The Voice of Insurance

Our industry is a mature one and because of that, growth stories are highly valuable. So today, we're looking deeply into the best growth opportunity for insurance in decades. And to that end we are going to examine an industry experiencing exponential growth and looking to multiply the amount of capital that it deploys tenfold over the next five years. We are of course talking about data centres. The huge demand for computer processing power unleashed by the boom in the application of artificial intelligence is a key driver of this new demand. On a recent results call, Aon CEO Greg Case said that this new phenomenon could generate over $10 billion in new premium volume in 2026 alone. But whilst the opportunity is enormous, so are the challenges. We won’t get ten billion dollars in new premiums a year without taking on substantial new volumes of risk. The sheer scale of investment in new data infrastructure is staggering, putting immense pressure on traditional construction methods, supply chains, power grids, the environment, and of course the traditional insurance market that is being asked to provide insurance cover for this unprecedented surge in the construction of vast assets. To help us analyse this opportunity from all angles, we’ve convened four experts, each offering a unique perspective— from an investor owning and operating the centres, to the underwriters covering property, environmental, and renewable energy risks. So I’m delighted to be joined by Atul Roy, an investor in digital infrastructure at Cordiant Capital who is representing the customer in our discussions; Lindsay Shipper, Head of North American Commercial Property at Beazley; Ben Sheppard, a renewable energy underwriting expert; and Nicholas Pearson who is a specialist in environmental liability risk underwriting.

As an insurance journalist, sometimes I think we in our profession must be a leading indicator for the industry. When we are breaking news it certainly feels that way. But at other times it often feels like we are a lagging indicator. Today’s podcast is a case in point. From about 6 years ago the insurance media picked up on a long-term trend and told its story. The story was that transacting reinsurance within the Lloyd’s market was something that was on the wane. Somehow Lloyd’s had lost its attractiveness and its market share was in major decline, indeed perhaps terminal decline. But no sooner had that narrative become commonplace did events make us look somewhat foolish. Today’s guest is a prominent leader of a resurgence of the use of Lloyd’s as a platform for building a reinsurance business. Cathal Carr is CEO of Oak Global, a new business underwriting global reinsurance and retro from within the Lloyd’s platform. Before founding Oak, Cathal had a stellar career with RenaissanceRe spanning two decades, so his reinsurance pedigree is impeccable. In this podcast we get into the heart of what Oak is all about, but as we do we quickly uncover some long-term reinsurance demand trends that Cathal believes will drive his business and the reinsurance sector long into the future. Cathal is highly regarded among his peers and is representative of a new generation of insurance leadership now breaking through and setting up their own businesses. As such our discussions around how to design and attempt to future proof a new reinsurer in the age of cloud computing and nascent AI are fascinating and highly recommended listening. So listen on for an exceptionally well-rounded interview with the founder one of the market’s newest and most exciting young business. LINKS: We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo: https://www.advantagego.com

Listening back this is an almost breathless podcast. But what’s remarkable is that it should be breathless for just under an hour. Markel Insurance has been through enormous strategic changes in 2025 and its CEO Simon Wilson has been at the heart of them. The reinsurance business has been exited and management structures streamlined. Now that the heavy lifting has been done this podcast outlines the type of company Simon wants the new, revamped Markel to become. This Episode is a great advert for the podcasting medium because no amount of words or investor presentations can be anywhere near as expressive and vivid as an executive with a clear vision and the passion and drive to get on and execute. You can hear it in every sentence. Simon also attacks all our conversation topics with equal vigour and gusto, so AI, digitisation and facilitisation and the rise of portfolio underwriting, the fast growth of MGAs and fronting carriers as well as the prospects for the US casualty market are all analysed with great rigour in the coming hour. It’s all candid and transparent. Everything is out on the open and nothing is off limits. It’s genuinely refreshing to hear the CEO of a multi-billion-dollar premium unit of a public company talk in no-nonsense terms about their business and the market it operates in. I really enjoyed this one and I think you will too. LINKS: We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo: https://www.advantagego.com

Today’s guest is a living example of the London Market being a place where global talent can come and enjoy a varied and fulfilling career that doesn’t have a glass ceiling. He arrived in London over thirty years ago as a risk engineer and now oversees insurance businesses writing over $2.5 billion in premiums and employing around 400 people. Luis Prato is President of Liberty Specialty Markets in the UK & the Middle East and North Africa as well as being CEO of Liberty Managing Agency at Lloyd’s. Because he is an engineer by training he is exceptional in his grasp of the technical side of underwriting and insurance operations. But he is extremely well rounded and has absorbed and internalised the culture of personal relationships and mutual trust that underpins the London subscription market and allows it to keep reinventing itself. Luis instinctively knows that outperformance in underwriting is a combination of both science and art. He has the engineer’s analytical mindset to bring rigour and structure to his methods, but also knows that if change comes at the expense of the people who make the market what it is, it won’t succeed. So, as the market simultaneously softens, digitises, and adopts AI and varying degrees of automation, this is a compelling and highly relevant conversation that brings us right up to date. Luis is optimistic about the immediate, medium- and long-term prospects for the London Market and after listening to someone as technically gifted, credible and down-to-earth as he is talking in these terms, I think you will be too. NOTES I made a mistake when I mentioned Luis’s colleague Matthew Moore. Matthew last appeared on the show in his capacity as Chair of the London Market Group, that is the LMG, not the Lloyd’s Market Association - the LMA, which is what I said. LINKS: We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo: https://www.advantagego.com

It’s great to have a guest of the calibre of Greg Hendrick CEO of Vantage back on the show, not least because his relatively new and young businesses is still growing fast and there is a lot to catch up on. Now five years old Vantage is set to write around $1.6bn in gross insurance and specialty reinsurance premiums and is managing $1.5bn in ILS funds. But listening back it’s the quality and breadth of the discussion we have that I am really pleased with. Greg is hugely experienced and once he updates me on where Vantage is and how he sees the market and the firm’s strategy within it, the conversation quickly moves on and probably goes deeper into the art of underwriting and portfolio construction than I have with anyone on the podcast so far. We also dissect the best applications of AI and other major trends, such as the flow of business into Excess and Surplus lines, the boom in MGA and fronting and hybrid carrier formation and the phenomenon of algorithmic underwriting and facilitisation. Finally, as this is a business set up with a likely 5-7 or 8-year initial investor timeframe and the five-year threshold has now been crossed, we round off on where Vantage is in its development journey and the prospects for M&A to complete its platform as well as the chances of a possible future IPO for the business in the medium term. Greg doesn’t hold back on any of this. He’s a great communicator and knows exactly what he is doing. He speaks with the absolute confidence of someone completely on top of his brief. And I think you will be able to sense the big smile on his face coming through the audio recording. It’s rare to get an opportunity to put everything you have learned in a successful career into practice and Greg’s clearly been enjoying his time building Vantage. I really enjoyed talking to him and got a lot of this conversation. Listen on and I think you will too. LINKS: We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo: https://www.advantagego.com

Today’s guest is someone who is running a business that is moving so fast that every time he comes back on the show we have an enormous amount to talk about and this time it is no different. Today Jeff Radke CEO of Accelerant is talking to me after a transformational 12 months that has seen his young business continue its heightened growth and IPO on the New York Stock Exchange. At the Voice of Insurance we have been lucky enough to follow Accelerant’s story at first hand since Jeff’s first appearance four years ago. The proposition is as tantalising as it has always been. Good MGAs need stable capital, strong underwriting insights and ultra-efficient processes, while insurers, reinsurers and other capital providers want access to stable, diversified portfolios of profitable insurance risk on a meaningful scale. Accelerant’s job is to connect everything and everyone up and make sure everybody in the chain can make money and be happy. It sounds simple but in a highly-competitive regulated industry this can be anything but simple in practice. As Accelerant’s platform grows and becomes the conduit for low single digit billions in premium volume via over 250 member MGAs, it’s more mature state is coming into view. The business is evolving to become something far more like a genuine intelligent insurance exchange and underwriting management platform than a mere fronting or hybrid carrier. This conversation is the best and most transparent I have had with Jeff so far. Talking to Jeff, it’s easy to see why so much business has flowed in Accelerant’s direction. Jeff has had huge tech-enabled trends on his side, but he also has charisma in abundance, but then so do many in our business. It’s only when that charisma is combined with the deep knowledge of someone who has sat at almost all points of the insurance and capital value chain in his career that it becomes such a powerful combination. Listen on – this is a very rich conversation that I can highly recommend to anyone interested in what large swathes of insurance market are going to look like over the next decade and beyond LINKS: We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo: https://www.advantagego.com

Welcome to a really exciting re-encounter with someone who has been out of our industry for some years but is now back with a highly original new proposition. In my line of work I get to see an awful lot of new insurance ideas and so it takes a lot to fire up my imagination. And when I talk to people on this podcast about those new ideas – often the new product niche or service they are looking at might have a total addressable market of a few billion dollars. But today our guest has something that is applicable to the entire multi-trillion dollar capital base of the global P&C insurance industry. Andre Finn is the Chief Strategy Officer of Intellegri, a business looking to apply advanced mathematical and computational techniques to capital modelling. Now if that sounds a bit dry at first, please bear with me. At present our industry holds large amounts of excess capital to cover possible adverse development in reserves, based around wide probability ranges around what our tail risk is. If we could narrow that range down, even a tiny amount, we could release large amounts of capital, which would improve our returns and make our sector much more attractive to investors. But since this technology can also model scenarios to high new levels of detail and accuracy, it could also be applied to creating entirely new insurance products to cover perils that are currently uninsurable. Any surplus capital could then be applied to these new products and we could expand the insurance market, again making our sector far more attractive overall. The possibilities are genuinely exciting. I promise you that this is not going to be a maths podcast. Andre is authentic and incredibly down to earth and focused on the practical delivery of something new and genuinely revolutionary. Andre was also the founder and CEO of another advanced modelling and analytics firm called Sciemus for almost 15 years from 2001 and so has long industry experience, and possibly a few scars and lessons learned to show for it. Back then the insurtech phenomenon hadn’t yet come into being, so sitting here in 2025 the timing would appear to be far better than it was back after the turn of the millennium. NOTES: Highly recommended further reading on Intellegri is to be found here: https://www.intellegri.com/ Andre rightly thanked Howden for the use of their London office for this recording. He also mentioned former collaborator Henry Sopher  LINKS: We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo: https://www.advantagego.com

Today’s guest is making a highly welcome return to the show after a four-year absence. Since we last spoke the fortunes of the market have been transformed, her company has matured and floated successfully on the New York Stock Exchange and has had its Insurer Financial Strength rating upgraded to A by AM Best. All this means that CEO of Hamilton Insurance Group, Pina Albo and I had an awful lot to talk about. And our discussion doesn’t disappoint. Pina is crystal clear in her vision for Hamilton and how it is planning to make the most of the many opportunities it still sees available in today’s marketplace. There’s a refreshing directness and lack of ambiguity in Pina’s delivery that will leave you in no doubt as to what she thinks of the market issues of today, from the prospects for growth in US casualty reinsurance and the long-term trend to delegated and automated underwriting, all the way through to the best applications of AI. It’s a candid chat that’s also often fun. So check in for some valuable time in the company of a global insurance leader who is burnishing her credentials and making the wider market sit up and notice her achievements. LINKS: We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo: https://www.advantagego.com

At first glance, today’s guest might have an unenviable job. That’s because that job entails trying to find the common ground between the hundreds of Lloyd’s brokers, some of whom are extremely large and very many of whom are very small and very specialist indeed. Christopher Croft, the CEO of the London & International Insurance Brokers’ Association (LIIBA)is someone who I see and meet constantly out in the marketplace, and is someone I have been meaning to get on the podcast for some time. That’s because he’s one of those people that if you didn’t already know, a mutual acquaintance would suggest that you meet. LIIBA is a unique trade body and lobbying group because its membership operates globally and so blends a core remit looking after broker interests in the London Market with an important role representing wholesale specialist brokers on the global stage. And Chris is a unique character – he is technically and intellectually very strong but combines this with a down-to-earth good humour and sense of fun that is infectious. In this podcast we focus on the key role that Lloyd’s brokers play in innovation and how this role is often under-appreciated and misunderstood by regulators across the globe. We also get up to speed with all the regulatory goings on and market reform programmes in the UK, Europe and beyond. After a listen you’ll have learned a lot but I think will also have found a friendly new voice banging the drum for the global insurance industry’s pivotal role in the global economy and London’s unique role within it. NOTES: Here’s a Link to obtain the Innovation Imperative Report we mention. The report was produced in association with Insurindex: https://theinsurindex.com/reports/the-innovation-imperative-why-brokers-matter-more-than-ever/?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=LIIBAreport2025&utm_content=innovation LINKS: We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo: https://www.advantagego.com