Ep232 Nick Line CUO Markel International: The Magic Moment where Underwriting Happens

Nov 26, 2024

Join Nick Line, Chief Underwriting Officer at Markel International, as he reflects on his dynamic insurance career from actuary to leader. He shares insights into the evolving London insurance market and the vital role of technology in underwriting. Nick emphasizes the importance of adaptability amid market fluctuations and explores new growth opportunities in climate risk and sustainable energy. The conversation also touches on the rise of cyber insurance and the need for underwriters to embrace a collaborative, client-focused approach.

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ANECDOTE

Early Career and Markel Acquisition

Nick Lyne joined Terra Nova in 1997 as a part-qualified actuary, later acquired by Markel.
He faced challenges presenting reserve deteriorations to Tony and Steve Markel during the post-acquisition period.

INSIGHT

Importance of Honesty and Transparency

Presenting bad news honestly and transparently, even to intimidating figures like the Markel brothers, earned Nick Lyne respect.
This experience taught him the importance of preparation, honesty, and admitting when you don't know something.

ANECDOTE

Markel's International Expansion and Lyne's Evolving Role

Markel International expanded globally, including into Spain, Singapore, Canada, Germany, and Holland.
Lyne's role expanded to include overseeing reserving, pricing, catastrophe modeling, and Solvency II implementation.

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Today’s episode is a real treat. With all Voice of Insurance podcasts the aim is to be able to get to a level of comfort and ease with a guest so that what we end up hearing is as close you can get to listening in on a lively conversation between two good insurance market friends in a bar.

This week I think we managed it and that’s down to my guest, Nick Line, the Chief Underwriting Officer of Markel International.

Nick has had a fascinating career, almost all of it at Markel and one of the forerunner companies that it acquired to make its entry into the London Market in the late 1990s.

Nick has been through markets hard and soft as well as reserving cycles plump with redundancy followed by equal and opposite inverse periods of insufficiency and strengthening.

You could say he has seen most things – and he also seen those phenomena through different lenses as he started his career as an actuary and only more recently took a more public-facing role.

Nick’s story is Markel International’s story too- as well as that of the evolving London and wider international insurance markets over the last 30 years.

As the market has become more technically sophisticated and reserving, pricing, capital and risk have to be measured and controlled, it has become perfectly logical that a CUO might not necessarily be someone who has written a risk in anger themselves

We cover quite a bit of history but it is the forward-looking parts of this podcast that are the most rewarding because Nick combines all the technical smarts one would expect from an actuary with the communication skills of the best CEOs.

His is a vision of the tech-and-data-empowered underwriter and global insurance market of the future, but one where the magic always still happens at the behest of a human insurance professional.

Markel International has grown quickly in the hard market of the last few years and this podcast is a record of a business that has found a groove and is firing on all cylinders.

We made this recording in Markel’s London office only aided by coffee, tea and water with no beer or wine anywhere to be seen.

But by the end it’s almost as if the champagne were flowing as tongues and jaws were loosened and expansive ideas were unleashed on the world.

This makes for a fun listen that is brimming with smart observations and interesting takes from Nick.

I hope you enjoy this one as much as I did.

We also thank audio advertiser, The Insurance Network (TIN), organiser of the highly-successful TINtech events series. This week they are advertising their successful TINtech London Market event, which will be happening on 4th February 2025.

But before then Data Jam, which is focused on exploring the implications and opportunities of data, analytics, AI and automation in the insurance sector, takes place on 28th November at Convene, 133 Houndsditch, London EC3. I’m going to be there.

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