trade credit. And as prominent Trade Credit insurers begin to appear under the Lloyd’s platform, this is a class we should all be getting to know a little better. Sarah is a great guest and our conversation encompasses themes as broad as global economics and politics as well as the cut and thrust of insuring trade receivable assets. LINKS: We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo: https://www.advantagego.com
Deep down we are all know that innovation isn't just a buzzword; it's really a matter of long-term survival. It is getting increasingly difficult to argue against the idea that the speed of change keeps accelerating and we now live in a world where what was science fiction only 20 years ago could soon become the norm. For instance, who would have guessed that the majority of our growing energy needs are going to be almost entirely met my novel green production methods within the next twenty-five years, perhaps even including scaled up nuclear fusion within the mix? Who would have imagined that commercial exploitation of space would become ever more economically viable, including the possibility of space-based manufacturing and even lunar habitation? In such an environment a failure to innovate means that not only will your company stagnate over time, but better-run, more innovative competitors might take an unassailable lead over you. If innovation is imperative this begs the question of whether there is a way of bottling up and distilling what the most innovative companies do, so we can try to be more like them. That’s what this Special Episode is all about. For one, does an innovation mindset or methodology exist? And more importantly, can we capture it, codify it, and embed it throughout large and complex organisations? To explore this and the major upcoming engineering, technological, financial and intellectual challenges of the next two decades, I'm joined today by a stellar line-up of guests from Beazley and wider industry. We’ll hear from Adrian Cox, Beazley’s CEO, Neil Kempston, its Head of Incubation Underwriting and Denis Bensoussan, Head of Space. I also talk to Rob Grant, Managing Director at Pollination, a specialist advisor and investor in the energy transition who is here to give us an external perspective. It's an exciting time to be at the forefront of this change, helping to unlock investment and build a more sustainable future. I don’t know about you, but I have ended this process in a much more optimistic frame of mind than I began it. I hope you too have been able to take some inspiration and comfort from this investigation. LINKS: Here's a link to further reading on the Energy Transition from the team at Beazley: https://www.beazley.com/en-US/news-and-events/spotlight-on-environmental-climate-risk-2025/powering-progress/
Today’s guest has just taken over the reins at a business that has always aimed to be a company that people find easy to work with and enjoy dealing with. Having been around long enough to have met and interviewed all three of his immediate predecessors, I can attest to this. Despite being at the head of a key global reinsurer, all those leaders were always open, accessible and down to earth: very much the sort of executives who you imagined answered their own emails and organised their own diaries. So I am happy to report that Clemens Jungsthofel, the CEO of Hannover Re, represents a continuation of his firm’s refreshing and highly individual character. When you buy reinsurance, at the most fundamental level you are buying life insurance for your insurance company as you protect your capital base from potentially fatal losses. It’s not a relationship you enter into lightly. It’s much more like a marriage than a simple business transaction. That’s why cedants seek out reinsurers who are strong, stable, steady, consistent, discreet and trustworthy, whatever an unpredictable loss landscape or the rollercoaster ride of the market cycle throws at us. Listen on and I’ll wager you can hear Clemens projecting these qualities in the same way his predecessors did. What you see is what you get. The son of an insurance agent, Clemens is someone who has insurance running through his veins. He is one of us and exudes an air of calm unflappability. It’s easy to imagine entrusting him with a trade secret, or admitting you really need his help. What follows is a very timely, broad and deep discussion of the state of the market and Hannover Re’s strategy within it as well as a thorough examination of the short- and long-term industry impacts of phenomena as varied and diverse as the major changes in insurance distribution and AI. Here is someone I found the business of recording a podcast with extremely easy and pleasurable. I think you’ll find listening to it equally pleasant and incredibly useful. Before the industry heads down to Monte Carlo for its annual meeting I can highly recommend this episode as a primer for all the major talking points. LINKS: We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo: https://www.advantagego.com
I really enjoyed today’s interview because is it packed full of eureka moments. Sometimes looking at a business from the outside it is hard to work out exactly what it does and how and why it does it. Visiting the website of a company of this sort tends to throw up more questions than it answers. And that’s frustrating for a journalist as It’s my job to make sense of these things For me cyber reinsurance underwriter Envelop Risk was one of those business – a bit of a black box that was hard to see into. I had known Jonathan Spry its CEO for about twenty years. Jonathan is very smart and has always operated at the high added value end of the Insurance value chain, where insurance and reinsurance blur into the capital markets, but in all that time I had never sat down and had a really long, researched conversation with him. And that’s why this is such a satisfying interview. In the next forty-five minutes we dissect Envelop’s augmented underwriting business model, looking at its Lloyd’s and Bermuda platforms and its Machine-learning-powered approach to underwriting cyber risk. But this conversation goes way beyond and examines the future of underwriting itself in the global syndicated risk and capital markets, as well as outlining some of the new classes of business that will emerge in the coming decades. Envelop has an appetite way beyond Cyber and this is a really rewarding encounter with someone who understands our business in a more tech and capital savvy way than most of us. At the end of this conversation I felt like the person who has been allowed deep inside the black box and gets to see how it works and interrogate its way of thinking. Jonathan was on excellent form and was disarmingly open and accessible about Envelop’s modus operandi. I feel enlightened for this experience and so will you NOTES: GOFAI = Good Old-Fashioned AI LINKS: We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo: https://www.advantagego.com
If you just confined your view to the top four brokers, you might easily assume that not much has happened in the US retail broking segment in the last ten years. But if you broadened you view to the top ten or twenty, you’d be faced with a very large number of billion-dollar-plus revenue broking groups that you would have been hard pressed to name ten years ago and many of which didn’t exist as far back as the turn of the millennium. This has come about through huge sums in private investment, a lot of strategic realignment and a considerable amount of M&A. There are a lot of untold stories buried in this remarkable era of expansion and this podcast is all about beginning to remedy that because today’s guest forms part of this remarkably fast-evolving cohort. Gregg Bundschuh is the chief Growth Officer at EPIC, the retail broking arm of the wider Galway Holdings business, which also includes wholesaler JENCAP. As the business approaches $2bn in annual revenues and this podcast does a thorough examination of the intermediary’s specialist business model. As a construction lawyer turned construction broker, entrepreneur and now senior management executive, Gregg’s career is in many ways a personal embodiment of what EPIC is trying to build. It’s all about highly-specific top-down vertical industry expertise that gives an edge in chosen niches, adding more value and building a loyal and growing customer base that doesn’t want to be without your specialist knowledge. The icing on the cake is to then try to orchestrate all the different specialisms so that the client can be served everything they need through a co-ordinated EPIC offering. It’s an incredibly ambitious and challenging way of doing business and one that is setting the bar extremely high. For example, continued above-average growth is needed to fund constant reinvestment in keeping the knowledge and talent base at the cutting edge. But it’s also incredibly refreshing and makes for an enlightening and enjoyable discussion. Gregg is great company and is an insurance player to his core. Listen on and the next 50 minutes will give you an awful lot of original business ideas to think about. NOTES: SIR = Self-Insured Retention LINKS: We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo: https://www.advantagego.com
Todays’ guest has been working on implanting the best technology into the London Market since the days when computer screens only displayed varying shades of green. He’s someone who I have known for twenty years and have come to rely upon to unpack all the jargon, spell out the acronyms and explain in layman’s terms what is really happening in the ongoing process of London Market technological reform. This is because Jeff Ward, the sales Director of Ebix Europe, is very wise, very patient and also very good company. He also has clear, common-sense opinions and is good at giving logical, concise answers to complex questions, when others might end up over-elaborating, or indeed over-simplifying. In short Jeff Ward is a market gem and an invaluable friend to help navigate the complex process of digitisation in which the market currently finds itself. Ebix Europe was behind the first iteration of PPL and is now in the market with the latest generation of that market pioneer, a sophisticated digital placing system called PlacingHub. As we sit on the cusp of a genuine revolution in the way global business is to be transacted and information flows through the market, Jeff outlines how the world of electronic placing is likely to develop and explains the genuine complexity of the re-engineering of London’s core accounting and settlement systems in the first phase of the BluePrint 2 reforms. He also explains how adoption of data-first standards is fundamental, outlines why early attempts to change brokers’ and underwriters’ timeworn behaviour during the quoting and placing process did not succeed and looks at the best use cases, and probable limitations of, AI in insurance. I highly recommend you take the next 45 minutes to meet Jeff Ward, my great insurance technology friend and guide. I am absolutely certain that in no time he will become yours too. NOTES: CDR = Core Data Record GRLC = Global Reinsurance & Large Commercial Standards LINKS: https://ebixeurope.co.uk/
The global, wholesale and specialty insurance and reinsurance segment of the global market has been putting out very strong results in recent times. If I had to highlight a consistent theme in my interviews of the past year, it would be an almost universal desire among carriers for continued growth, but without compromising on profitability as appetites return and the market becomes more competitive. Today’s guest is a senior underwriter who embodies that conundrum. Andrew McMellin is President of Markel International, a business that has done extremely well in the past few years, and which has set itself ambitious growth targets for the next. This podcast examines the delicate balance that allows growth to continue to flow down to the bottom line and not just add volume on the top. Andrew has had a long and successful career and his insight and long-term perspective is extremely valuable. In this podcast we examine Markel International’s growth strategy in detail and on our way evaluate all the concurrent phenomena impacting the market, such as digitisation and the streamlining of follow capacity, as well as the impact of AI and a more collaborative reinsurance market. Andrew is on exceptional form and this is a very enjoyable encounter with a market player on the top of his game and looking to maximise the opportunities that a still healthy insurance market is affording. LINKS: We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo: https://www.advantagego.com
Today's Episode is fun and insightful from start to finish and that is entirely down to my guests. One of the great Eureka moments in insurance comes when you meet an actuary who is a great communicator. Five minutes chatting to them usually unlocks understanding that would take you years to glean yourself, or which indeed you may never have worked out without their help. Luckily today I am talking not to one, but two such people. Simon Pollack (pictured top) is the Founder and Director and Owen Whelan is the Managing Director of Calibrant, a really interesting, relatively young business concentrating on portfolio management, particularly in the burgeoning field of Delegated Underwriting Authority. With MGAs continually gaining market share and also garnering extra scrutiny from senior managers and market regulators, Calibrant is in a fast-growing segment of the market. The core of what Calibrant and its Sybil software platform does is to wring improvements to the loss ratio of underwriting portfolios through joined-up, granular analysis. It sounds simple in theory, but in practice bridging all the gaps between the underwriting, reserving, pricing and senior management functions is the culmination of Simon and Owen’s multi-decade experience in the industry. This is a duo right on the top of their game and this podcast is absolutely packed with valuable insights garnered from long and successful careers in our business. Simon and Owen met as London Market drinking buddies and you should think of this podcast as a very enjoyable chat in a bar with two great friends and a glass of your favourite tipple in your hand. You’ll learn a lot and after listening to this I expect you’ll want to spend a lot more time with this fun and down-to-earth duo. LINKS: https://www.calibrantinsurance.com/
Today’s guest is a visionary and in the next 40 minutes he’s going to outline the future of broking. As insurance placement process evolves from being the movement of documents around the market to a seamless flow of data between parties, we are on the cusp of a big bang in complex insurance. If you think that this is something that won’t be happening any time soon, you are completely wrong - it’s already happening. Anthony Siggers is the Digital Leader for Marsh Specialty UK and Marsh has already fully digitised 70% of its London slips. Given that Marsh places about $15bn dollars of premium a year into the London Market, this is one tech change that is already way past the tipping point. If a massive broker like Marsh can do it, so can everyone else. So we’re digitising the market, but what next? That’s what we spend most of this podcast discussing. For example how much of the market will be lead capacity and how much automatic or algorithmic follow? How will a broker be working in the near future? What will happen to costs, commissions and insurance penetration? And what about the impact of AI? And what are the secondary effects of all this change likely to be? Siggers has been implementing technology and pursuing entrepreneurial ideas in and around insurance and the financial markets for thirty years. He is eloquent and he is also great fun. This interview will completely change your perception of where the syndicated insurance and reinsurance markets are heading and how fast they are doing so. If you only listen to one podcast this year, make sure it is this one. NOTES: JSON (pronounced like the name Jason) is a file format for data transfer LINKS: We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo: https://www.advantagego.com
Today, we’re going to go deeper into the world of cyber attacks than we have ever done before. We’ll be looking at the insurance claims that they produce as well as the longer-term consequences for their victims Often as journalists covering cyber insurance we focus on the big hacks, the headline numbers, and gloss over the detail of the personal stories and the real hard yards that have to be run to recover from an attack and the potential long-term consequences for a business, its directors, its customers and all other stakeholders. As the immediate damage and business interruption triggers potential regulatory, statutory and other serious third-party consequences, these hard yards often have to be run down multiple different paths simultaneously. The in-depth interviews that follow will deepen your understanding of the more complex and long-tail nature of this peril. I’d like to put you right in the room in the shoes of the Directors of a company as an attack unfolds. We’re going behind the scenes to uncover what it’s really like when a business becomes the target of a digital assault, from the immediate shock to the long-term repercussions that are often ignored by boards. We’re also going to go into detail on how the nature of the cyber threat and the tactics of cyber criminals are evolving. To help me in this task my guests are: Magnus Jelen, (pictured top) Director of Incident Response EMEA for Coveware, a firm that helps victims of cyber extortion recover their data; and three senior executives at Beazley: Raf Sanchez (pictured 2nd from top), Beazley’s Head of Cyber Services, Cyber Risks. Melissa Collins, (pictured 2nd from bottom) Head of Third Party Cyber & Tech Claims, and Wayne Imrie, (pictured bottom) Head of London Market Wholesale Executive Risks. Magnus and Raf are right on the front line, dealing with the immediate consequences of a hack. Magnus even deals with the hackers themselves. Melissa deals with the external insurance claims that result and Wayne is a Directors and Officers (D&O) specialist who has a deep understanding of how the D&O and Cyber insurance products interact. LINKS: As promised, here is the link to Beazley's latest Risk and Resilience Survey Spotlight on Tech Transformation & Cyber Risk 2025: https://www.beazley.com/en-001/news-and-events/spotlight-on-tech-transformation-cyber-risk-2025/
This week’s Episode is a burst of energy. Jason Howard is President of Acrisure International and has the task of looking after everything in the Acrisure Group that is outside the US, Reinsurance and Wholesale. This means most of the world is effectively his oyster. A group as ambitious and fast-moving as Acrisure needs someone with enormous drive and enthusiasm to deliver on such a universal role and Jason is the embodiment of that. In this podcast Jason explains Acrisure’s global end-to-end insurance strategy in great detail – from a retail broker anywhere in the world all the way to Lloyd’s Syndicates and the capital markets. This makes for an incredibly broad and rich conversation. Naturally we talk about the role of strategic M&A in building a global network, but we also discuss the market and how a business like Acrisure can differentiate itself by joining up the global value chain and making it work more responsively and more efficiently. We also dissect the less tangible questions of corporate culture and the industry’s developing relationship with technology and automated underwriting in general and AI in particular. The business’s explosive growth record speaks for itself – as does Jason. I first met Jason in an underwriter’s queue over thirty years ago – I can verify that if anything today he has more energy, enthusiasm and positivity than he did back then as a young man. It’s infectious. I promise that the next half an hour will pass by very quickly and in it you will learn exactly what makes Acrisure International tick and a lot more besides. NOTES: Jason was last on the show five years ago when he was CEO of Beach & Associates, before it was rebranded to Acrisure Re. Here’s the link to that podcast, recorded 240 Episodes in the past: https://thevoiceofinsurance.podbean.com/e/ep-22-casualty-capital-and-covid-with-jason-howard-ceo-of-beach/ LINKS: We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo: https://www.advantagego.com
Today’s Episode is a really enjoyable two-hander. After over twenty years running the IUA (or the International Underwriting Association, to spell it out in full) Dave Matcham has just passed his CEO role over to Chris Jones. So this episode serves a double mission. The first is to mark the extraordinary career of Dave Matcham, the London Market’s longest-serving CEO and someone who has helped guide the market through more than 20 years of change. With Dave we look back on some of the most significant milestones and sometimes tumultuous events shaping a lifetime of service to the market. Then we will bring everything up to date as Chris and Dave outline the London Company market trade body’s agenda on all the most pressing issues of the day. Running a trade body is often a thankless and unglamorous task, with a huge amount of work going on behind the scenes to make sure the market functions as it should. Dave has been a tireless servant for his membership and the broader London Market and Chris has big shoes to fill. Dave has always been one of the most knowledgeable and approachable senior figures in the market, with a straightforward, no-nonsense approach to business. From this meeting Chris is continuing in that mould. So, if you want a sense of how international insurers’ relationship with the UK regulators is developing, where market process reform is heading and how the market is dealing with issues such as the application of AI and the policing of non-financial misconduct, please listen on. Dave and Chris are well-rounded, level-headed and very often light-hearted company and the time will fly by. We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo: https://www.advantagego.com
Today’s Episode is all about collaboration. To anyone in the London Market, VIPR has become a very well-known technology company, particularly in the area of Delegated Authority, where its Bordereaux management systems have achieved a critical mass of adoption. But as the business looks to expand globally, particularly the huge and strategically-crucial US market, it needs to partner with existing major players to achieve its goal. Just because we all know that weaning the insurance sector off spreadsheets and other documents is a universal problem, it doesn’t follow that a business like VIPR will automatically gain business just because it has a solution that has been tried and tested over time. This is where Sikich comes in, as a trusted adviser implementing technological transformation, it’s picked VIPR to go to market to help prepare itself for the coming fully-digital and AI-enabled age. In this podcast Rahul Bhatia, Principal at Sikich and Tony Russell Chief Revenue Officer at VIPR outline this alliance and the huge prize on offer to clients that are able to automate how data, not documents, flow through their businesses, from their customers and onto their own suppliers and wider stakeholders. MGAs, particularly US-domiciled ones, have ridden a spectacular wave of growth in the past decade. If that is to continue and they are to cement their tech advantage, they need to listen to what Rahul and Tony have to say. We live in exciting, revolutionary times and today VIPR and Sikich are at the frontier of delivering a lot of the technological change that much of the industry has been dreaming about for decades. So if you want to know how underwriters can grow without adding to cost while at the same time becoming more skilful at underwriting and more responsive to client needs and new demand, this podcast is for you. Rahul and Tony are hugely experienced in this field and are relatable, down to earth and easy to talk to. I can highly recommend a listen. LINKS & CONTACTS: https://www.viprsolutions.com/ www.sikich.com Rahul Bhatia’s contacts are: LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/rahul-bhatia-profile/ Email rahul.bhatia@sikich.com
Today’s guest has one of the broadest international reinsurance roles of anyone I have interviewed on the podcast. That’s because Louise Rose has oversight over everything that TransRe does outside of the Americas. Louise has been on the show before as part of the annual Monte Carlo special Episode, but it’s wonderful to have the time for a comprehensive examination of the state of the reinsurance world. And that is exactly what you get. We cover everything from the trajectory of the market to Trans Re’s strategy as it looks to gain a stronger foothold in Continental Europe and the Asia Pacific region. Ai, Cyber, MGAs and the state of the Casualty market all get a thorough work-over. Louise is in her 29th year at Trans Re and is always direct in her communications style. It’s refreshing and makes for a highly informative and valuable encounter. NOTES: Here’s a link to the excellent US Public D&O report that we mention in our conversation: https://www.transre.com/u-s-public-do-2025-insurance-market-update/ We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo: https://www.advantagego.com
As the global subscription market digitises, the roles of market leaders and followers are becoming much more clearly demarcated. There are businesses designed to be leaders with large investments in class-specific expertise and specialist distribution relationships who are looking to align followers and consortium partners behind them. There is also a parallel class of follow-only underwriters looking to support and amplify those same leaders. It’s a modern twist on the oldest symbiotic relationship in the subscription market. Ki is an example of a wholly digital business that is looking to become the ultimate following market and this expansive conversation with its CEO Mark Allan sketches out much of what the future of London underwriting is going to look like. Ki has been a first-mover in the world of algorithmic underwriting and has built a billion-dollar business that has matured, become independent and is now offering to share its expertise as a tech partner for underwriters and brokers alike. Mark knows more than any of his peers about what is achievable and what is likely to change in the London Market of the future. On the basis of this conversation, the future of the market should be very bright, as it becomes much faster, more agile and responsive to brokers and clients, while at the same time becoming much more efficient and productive and a genuine alternative home for the sort of business that has traditionally only been accessible to local market underwriters around the world. It’s fascinating and invigorating stuff. Mark answers all the big questions and many more besides. You’ll learn a lot and the time will rush past. LINKS: We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo: https://www.advantagego.com
I really enjoyed recording this podcast. That’s probably because since I last spoke to Mark Wheeler, Co-founder and Co-CEO of Mosaic Insurance, a full three-and-a-half years ago, he has been able to execute and begin to reap the rewards of all the plans he laid out in Episode 99. There’s nothing like a sub-80 combined ratio to put a spring in your step and validate the vision you had when you founded the business, particularly when it comes relatively early in a start-up’s life. Mosaic has now built out its global platform and wrote over 660 million dollars in gross premiums in 2024, with that number set to grow as the group continues to scale. This interview distils the group’s highly-specialist added-value underwriter-led philosophy in excellent detail. But at its core, this podcast is really all about a real Lloyd’s expert making the most of all the advantages of the market’s unique syndicated underwriting and capital platform. It’s about the deep understanding of risk and the many shades of diversified capital that that risk can be connected to to create a sustainable ultra-specialist insurance business. Mosaic has its own capital, third-party capital, specialist reinsurance relationships and a large group of syndicated insurance partners underwriting alongside it. It is highly diversified and is set to diversify more. It’s capital-efficient, but certainly not capital-lite. Today this is an almost unique model but at the same time it will be a very familiar one to anyone who knows Lloyd’s longer-term history. As the market splits into leaders, followers and data-heavy portfolio managers, here’s as good a summary of the 21st century lead underwriter model that you are likely to hear anywhere. Mark is a charming guest and this is one of those interviews that just crackled along of its own accord, without prompts. I can highly recommend a listen. NOTES: Mark Mentions a Toby. This is Toby Smith, Mosaic’s CEO of the Americas He also mentions Burkhard, which is Burkhard Keese, former CFO of Lloyd’s. FAL (Pronounced as a word) = Funds at Lloyd’s CISO = Chief Information Security Officer LINKS: We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo: https://www.advantagego.com
When I meet someone to record an interview they often ask me how long the podcast is going to be. My stock answer is that it entirely depends upon them. Some people talk more than others and some people pack an awful lot into a lot less time, while others take longer to fully express themselves. You also never quite know where the conversation is going to go and that is a huge variable. Today’s podcast is lively, fun and gets straight to the point. That’s because it entirely reflects our interviewee. Kevin Gill is the Chairman of IRLA, the Insurance and Reinsurance Legacy Association. IRLA is the UK trade body that represents insurance and reinsurance legacy management professionals and this interview will bring you right up to date with everything that is happening in this increasingly mature and sophisticated segment of the marketplace. As legacy becomes ever more embedded as an essential, trusted service provider and capital partner for the live market we discuss how that relationship is evolving and where it might end up in the long term. The legacy market also has its own cycles independent of the live market and so we look at the relative state of the two markets and how this affects dealmaking. We also take the temperature of how the legacy sector feels about some of the more problematic recent live underwriting years, as well as looking at emerging loss trends and prospects for the application of emerging technology such as Ai to the sector. The portrait that emerges is of a confident, professionalised and vibrant segment that is ready to trade and is looking at interesting growth opportunities as some of the soft-market underwriting years begin to mature. Kevin is a breath of fresh air and there are no subjects left off the table. My bet is that you’ll finish this episode wanting more. NOTES: ADC = Adverse Development Cover LINKS: We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo: https://www.advantagego.com
Today’s Episode is special and completely out of the ordinary. Regular listeners will know that in most episodes I will talk to senior insurance and reinsurance executives and focus on what they have just done and what are about to do. Today’s no different in that respect, but it’s a far richer encounter because of who my guest is and what he has been doing since the summer of 2023. Until very recently Steve Arora was the co-founder of Alpine Re, a new balance sheet reinsurer looking to tap into a disrupted reinsurance market. Alpine Re didn’t end up materialising, but only after an intense 20-month period of activity in which investors of all shapes and sizes were contacted and canvassed. All this means that Steve is currently better qualified than even the best investment banker to talk about what investors want from the reinsurance industry. Once you have left no stone unturned you get to see the real layout of the bedrock below and in our interview Steve goes really deeply into the appetites, hopes and fears of each investor type. We also examine in great detail the optimal design of the model reinsurer of today. If you had a blank piece of paper and could start a new reinsurer from scratch, where would you be domiciled and how many underwriting locations would you have? And what would you be looking to write? Would you be a specialist or a generalist and what would your relationship with technology be? Understandably Steve has been thinking very hard about all of these questions and his insights are highly valuable. This episode is a great illustration of how no experience ever goes to waste. Steve is on excellent form and the interview has great pace and intensity. In our world very few people try something genuinely entrepreneurial more than once in their careers and in this meeting you’ll learn all of the lessons that Steve has learnt from time out spent a long way out of his comfort zone. It’s clear to me that the next role or venture that Steve becomes involved with will benefit immeasurably from this recent intense experience. In the meantime I can highly recommend a listen. NOTES: During our conversation I couldn’t remember when Steve was first on the podcast. It was on Episode 8, way back in 2020 when he was CEO of Axis Re: https://thevoiceofinsurance.podbean.com/e/ep8-japan-florida-and-casualty-renewals-preview-steve-arora-axis-re/ LINKS: We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo: https://www.advantagego.com