The Voice of Insurance

Imagine a world where your underwriters can design their own insurance products in front of their eyes. A world where you don’t wait months for developers to come back to show you things they have built that end up bearing no relationship to what you asked them to do. In this world if you don’t like it you can just dump it and start again. And in this world the idea of legacy technology is meaningless- it simply ceases to exist. Here your only development cost is a monthly subscription. Well, it turns out this world is already here and not many of us know about it. I think you can tell from these words that today’s Episode is one that I found incredibly liberating and enlightening to record. I love it when I learn something new, especially when its something I have been hearing other people talk about for a while, but I’ve been too busy or perhaps too embarrassed or scared to ask them to explain it to me. The world of no-code software is one of those things that I’ve been hearing about for a few years, but haven’t really understood in any detail. So it was brilliant to meet Risto Rossar CEO of Insly, which is a business that has been running a no-code platform for the insurance industry for the best part of a decade. Risto is one of us – he’s an insurance guy. His first business was a digital insurance broker he launched around the turn of the millennium. Back then to do this you had to create all the tech yourself because it simply didn’t exist. That firm became very successful in the Baltic States and was sold on. But Risto soon realised he was onto something. Scaling brokers globally was hard but scaling software is a lot easier. He decided his next venture would be a tech business that helped to digitise the insurance sector That is how Insly was born. Now it’s working with 40 carriers and MGAs and around 4,000 brokers from around the world. Listen on for an inspiring conversation with someone who understands that the only way to unleash real innovation is to liberate insurance folk from the need to learn how to code and allow us to get genuinely creative with insurance for the first time in our history. In our discussion we also slay a lot of the myths around other tech buzzwords such as Blockchain and the idea of the moment: Embedded Insurance. Risto is great company and I can highly recommend a listen – you’ll learn a huge amount and hopefully end by feeling inspired and invigorated. LINKS Find out more about Insly here: https://insly.com/en/ And connect with Risto here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ristorossar/

Today’s Guests are Richard Watson and Stuart Bridges of Inigo This podcast is a really enjoyable encounter wholly because of the unexpected way these two executives decided to conduct themselves. In the build up to an interview like this I usually circulate some sample questions beforehand. This is to get the subjects comfortable and to be able gather their best thoughts before we start recording. But the night before this recording Richard emailed me suggesting that we ditch my list of questions and that he and Stuart should interview me instead. A bit of broking later and we ended up with elements of both ideas. I hope you enjoy it. Listening back it’s definitely something different. But then no-one in the 153 Episodes preceding this interview has ever suggested we do any like this. I think what follows is a great advert for the business Richard, Stuart and their teams are building. The two are different, they’re original and they’re free thinkers who are happy to share their ideas and quite a lot of their own unique personalities. They’re clearly also having the time of their lives running a business that is looking to underwrite in excess of 1.2 billion dollars of premium in its third year, which is, perhaps unsurprisingly, ahead of the original plan. NOTES: Richard speaks first. The abbreviations 10-Q and 10-K are respectively a US-listed company’s quarterly and annual results, as filed to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The figures and letters refer to the statutory forms the companies have to use. LINKS We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo: https://www.advantagego.com/ And our advertiser Bolton Associates: https://www.bolton-associates.co.uk/

Today’s guest is a real insurtech innovator with a story that is all the more remarkable because is bringing cutting edge tech to one of the oldest and most traditional lines of insurance, cargo. Ben Hubbard CEO and co-founder of Parsyl is an insurance outsider, who now finds himself running a Syndicate in the beating heart of the global cargo market – Lloyd’s of London. How did he get there? The other remarkable part of the Parsyl story is that it is unlike other insurtechs, who see fusty old insurance as ripe for disrupting, Parsyl is born from the idea that it is insurance that completes the tech side of the business because it allows economic incentives and enhanced coverage to be offered to customers to make them change behaviour and run their businesses better in the interests of all. So Instead of just selling technology it is also coming to take on a client’s risk – and that is something much more useful. To give you an idea of the firm’s progress and its potential, the business has just announced a strategic partnership with Lineage Logistics, the world’s largest temperature-controlled logistics solutions provider whose customers spend around $500mn a year on cargo insurance. Ben is a really friendly character who has the charisma and empathy needed to succeed in a multi-brokered market and I think his approach shows the way forward for how best to apply technology in the wholesale insurance value chain. So listen on – you may find inspiration for how to adapt Ben’s approach into your own chosen specialist lines. LINKS We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo: https://www.advantagego.com/ And our advertiser Bolton Associates: https://www.bolton-associates.co.uk/

Today’s guest is Phil Hobbs President & Managing Director at Liberty Specialty Markets. In the past Liberty Mutual businesses used to be run allowing a lot of autonomy and sometimes geographical and operational overlap. But these days Liberty is a business that has undergone a huge amount of work to unify in structure and present much more of a united front globally. And when you hear that Specialty Markets now produces 24 billion dollars of gross written premium, making it one of the largest commercial P&C insurers in the world, you can see why it makes an awful lot of sense to project and leverage that sort of scale out in the marketplace. That’s what makes this such an interesting discussion. When Phil joined Liberty 15 years ago he had a role in the group’s Lloyd’s Syndicate. Now he has a completely global view and only half of the premium he overseas is written in London. And because the business is a buyer and seller of reinsurance and retro, very few other organisations have such a joined up view of the insurance value chain in its entirety and with such breadth and depth. Given the turbulent state of the market Phil’s view is extraordinarily valuable. Here we talk in depth about how the recent reinsurance reset might affect market dynamics in insurance, as well as grappling with the state of play in core London specialty political risk and violence classes, Cyber, resurgent inflation, ESG and the post-pandemic work environment. Phil is very articulate and his calm and easygoing demeanour permeates our exchanges. He is also very good at making very complicated processes and dynamics much easier to understand and that is why I think a listen today will be very well rewarded. LINKS We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo: https://www.advantagego.com/ And our advertiser Bolton Associates: https://www.bolton-associates.co.uk/

Todays’ guest is from Insurtech royalty. He’s part of a select club of executives running youthful insurance businesses with valuations exceeding a billion dollars.  Bolttech and its Group CEO Rob Schimek have been in a hurry, building technology and a licensed ecosystem that is connecting large companies and their customers, brokers and other intermediaries, carriers and thousands of their insurance products in 30 markets across three continents. It’s done this from a standing start in only 2020 and today billions of dollars of premiums are quoted through the fluid connections that the business facilitates. I’ve been around insurance and technology long enough to know that getting this kind of traction this quickly is something special and that is why I wanted to get Rob on the show. In the last two decades insurance investment graveyards have been filled with big bold ideas like this and I wanted to get to the heart of what Bolttech is trying to do differently. It turns out that far from disruption the firm’s approach is to bring collaboration and flexibility to everything it does. It is also incredibly focused on the hard and unglamorous technical yards of Insurance that many more naïve insurtechs make the mistake of overlooking. Dealing seamlessly with the complex regulatory aspect of distributing thousands of products in different markets, perhaps through unlicensed entities, is an enormous challenge that this business takes just as seriously as the tech side of things. With a very senior insurance career already under his belt Rob really is one of us. So listen on for an idea of what the future of general insurance distribution is going to look like. And if you were ever dying to learn what all the fuss surrounding embedded insurance is really all about, then you have absolutely come to the right place! NOTES A couple of abbreviations smuggled themselves in: OEM = Original Equipment Manufacturer - eg. Samsung for mobile phones. API = Application Programming Interface – ie a way of connecting up different computer systems LINKS We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo: https://www.advantagego.com/ And our advertiser Bolton Associates: https://www.bolton-associates.co.uk/

Today’s guests are brokers - a London Market wholesale veteran and a rising star executive. John Sutton (CEO) and Jonathan Tritton (SVP) work together at Acrisure London Wholesale (ALW). The business does exactly what is says on the tin – it’s fast growing retail broker Acrisure’s London Wholesale operation It’s almost five years since ALW was formed and for the incredibly acquisitive Acrisure group, it’s a rarity because it is a business that has so far done all of its growth organically. This is a really lively discussion and one that I think shows this business and the market where it operates in a very positive light. ALW is finding ways of serving its huge and growing retail, and now wholesale, network with product designed and built in London. It’s doing this through a combination of old school savvy and expertise and a youthful nimbleness and technological awareness that is refreshing to see. What’s more as the market has hardened across the board and already hard-to-place covers are becoming even harder to place this duo are adamant that the London Market is standing up and being counted and is rediscovering much of its old creativity and entrepreneurial spirit. NOTES One abbreviation. PV stands for  Political Violence. LINKS We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo: https://www.advantagego.com/ And our advertiser Bolton Associates: https://www.bolton-associates.co.uk/

I’m delighted to say that todays’ guest is a returning visitor and he returns very much the insurance executive of the moment. Adrian Cox is the CEO of Beazley which since we last spoke has cemented its reputation as the most dynamic and pioneering of the London-headquartered global specialty insurers and reinsurers. Late in 2022 Beazley raised fresh capital to deploy into the hard reinsurance market. It did this in an environment when almost nobody else could get financing away. And just as we were about to do the recording the firm announced it had placed the first ever Cyber cat bond. So perhaps understandably Adrian was absolutely buzzing in this episode. The firm’s core markets have all reset and Beazley’s positions within them look extremely attractive In this crackling podcast we cover the market resets in property reinsurance, specialty and cyber classes and where Beazley fits in with them, as well as the ongoing ESG transition, the prospects for rising tech efficiencies in insurance and the emergence of new ways of working in the post-pandemic world. LINKS We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo: https://www.advantagego.com/ And our advertiser Bolton Associates: https://www.bolton-associates.co.uk/

Today’s podcast carries on where we left off after the State of the Reinsurance Market Special Episode which was released after Monte Carlo. We already knew this renewal was going to be difficult, but the subsequent intervention of Hurricane Ian stiffened reinsurers’ resolve further. The result was a bruising and often frustrating encounter. You should already know the headline numbers by now: Dedicated reinsurance capital shrank by the most since the global financial crisis of 2008 Global property catastrophe pricing was up 37% - the largest 1.1 increase since 1992 And there was a 50% increase in retro pricing, which means this highest echelon of reinsurance is now 165 percent more expensive than in 2017 The aim of this podcast is to put all of this into historical context, ask the big questions about who the winners and losers were and to examine what the change means for the 2023 outlook and the long-term strategic direction of the market and those who invest in it. To help me I have representatives from three of the top four reinsurance broking groups. David Priebe is Chairman of Guy Carpenter and brings experience and a global market view that few can match, although James Vickers Chairman of Gallagher Re International should certainly feel he is a peer. Finally David Flandro Head of Analytics at Howden brings his unique research-focused mind to bear and to give us a bigger macro take on what has been happening. A quick note. You must read Gallagher Re and Howden’s respective 1.1 reports as an essential accompaniment to this podcast. Both are hugely informative and insightful and are wholly complementary to each other Links to both are below. This was a bit more work than usual but I really enjoyed my three interviews and the subsequent time spent blending this highly accomplished trio’s thoughts together. I think it brings the renewals to life and will be useful for anyone wanting to navigate the re-set markets of 2023 ABBREVIATIONS IRR: Invested Rate of return EVA: Economic Value Added D&F: Direct and Facultative NOTES: David Flandro acknowledged the work of principal Howden 1.1 report author, Head of Research, Julian Alovisi. LINKS The Howden report is called The Great Realignment: https://www.howdengroup.com/news-and-insights/the-great-realignment-2023 The Gallagher Re report is called Market Turns: https://www.ajg.com/gallagherre/news-and-insights/2023/january/gallagher-re-first-view-market-turns/ We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo: https://www.advantagego.com/ And our advertiser Bolton Associates: https://www.bolton-associates.co.uk/

Todays’ guest is a highly experienced broker. And since right now is a market absolutely made for brokers of his calibre and experience, in this podcast Alastair Swift and I get stuck straight into the reality of the global specialty insurance market and the ultra-hard reinsurance market. Alastair is Head of Corporate, Risk & Broking Global Lines of Business at WTW and is CEO of Willis Limited, so has a view of the state of play in London that is hard to match. Listen on and you’ll hear: How net lines and greater syndication are the order of the day as insurers’ outwards reinsurance renewals stall Why the market is like an open pair of scissors – up where there are aggregation, and therefore reinsurance-related, issues and down where there aren’t. You’ll learn why clients have had enough, and alternatives such as captives and parametric solutions are booming. How the cyber market has stabilised and is ready to continue its exceptional growth. And why some insurers may choose to increase market share by absorbing higher reinsurance costs themselves and not passing them on. Alastair’s been on the show before and it shows through in his confidence and the concise way he answers all the questions I throw at him So listen on for an intensely concentrated description of the state of the market today, right from the eye of the storm, with someone completely on top of their brief. LINKS We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo: https://www.advantagego.com/

Today’s guest is Alex Blanco, CEO of Vantage Insurance. Alex has been dealt a rare hand in the insurance world, because he has had the chance to build something from scratch with no legacy. What would you do if you could start a specialist insurance business from a clean piece of paper, and in a pretty favourable insurance market environment?  What lines would you start with? How would you use technology? Would you stick to the E&S market or would you add admitted capabilities? How would you approach alternative distribution such as MGAs? Would you go international? These are the core questions at the heart of this podcast and Alex puts his multi-decade executive experience to providing the answers. Alex is a great guest and this is a really robust and far-reaching conversation. I can highly recommend a listen. LINKS We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo: https://www.advantagego.com/