The Voice of Insurance

The transformation of major Japanese insurers into genuinely global insurers has been one of the most remarkable long-term changes of the last couple of decades. Today’s guest is an embodiment of that internationalisation. Ken Reilly is CEO of Insurance for Sompo in Asia Pacific but boasts a 30-year international career that has seen him work in New York, London, Bermuda and Tokyo. Ken now splits his time between Singapore and Tokyo because, in addition to his APAC role, he now runs Sompo’s own Japanese commercial insurance division. This is a really interesting encounter because – swayed by the big numbers, we are often guilty of an over intense focus on the North American and European insurance and reinsurance Markets. In this episode I get to talk to someone who knows that world intimately to show me the nuances of the Asia Pacific market through the eyes of a global business that has been in some of those markets for 50 years. Ken is a great guest and this is a very refreshing and enlightening interview. Listen on for the dos and don’t of Asia-Pacific expansion and a lot more besides. LINKS: We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo: https://www.advantagego.com

Richard Brindle, an experienced insurance executive and chair of The Fidelis Partnership, discusses their innovative multi-platform risk allocator strategy and lessons learned from recent market challenges. Joining him, John-Paul O'Hare, Group Director of Underwriting, delves into the surge in submission flow, the integration of AI in underwriting, and the impact of California wildfires on their approach. They explore the potential of emerging risk classes and emphasize the importance of in-office presence alongside a proactive claims handling philosophy.

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/  

Clemens Jungsthöfel, CEO of Hannover Re, shares insights from his extensive background in insurance, rooted in his family's agency. He discusses the importance of relationship-building in reinsurance, likening it to a marriage rather than a mere transaction. Clemens emphasizes the need for sustainable returns and tailored solutions to fit evolving client needs. He also touches on the complexities of the US casualty market, the role of technology in underwriting, and the growing significance of long-term partnerships in navigating a shifting landscape.

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