The Voice of Insurance

Todays’ podcast is another really positive and uplifting meeting with someone right at the top of their game. Fresh from posting record annual profits of over $1.4bn on a top line that exceeded $6bn for the first time, it was perhaps understandable to find Adrian Cox, CEO of Beazley in excellent spirits. Whilst the market may be peaking in terms of pricing, speaking to Adrian it certainly doesn’t seem to be peaking in terms of profitable opportunity, and much of this podcast is a dissection of global specialist insurance opportunities in the world and how a top-tier progressive underwriter like Beazley is positioning itself to make the most of them. Whether it be fast-emerging new classes of insurance relating to the decarbonisation of the economy, burgeoning new geopolitical risk and complexity, the rise of parametric covers, the application of artificial intelligence or indeed the fast-changing dynamics of how insurance is transacted, this encounter reveals positive new thinking and investment in abundance. Listen on for all this and more. I think if you listen closely enough you can hear a distillation of Beazley’s distinctive culture coming through, not just in what Adrian is saying about the issues of the day, but in the way he is saying it. It seems that it is possible that rigour and discipline combined with worldly curiosity and a willingness to allow controlled experimentation in the understanding that not everything will go to plan can all form key parts of a successful business culture. This is another good episode to file away for when you’re in need of a morale-booster. Adrian’s enthusiasm and good humour are infectious and I think you’ll enjoy listening to this as much as I enjoyed recording it   LINKS: We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo: https://www.advantagego.com

This might be turning into a bit of a running theme, but today’s podcast is another really positive, really forward-looking encounter with the CEO of a global balance sheet business who is reaping the early benefits of a turnaround and transformation plan. President and CEO of AXIS Capital Vince Tizzio is on really strong form in this interview. In it we tally up where he feels AXIS is currently placed on the journey towards its stated aim of becoming the best specialty underwriter in the world. It’s clear that large strides have been made and in our chat Vince details the ongoing programmes, both strategic and operational that he feels are going to help the business achieve his ambitious goals. We also check in on where the best market opportunities currently lie and how AXIS is planning on making the most of them, as well as how the group is navigating opportunities such as AI and the volatile state of global risk of all descriptions. Vince is a great interviewee because he is authentic and wears his heart and his passions on his sleeve. I certainly came away with the feeling that with him what you see is what you get. Listen on an I think you’ll be able to hear for yourself. LINKS: We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo: https://www.advantagego.com

Today’s podcast is one of the most positive and optimistic I think I have ever recorded. Andrew Horton Group CEO of QBE has been in the role long enough to have been able to reap some of the rewards of the changes he has made at the global insurer since he took over the top job. Having dealt with legacy issues and posted some remarkable results that have validated his strategy – the mood from this interview is 100% forward-looking and upbeat. Andrew’s QBE has a spring in its step and a growth plan to execute into a global insurance and reinsurance market that seems to be throwing up opportunities almost wherever you look. It certainly helped that this was recorded on a pleasant early spring day in London, with plenty of sun in the sky and blossom on the trees, but the difference between this interview and the last one I did with Andrew two years ago is palpable. Today, Andrew is buzzing with energy and good humour and has audibly grown in confidence. In this discussion we make light work of all the issues of the day, taking in topics as diverse as Reinsurance, D&I, the long-term trends of facilitisation and algorithmic underwriting and their consequences, Lloyd’s and the London Market, and insuring the transition. So listen on as we take a world tour of market opportunities and a refreshed and revitalised player looking to seize the moment. If you are feeling jaded and in need a tonic – this is just what the doctor ordered! LINKS: We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo: https://www.advantagego.com We also thank audio advertiser, The Insurance Network (TIN), organiser of the highly-successful TINtech events series and Data Jam. www.tin.events

Today’s guest is without doubt the most successful insurance executive I have had on the show.

He’s also completely unique in that he is the only insurance boss I am aware of to have run one of the world’s largest insurers and its largest broking group.

Brian Duperreault is insurance royalty. Having started his career at AIG, he then transformed ACE from a Bermudian upstart to a major global player.

He then ran MMC and set it on the road to a radical recovery, founded Hamilton Insurance and then helped AIG get a spring back in its step

He has now just founded Mereo Advisors in probably one of the most difficult funding environments for balance-sheet businesses in his long career.

But this introduction shouldn’t be a run-through of his superb résumé – most of you know all of that already.

Before this meeting I’d met Brian a couple of times. I had a brief interview with him once in the early days of the Hamilton era and had chaired him onstage at an Insurance Conference.

But today’s episode really showcases why the podcast can be a much more intimate and valuable medium than others.

In this encounter we had the luxury of less time pressure and what resulted was a long and expansive conversation that is something very different.

If you want to know how Brian has found success, listen on – it comes through loud and clear in every sentence.

Brian cares deeply about what he does, but it’s obvious he cares about all the people in the organisations he has run even more. He is a rare CEO, not because he is brave, morally upstanding, strategically audacious, a natural underwriter and risk-taker who is strong when executing difficult decisions and has a clear vision for how create, grow and run great insurance businesses – he’s got all of that in abundance.

But on top of that he is self-aware enough to know instinctively when he should hand over to a successor and try something new. As he puts it, he knows you can let a role define you and it can get really hard to leave when you’re the big successful boss and everyone always laughs at all your jokes!

Some of Brian’s most lasting achievements have not just been the growth and performance of businesses while he has run them, but the robust state he has left them in and the continued sustainable growth they have all achieved after he has moved on.

I could go on – but I think you get the picture by now.

Listening back, I think we managed to do the opportunity justice.

Brian’s also great fun and we ended up laughing a lot more than I had imagined when poring studiously over my research and reading the superb Biography that has just been written about Brian by longstanding former colleague Wendy Davis Johnson in preparation for this interview.

This podcast contains an enormous amount of highly valuable advice. My advice is to listen on and take it all to heart. If as a result anyone listening achieves even a tiny percentage of the success that Brian has, it will have been time well spent.

LINKS:

Faith and Purpose, The Life and Vision of Insurance Icon Brian Duperreault, is out now and available here:

https://duperreaultbio.com/how-to-order-faith-purpose/

I can highly recommend a read.

We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo: https://www.advantagego.com We also thank audio advertiser, The Insurance Network (TIN), organiser of the highly-successful TINtech events series and Data Jam. www.tin.events

This week’s guest has probably the best 360-degree understanding of the insurance value chain of anyone I have had on the show. This is because Mike Keating has a career that spans collecting insurance premiums in person and runs all the way through underwriting, backing MGAs, working for and founding MGAs, to working for Private Equity and helping find investment to start new insurance businesses. Now Mike is putting all he has learned into running the Managing General Agents Association (the MGAA) the trade body that represents the MGA community in the UK and Ireland. The MGAA’s members write around £15bn – or just under $20bn - in GWP, so this is an organisation that carries quite a lot of weight in the market. In this podcast we examine the reasons behind the continued success of the MGA as a vehicle for delivering underwriting talent and the prospects for their growth to continue sustainably into the future. We also learn what is on the MGAA’s agenda, in terms of the lobbying work it does as well as what are the latest initiatives from the important educational and networking sides of the organisation. But leaning on Mike’s broad experience, our topic ranges are far wider than that. For example, a large part of our discussion extends to include the application of AI in the MGA space. With the average tenure of the underwriting paper backing MGAs hitting new highs, MGAs providing the preferred career path for many underwriters, and with someone as passionate and knowledgeable as Mike looking out for its interests, the future for the UK and Ireland MGA sector looks very healthy. But most importantly Mike is great company and an insurance player through and through and the best possible reason to listen to this podcast is to get the benefit of some of the insights that his long experience has given him. NOTES: We mention Reg Brown. Reg is a Lloyd’s luminary who ran his own Syndicate and is the driving force behind founding the MGAA, as well as many other market-wide initiatives and collaborations, most notably the Insurance Museum, of which he is Chairman. https://www.linkedin.com/in/reg-brown-62827313/

LINKS: We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo: https://www.advantagego.com We also thank audio advertiser, The Insurance Network (TIN), organiser of the highly-successful TINtech events series and Data Jam. www.tin.events

Today’s guest is making a return to the show after a three-year gap. That’s way too long for me because the last time she was on the podcast she made such a strong impression that I described her as a dream interviewee. But there are good reasons for the gap – not least a year’s gardening leave as she moved to take on one of the biggest jobs in broking. Luckily for all of us Lucy Clarke, President of Risk and Broking at WTW is back on the show. She’s still the dream interviewee and given her important new role and Willis’s re-stated ambitions to restore the sheen to this historical jewel in the global broking crown, she’s more of a dream guest than ever. This podcast doesn’t disappoint. In this interview I found Lucy on top form, fully established in her new role and clearly revelling in the task in hand. Here we unpick all of Willis’s strategy, from it’s ambitious return to reinsurance to its audacious digital broking initiatives, and we put all this in the wider context of Lucy’s extraordinarily broad view of the market’s ebbs and flows as well as its permanent structural changes and external opportunities and threats, such as those presented by AI Nothing was off the menu and with Lucy what you see is what you get – her drive and passion are always on display. Here’s someone with their sleeves rolled up and clearly enjoying a dream job scenario unfolding in front of them. LINKS: We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo: https://www.advantagego.com We also thank audio advertiser, The Insurance Network (TIN), organiser of the highly-successful TINtech events series and Data Jam. www.tin.events

Today’s episode is different because I’m not talking to an industry CEO, but somebody who has made a career of holding industry CEOs to account. Since before the turn of the millennium Ian Gutterman has been analysing the insurance industry on behalf of investors and in that time has sparred with all the top CEOs and executive teams. Analysts and journalists are kindred spirits – we both sit on the outside of the industry looking in and we both tend to speak to the same sorts of people, although we tend to ask different sorts of questions when we do. After a while we tend to seek each other out to compare notes. Journalists seek out the smartest analysts with the strongest personalities and the best communication skills and get them to explain some of the more technical and academic questions driving the industry. Ian is a journalist’s dream because he is incredibly intelligent but also refreshingly direct. Ian has personality and strong convictions in abundance and in this episode we cover all the big questions affecting the industry today, from when the 15-year bull market for intermediary valuations might come to an end, the wider consequences of the California wildfires and whether the insurers really have a proper handle on cat risk, to whether recent bouts of casualty reserve strengthening are now the end of the matter, or the lessons from the insurtech boom and why Venture Capital and insurance don’t mix. Ian and I had a lot of fun on this recording. Listen on and I think you will too Enjoy the podcast NOTES Ian writes a really strong insurance blog at https://iansbnr.com/ I always read it and I highly recommend you do too. It rarely pulls any punches. LINKS: We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo: https://www.advantagego.com We also thank audio advertiser, The Insurance Network (TIN), organiser of the highly-successful TINtech events series and Data Jam. www.tin.events

Today’s episode is packed full of really practical insights because this one is all about making things happen. So often in our sector we can very clearly see the change we have to make or the new system we have to adopt to be able to improve the way we do things, but we find it really hard  to achieve final implementation.

It’s as if the green pastures are right in front of us, tantalisingly in view, but there is a steep ravine that we have to cross to get there. As Ian Summers (Pictured, Top), who has been helping his employers and clients implement major change projects all his long career notes in this podcast, it’s incredibly common that the change management side of a project is overlooked or underestimated. And even if the systems are ready, are the people in the business really ready to start using them with confidence? This kind of skill is a very specialist one and its very specific to each industry. That’s why it is great to have insurance change management specialist Melody Miller (Pictured, bottom) on the show. Melody is an Executive Director at Sea Change London, which is a member of AdvantageGo’s ecosystem and is an expert in getting complex, time-sensitive and often existential mega change projects over the line. In this podcast we dissect the major changes facing players in the London and International insurance markets. Ian and Melody are on excellent form and do a great job of simplifying often complicated ideas so that laypeople like you and me can understand them. So, if you want to learn how to handle change better and get an expert feel for where difficult market-wide projects including the transformational but mission-critical Blueprint Two might be headed in 2025, I can highly recommend a listen. LINKS: We thank our sponsor AdvantageGo: https://www.advantagego.com https://www.seachangelondon.com

Today’s Episode has a really special feel to it and that’s all down to this week’s guest. Graham Evans is Executive Vice President and Head of International Insurance at Westfield Specialty Insurance and is bringing all that experience to bear as US Mutual Group Westfield looks to build out a globally diversified specialty operation to complement its core US insurance business. In this podcast we assess the prospects for the London and broader International specialty insurance markets and go into detail about Westfield International’s ethos and growth strategy moving forward. Graham has been working in the underwriting rooms of the London Market since the mid-1980s, so has been a London underwriter boy and man through markets of all descriptions. His is the sort of experience that is exceedingly hard to replicate and, listening back to this recording, it’s plain that all his answers bring a lifetime of London Market expertise to bear. This makes for a very enjoyable listening experience, particularly when the current prospects for the London Market are looking more exciting than at any other time in Graham’s long career. So listen on as Graham explains how the 177-year-old Westfield Group is planning to bring something a little different to the already eclectic mix of the London and International insurance markets. LINKS: We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo: https://www.advantagego.com