The Voice of Insurance

Today’s guest is well on the way to cracking a problem that has been vexing the market for thirty years and something I have been writing about specifically for the last twenty.

We all know that the process of syndication of risk in the London and other international insurance and reinsurance markets is full of inefficiencies and ripe for reform.

But just because a problem has been around for a long time and has been well documented, it doesn’t make finding and implementing a solution any easier.

I have lost count of the number of insurance and reinsurance exchanges I have seen launch and then wither and die over the last two decades.

Gilbert Harrap, the CEO of InsurX is someone who is setting out to change all of this.

Many exchanges failed either because they were founded by people with little understanding of complex insurance or they alienated their potential users, particularly the brokers, who often rightly or wrongly perceived them as a threat to their businesses.

InsurX is different because Gilbert is someone with market experience who is focusing on building a utility that could help both underwriters and brokers increase volumes and improve margins.

This is a fascinating conversation with someone running a business that has already gained significant traction in two classes of business and is looking to expand across the board.

Gilbert is one of us and I think that’s a big part of why InsurX has been well received. He is laser-focused on helping brokers serve customers better while allowing underwriters to diversify in smart new cost-effective ways.

He doesn’t want to be an underwriter or a broker – he just wants to be the one connecting them using intelligent new methods that add value to both parties.

I really enjoyed my time with Gilbert and left feeling that InsurX might be one of the first exchanges to make it in the complex syndicated risk space.

I also ended this conversation feeling much more optimistic about the future of the London Market and its prospects of increasing its global share of high-quality insurance business.

LINKS: We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:

https://www.advantagego.com/

Today’s guest is VIPR’s Client Services Director, David Butler.

On this show I speak to lots of CEOs and that means my guests are sometimes quite far removed from the day-to-day solving of problems for clients.

David’s job is to be as close to the client as possible, finding out what their real problems are and therefore what they really need.

It’s then his job to make sure that what VIPR are providing those customers with is exactly what’s required – and more importantly that customers have all the training and support to make sure they can get the maximum benefit out of a product and can adapt and reconfigure it effectively as their business develops.

All this means is that he probably has his finger closer on the pulse of what is worrying carriers in the market than almost anyone around.

So as the market digitises and looks to analyse the new data pools that it is collecting and apply new technologies like AI at many different points in the value chain, it is people like David who are going to be doing all the heavy lifting.

David is a technology specialist with just under 30 years’ experience and his insights into how to make the most of all the exciting new tech at our disposal or just coming onstream, is hugely valuable.

He’s also a really friendly person who has spent much of that long career explaining complicated ideas in ways that are really easy to understand and that’s why I can heartily recommend a listen today. NOTES I promised to look up what the common computing term BUS stands for:

BUS is an acronym for Binary Unit System. These are used to used to transfer data around a network (a bit like the way a real-life bus moves people about).

Today’s guest has quickly shown himself to be one of the industry’s most accomplished leaders.

When he took over at SiriusPoint just over 18 months ago he gave the business a clear but tough turnaround plan that he executed quickly.

Now just coming through the other side of a remarkable change in fortunes, he is brimming with confidence and ambition to move the business he runs further up the performance percentiles.

Scott is a very strong communicator and the next forty minutes are packed with very specific ideas, strategies and clear direction.

With someone like Scott, you get the impression that you will always know where you stand and exactly what he expects of you, but the very detailed nature of his responses shows that he also listens extremely carefully to what questions he is asked.

SiriusPoint is very much marching to his beat and he is a very engaging, disarming and direct podcast guest.

LINKS:

We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:

https://www.advantagego.com/

Today’s podcast is a real tour de force with the founding CEO of a maturing Lloyd’s market business that is starting to come into its own in its eleventh year of trading.

Fresh from a takeover by blue-chip private equity investor CVC and now boasting a sub-90 percent combined ratio and $450mn in capacity for 2024, Duncan Dale, CEO of Dale Underwriting Partners, is full of confidence and is excited about the opportunities that the Market is currently throwing up for his firm.

In many ways Dale Underwriting partners is a microcosm of the Lloyd’s of the last ten years. The market of the twenty-teens was a difficult one in which to start up, but patience and persistence have finally started to pay off.

The investment by CVC last year was rightly reported as a re-affirmation, not just of Duncan’s business, but of the continued attractiveness of the Lloyd’s platform itself.

This discussion is fun and is a wonderful dissection of the state of the market.

It’s also an underwriting masterclass with a canny trader sharing his long experience and deep understanding of the US casualty insurance and reinsurance market, the discussion and debate of which has been hogging the headlines for most of the last 24 months.

Listen on and hear about the opportunities that are exciting Duncan now that he has grown the underwriting platform and attracted the capital to make the most of them.

NOTES:

When Tom Bolt was at Lloyd’s his job title was Director of Performance Management.

LINKS

We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:

https://www.advantagego.com/

How do you get big, globally diversified insurance companies to innovate? It’s something that we all know is way easier said than done.

That’s what today’s podcast is really all about.

Today I’m joined by two senior executives who are working together to implement change, improve efficiency and do new things at global insurer QBE.

Global Head of Cyber Serene Davis has been tasked with creating a global offering for cyber at QBE, where up to now development has been patchy, with different strategies playing out in various markets across the world.

And CEO of QBE Ventures James Orchard runs a small team whose job it is to assist senior executives like Serene in realising their vision through the partnerships and strategic investments that will build up the tech providers that will help them achieve their goals.

It’s a fascinating conversation and one that embodies QBE’s relatively new CEO Andrew Horton’s plan to imbue a culture of innovation across the group globally.

Indeed Mr Horton may not be on the show himself in this Episode, but his presence never seems to be far from the surface.

It’s clear from this lively chat that if you want to instil change and a culture of innovation you have to lead from the top and you have to resource it and be strong enough to accept that there will be many twists and turns on the road to eventual success.

Listen for yourself – for anyone who is grappling with the challenge of keeping a large insurance business up to speed and relevant, without throwing out the parts of its culture that have already got it to where it is, this will be a valuable listen.

NOTES

I let the abbreviation KPI through. It stands for Key Performance Indicator.

LINKS

We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:

https://www.advantagego.com/

Today we’re doing something completely different. We are going to try to look into the future. In this Episode none of the people we are going to talk to are senior insurance leaders. But they might be the insurance leaders of the future. We in insurance know that we’re not likely to be at the top of young people's wish lists when it comes to a future career.  But it’s only recently, as we have focused more on talent gaps, that we have started to do something about remedying this problem. That’s where today’s episode comes in. There is a wonderful talent accelerator called Startup Sherpas that goes out and engages with young people via paid work experience cohorts that are funded by industry. These projects, which take a hundred young people each, are called Supersquads. Last summer Allianz, Aviva and the London Market Group (the LMG) sponsored one of these Supersquads and three of today’s guests are graduates of that scheme. Startup Sherpas calls them Sherpees. In that project the Sherpees were asked to come up with ideas to help the Insurance sector better get the attention of young people and make them more likely to think about a career in insurance. The Sherpees came up with a huge number of ideas and these were whittled down to the best, three of which you’re going to hear about today from their creators. Howden Ventures and its insurer innovation partners are sponsoring the next Supersquad and it was the Head of Howden Ventures and recent Voice of Insurance guest, Tom Hoad who was the person who got me involved. Today’s recording happened in the Lloyd’s Lab at a live event I chaired in which the Sherpees pitched their idea to an audience of industry people. I grabbed five minutes with the presenters Chelsea Abili (Bottom left), Amaan Patel (Top Left) and Funta Olenrewaju (Top Right) just before they went on stage. But first I spoke to Dan Wyllie (Bottom Right) Managing Director & Chief Operating Officer at Startup Sherpas to set the scene LINKS: https://startupsherpas.org/ Here’s the report that came out of the first Supersquad: https://startupsherpas.org/register-interest-insurance-time-machine-report-2023 We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo: https://www.advantagego.com/

Greg Hendrick is a dream guest. He’s smart, incredibly knowledgeable and experienced, but also really easy and fun to talk to. He’s also still only in the fourth year of building out a major insurer, reinsurer and capital markets partner completely from scratch. For Greg and Vantage Risk, time moves a lot faster and experience is accelerated and compressed compared to the rest of us. There’s a huge amount to talk about and that’s why I was delighted to be able to spend so much time talking to him again. Here we catch up on how Greg’s strategy has evolved against plan and get into great detail about the state of the market all the way across the insurance value chain. But I’m glad we also spend a lot of time looking at how technology is shaping the future of underwriting and completely re-organising the way that we all work and interact with our colleagues day to day. After all, not many people get to the chance use all their experience to design a whole new business from scratch following a contemporary Blueprint with no legacy issues to deal with. Greg sounds like he’s really enjoying this opportunity and I think you’ll enjoy it too. NOTES: Greg mentions a Dinos. That is of course Dinos Iordanou, Vantage Risk’s non-executive Chairman. LINKS: We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo: https://www.advantagego.com/

Today’s guest has one of the biggest jobs in the London Market. Kate Markham is CEO of Hiscox London Market and the last time we spoke she had just brought her business unit through a remediation strategy that was beginning to bear fruit. Eighteen months later, and the results have been stellar. Today the best are looking to invest and grow and get out on the front foot and lean into the opportunities that a still very strong market has to offer. And this podcast is all about that. This is a business very much looking to the future. Our conversation came about because Hiscox has been one of the first to experiment with artificial intelligence to help speed up and enhance the lead underwriting process and so I wanted to dig right into the detail of what Kate and her teams had done and what the results had been like. So we spend much of this discussion going deep into this and examining where the next steps are going to lead. It’s a very heartening and positive message. Underwriters aren’t going to be out of a job because they will be freed up to add real value in the assessment of risk and to enhance the service that they give brokers and innovate to improve the relevance and quality of the cover that can give their ultimate customers. The emergence of a fully connected digital value chains is also going to make it much easier for a much larger share of world business to access the London Market. After all if underwriters make it really simple to send something to London, and turnarounds are almost instant, why wouldn’t many more brokers seek quotes? Kate is full of energy and enthusiasm and our conversation is fun and rattles along at a fast pace. Kate is also one of those leaders who has the gift of instilling confidence in the people they come in contact with and this podcast put a spring in my step about the quality of the London Market’s future if it can grasp the unique opportunities it is currently presented with I got a lot out of this chat and I think you will too. NOTES: I let the abbreviation D&F get through. It stands for Direct and Facultative and is big-ticket property business.

LINKS: We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo: https://www.advantagego.com/

Today’s guest is one of the most remarkable and exceptional people I have had on the show. Guillaume Bonnissent is the CEO of Quotech, a business he founded just over four years ago. With over 20 years in underwriting Guillaume can boast one of the most eclectic resumés of any of his peers. He’s written almost every class going, via almost every distribution channel in the insurance value chain, spanning specialist insurance, treaty reinsurance, portfolio underwriting and an MGA. This gives him a unique perspective on the needs of underwriters of all shapes and sizes, and indeed brokers too. But the really remarkable bit is that he has always been a technologist. He learned coding as part of a business degree and has kept his skills up to date. This meant that when in his last role he was looking for some software that it turned out didn’t exist, he was able to write a prototype version of what he needed himself. The tool worked and he quickly saw the potential for a new software business and Quotech was born. It’s a remarkable story which is really all about giving teams everything they need to do their jobs better. It’s a very rare story of software made by an underwriter for underwriters. In this podcast we’ll certainly learn all about Guillaume’s original inventions, which are being adopted by some very influential market businesses, but we’ll also have a really deep and far-ranging discussion about the long-term consequences of digitisation and artificial intelligence on the insurance value chain. Guillaume is a real London Market original and I found it really easy and fun to talk to him. Listen on and I think you will find it as enlightening and enjoyable as I did. LINKS Quotech https://quotech.io/