The Voice of Insurance

Regular listeners will know that usually I talk to one person at a time, but over the course of four days in Monte Carlo I managed to record over 20 short interviews with industry leaders. This means this podcast is an in-depth documentary on the state of global insurance, reinsurance and the insurance-related capital markets. It’s a document detailing the state of mind of key actors that make and influence the market. The great thing about Monte Carlo is that a consensus can emerge, even from thousands of disparate voices. This year that definitely happened This is without doubt the toughest and most dynamic (re)insurance market since late 2005 – and I should know because I have been to every Monte Carlo gathering from then onwards. My aim is to try and capture the essence of what it is like to be in the room with the top decision-makers. You will experience a tough market consensus emerging and be able to hear the different harmonies and minor discords from within this great chorus of voices. Enjoy this very special podcast! LINKS: We thank our Special Episode Sponsor, Stephens Rickard: https://www.stephensrickard.com

Some people seem to have things happen to them, while others make things happen. Richard Brindle (pictured right) and Dan Burrows (pictured left) of Fidelis are in the latter category and are about to make history by becoming the first traditional balance sheet insurance company to split its underwriting and its capital into two independent entities. It’s a typically bold and fascinating move and one which throws up many questions. Are they doing this because valuations of balance sheets are so low and those of MGAs are so high, or are there other motives for going through such a painful process? The answers are all here. Richard also unloads a huge amount of his insight on the state of the reinsurance and specialty markets as we head into the 1.1 renewal season. It’s the toughest talk I’ve heard in my career and that includes the post Katrina Rita and Wilma market of 2006, into which Lancashire was born. This all adds up to one of the best podcasts you’ll listen to this year, or any year. NOTES One slip of the tongue on an acronym. SRT stands for Significant Risk Transfer not Strategic Risk Transfer. LINKS We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo: https://www.advantagego.com/ We also thank this Episode’s advertising supporter Oxbow Partners https://oxbowpartners.com

Anyone listening to this podcast over the past couple of years can’t have failed to notice the way that Environmental, Social and Governance or ESG has moved quite quickly to the top of the industry agenda. Taking into consideration the Environmental Social and Governance impacts of all of our customers, all of our investments, all of our suppliers and all of our own activities is something that may be a little too much more many of us in the industry to get our heads around. Once regulators get involved, and it is only a matter of time before they do, ESG will become the biggest potentially existential threat to insurers since the implementation of Solvency II. That’s why it is important to seek expert advice. And that’s why I am delighted to introduced Miqdaad Versi, a principal at Oxbow Partners. Oxbow Partners is a management consultancy specialising in the insurance industry. And Miqdaad focuses on insurance, reinsurance and ESG and sustainability and has authored a first-of-its-kind report on ESG in conjunction with the Bermuda Business Development Agency (BDA). This podcast lays out his credentials as well as the scale of the problem. If you have been too scared even to start thinking about what to do about the enormous ESG challenge ahead, this is an excellent place to begin. Miqdaad is smart, eloquent and passionate on this topic. He’s also very optimistic that the insurance sector has the skills to navigate ESG’s threats as well as to be able to make the most of the huge opportunities that it is going to throw up. This podcast is also full to the brim of useful information and easy-to-follow advice. NOTES and LINKS Miqdaad Versi’s email is mversi@oxbowpartners.com The report we mention is ESG in Bermuda: The Rising Tide – The maturity of ESG on the island and what it means for the (re)insurance industry You can access it here: https://oxbowpartners.com/blog/esg-in-bermuda-the-rising-tide/ Find out more about Oxbow Partners at: https://oxbowpartners.com/

What an absolute blast this episode was to record! I often interview irrepressible, energetic and ultra-enthusiastic executives on the podcast – it goes with the territory after all. Indeed I have had both of today’s guests on the show before, but there is something about bringing them together that caused sparks to fly and brought a different dynamic into play. David Howden of Howden Group and Rod Fox of TigerRisk Partners are both founders of their respective businesses and are two of the most successful broking entrepreneurs of their generation. The two are combining their firms in an M&A deal that is creating a highly credible challenger reinsurance broker to the big three. This podcast is almost like a metaphor for what they are trying to achieve together. One and one seem to add up to quite more than two and both were already larger than life before we started! No questions were off the table. It’s all here. There’s nothing left out. LINKS Howden Re has an excellent Reinsurance Market report out. It's called Reinsurance - A Tipping Point  We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo: https://www.advantagego.com/ We also thank this Episode’s advertising supporter Oxbow Partners https://oxbowpartners.com

Today’s guest is someone who, despite being the CEO of a very prominent publicly-quoted global speciality insurer and reinsurer, has been keeping himself out of the media spotlight for the last couple of years. This is because like many other leaders in our world, Albert Benchimol CEO of AXIS Capital has been busy overseeing underwriting remediation and a wholesale re-set of his business’s strategic positioning as the market has transitioned. Now I’m delighted to announce that he has come out the other side and has agreed to be on the show. The Albert I encountered in this episode was someone looking forward to the future with a lot of energy, optimism and enthusiasm. No subjects were off the menu, so after swiftly polishing off the elephant in the room topic of Axis’s widely publicised decision to pull out of property reinsurance, we expanded out into a really broad discussion that encompasses, rate adequacy, the rise of the MGA, inflation, ESG and industry diversity to name but a few. Albert’s now been CEO of AXIS for over a decade and it’s that experience and sense of authority that I think shines through every minute of this lively encounter. We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo: https://www.advantagego.com/ We also thank this Episode’s advertising supporter Oxbow Partners https://oxbowpartners.com/

Today’s guests are InsTech CEO Matthew Grant (pictured top right) and Research Analyst Henry Gale (bottom right). Regular listeners will know that the InsTech team are my go-to experts from the world of Insurtech. I rely on them to keep me informed and connected with the most important developments in that burgeoning field. Matthew Grant has spent over 30 years at the intersection of technology and insurance. Since he co-founded the InsTech events and intelligence platform five years ago, it has grown into an extremely active global community of around 25,000 industry professionals which has worked with over 200 companies. As this unique community has grown, so has its manpower and the sophistication of its output. Instech’s regular research reports are essential reading for incumbent insurance folk, tech investors and entrepreneurs. And it is the latest InsTech report that we are focusing on today. No-one will have managed to ignore the Parametric Insurance phenomenon as it has exploded into our consciousness, particularly over the past couple of years as eye-catching launches and multi-million-dollar fundraisings have made the headlines. With such an explosion of new ideas and potential partners, the subject is a potential minefield. Who to partner with? Which avenues to pursue and which to avoid? Thankfully Instech has produced a comprehensive and highly practical report on the subject. Matthew has been personally involved with parametrics for over 25 years and Instech has been closely engaged with all of the most interesting players in the space since it was founded. One of the aims of InsTech is to connect incumbents, investors and entrepreneurs around workable ideas that have the best chance of succeeding in the real world and this makes for a very focused podcast. And important for me, Matthew and report author Henry may be supremely well connected and clued up, but they have their feet on the ground and explain their ideas with great enthusiasm but expressed in plain English in an easy-going manner. This means you don’t need to have any specialist knowledge or interest to learn an awful lot from this conversation Enjoy the podcast NOTES As Matthew alludes to at the start, he has been hosting the InsTech podcast since 2018. He has notched up over 200 episodes with a cross-section of the insurtech community. Check them out on your favourite podcast app or here: https://www.instech.co/podcasts LINKS The report is called Parametric Insurance in 2022: the 150+ Companies to Watch Here's the link: https://www.instech.co/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=21  If you want to follow up on the offer Matthew makes towards the end of the podcast, please email hello@instech.co Check out all of InsTech’s latest reports, podcasts and online and in-person events at https://www.instech.co/

Today’s guest is a former Microsoft, CIA and Goldman Sachs employee who, perhaps unsurprisingly, has found his way to somewhere very close to the top of the Cyber Insurance tree in the past few years. With a billion dollars in run-rate GWP after just five years, major VC funding, aggressive international expansion plans and now a newly-acquired US admitted carrier, Coalition and its CEO Joshua Motta have quite a story to tell. With his deep cyber security background it was likely that Coalition was going to build something very different from incumbent insurers and indeed the firm’s offering is much more of a joined-up full service than many of its competitors. As Joshua puts it, Coalition “owns the repair shop” and that helps an awful lot with risk engineering and loss mitigation. And so far the results have been excellent. The grand tour of the Coalition modus operandi is really interesting but it is when the conversation spreads to more weighty industry topics that I think this podcast really takes off. Joshua has some really strong views about how fears around systemic risk in cyber have been overblown and how to unlock the capacity that cyber will need if it is to continue its fast growth without hitting capacity constraints. Now you may say that he would say that, but now that Coalition is funding more of its own underwriting, Joshua is clearly happy to put his money where his mouth is. Coalition is also putting some of its own modelling work out on open source to help others get comfortable with its view of risk. I definitely recommend a listen for anyone nervous about committing capital to cyber reinsurance for fear of earth-shattering systemic risk – the counter-arguments made here are pretty convincing. LINKS Here is the announcement about Coalition buying Admitted lines carrier Digital Affect Insurance Company This coincided with our podcast recording and as you will hear, it was definitely news to me. With hindsight I should have probed a lot more. Next time! We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo: https://www.advantagego.com/ We also thank this Episode’s advertising supporter Oxbow Partners https://oxbowpartners.com/

Today we are going to be doing something completely different. We’re not going to talk about insurance. Regular listeners will know that AdvantageGo has been a great supporter of the Voice of Insurance since the early days of the podcast. But you might not have known that this excellent technology company is also an important backer of UK military charity, ABF The Soldiers’ Charity. AdvantageGo is an associate Sponsor of The Soldiers’ Charity’s Annual fundraiser, the Lord Mayor’s Big Curry lunch at the Guildhall in London, which is a fixture attended and supported by many in the London Insurance market. It’s the Soldiers’ Charity’s work we want to showcase here, particularly a highly successful programme the charity funds in the field of pain management. So I’m going to introduce two services veterans, Russ Kirby (pictured bottom right) and Bernie O’Toole (top right) who have both been through the programme. Russ is a Navy veteran and Bernie was in the Army. You may find parts of their accounts distressing, but I would encourage you to continue because you will be rewarded with a great story of empowerment and optimism. The pain management programme has given them their lives back and you will feel their positive energy as they recount drastically reducing the painkillers, or dispensing with them entirely and regaining the confidence and optimism to look forward to productive and satisfying future lives. As Bernie says – the programme works and it’s worth its weight in gold. NOTES For worldwide listeners, B&Q is a major UK DIY store. LINKS If you want to get more closely involved with ABF The Soldiers' Charity, please contact Katy Wildman on kwildman@soldierscharity.org or email lmbc@soldierscharity.org Please donate if you can here: The Lord Mayor’s Big Curry Lunch website: https://events.soldierscharity.org/event/lmpjbc-2022?lightbox=/event/lmpjbc-2022/donate Or here: ABF The Soldiers’ Charity website: https://soldierscharity.org/donate/make-donation/ SSAFA is the Armed Forces charity. Russ also mentions other UK Armed Services charities The Poppy Factory  and Help for Heroes Russ’s private business is called Russ Mounts Stuff We thank AdvantageGo for organising this very special podcast: https://www.advantagego.com/

Today’s guest is someone I’m delighted to be welcoming back to the podcast after just under two years. Back then he was the relatively new CEO at Hannover Re and some of my questioning probed what sort of things he might do differently from his predecessors. Now into his fourth year in charge and Jean-Jacques Henchoz is the seasoned boss of a reinsurer that has not skipped a beat since its leadership transition. Very strong growth has continued and results have been excellent. In the first question in this podcast I dared ask if Hannover Re’s growth streak could continue now that the already 3rd largest reinsurance group in the world is far closer to the number two spot than the number four is to it. The answer was a very frank “yes for now” and that set the tone for everything that was to follow. I learned a lot about a huge range of topics, including views on the Ukraine war, Florida, resurgent inflation and the prospects for Cyber ILS. I also discovered how the strong growth environment has created the conditions that have made Covid reinsurance disputes far fewer in number than we thought they might have been two years ago. Jean-Jacques is clearly at the top of his game and I couldn’t recommend this episode more highly as not only a crystal-clear view into the reinsurance industry’s standout performer of the past fifteen years, but a really useful primer for the autumn conference season and the testing end of year renewals to come. LINKS We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo: https://www.advantagego.com/ We also thank this Episode’s advertising supporter Oxbow Partners https://oxbowpartners.com/

Today’s guest is Sean McGovern CEO, UK & Lloyd’s at AXA XL. Sean was first on the show a year and a half ago when he was less than a year into his first industry CEO role. When we last spoke he was in the middle of a root-and-branch remediation of AXA XL’s book, the severity of which had taken many by surprise. As a senior Lloyd’s executive and spokesperson Sean had been in the public eye for many years, so everyone knew he would be able to handle that side of the job. But if anyone had any doubts about his ability to lead a tough underwriting turnaround, they were dispelled as AXA XL’s Syndicate 2003 posted a vintage 75% combined ratio in 2021 – that’s a 59-point improvement on the previous year. I think the difference between the two podcasts is palpable. Here is a confident and forward-looking executive with growth on his mind in all areas of his business. As a result this is a really positive discussion with one of Lloyd’s largest players about today’s opportunities as well as the major issues affecting the London Market as a whole. I can highly recommend a listen. NOTES A couple of abbreviations: AIRMIC stands for the Association of Insurance and Risk Managers in Industry and Commerce and is the UK’s Risk Manager trade body. NZIA stands for the Net-Zero Insurance Alliance, a global industry body which has been convened by the UN. LINKS We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo: https://www.advantagego.com/ We also thank this Episode’s advertising supporter Oxbow Partners https://oxbowpartners.com/