The Voice of Insurance

Today we have a live market where reinsurance capacity has dried up and investors are utterly fatigued or are openly on strike, and so every dollar of spare capital feels twice as valuable as it did last year But at the same time we have a highly sophisticated legacy market that is well capitalised and, because of its relatively solid recent track record, has access to more funding if it needs it. Also legacy infrastructure is probably better equipped to handle anything the live market can throw at it than at any time in its history. Surely in today’s market every live dollar than can be freed up to write new business at tomorrow’s better prices, will be freed up? Now is clearly a great time to be talking to today’s guest. Luke Tanzer is CEO of RiverStone International, a business at the heart of the Lloyd’s and UK company legacy market. RiverStone has a new owner, fresh capital and focus and ambitious international expansion plans. Luke is one of the most engaging members of the legacy community and if you haven’t met him before, I think you’ll find him incredibly insightful and refreshing. And if you still have any outdated ideas about what run-off is in the 2020s, a few minutes in Luke’s company will set you straight. Given what is happening in the live market, Luke and his peers’ profiles are very likely to be raised a notch or two in the next couple of years as excess demand seeks out his capital and expertise, so get ahead of everyone else and listen on. NOTES A couple of unexplained abbreviations. RITC is reinsurance to close, a key part of the Lloyd’s three-year accounting process. DD is of course due diligence. LINKS We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo: https://www.advantagego.com/ We also thank this Episode’s advertising supporter Oxbow Partners https://oxbowpartners.com

Normally I have C-suite guests on the programme who are working for companies with tens, hundreds and sometimes low thousands of employees. They generally write between the tens, hundreds of millions or single-digit billions in annual gross premiums. But today’s guests are working on behalf of a marketplace that directly employs 47,000 people and many more offshore. It writes well over a hundred billion dollars in gross premiums and that is a number set to rise sharply as the market continues to harden. This is because together CEO Caroline Wagstaff, and Chairman Matthew Moore, run the London Market Group, the LMG. The LMG is the London Market’s trade body bringing together Lloyd’s and its constituent underwriting businesses, the London company market and the brokers to represent the whole London insurance and reinsurance Market to the outside world and to lobby on its behalf. London is facing a demographic squeeze where its stock of over 50-year-olds exceeds its number of those under the age of thirty. In this lively episode Matthew and Caroline recount the nature of this problem and, more importantly, articulate the plan they have formulated to address it. We also talk about the prospects for the UK regulator to have to take the market’s competitive position into consideration when making and implementing new rules as key financial services reform legislation makes its way through the UK Parliament. The agenda includes the prospect of the UK seeking to develop a ‘red carpet’ welcome to rival that of more nimble and proactive jurisdictions such as Bermuda and Singapore. The continuing iterations of ongoing work to further the London Market brand under the London Makes it Possible banner are another topic of discussion. Matthew and Caroline are passionate and really engaging speakers and this episode will give you a great sense of where the market’s collective marketing and lobbying efforts are being channelled both now and in coming years. LINKS We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo: https://www.advantagego.com/ We also thank this Episode’s advertising supporter Oxbow Partners https://oxbowpartners.com

Regular listeners will know that I really rate today’s guests and what they are trying to do for the market. I also find them really good company – they are fun, smart infectiously enthusiastic and are always brimming with new ideas. Every time I have a meeting with them I come away with something new to think about. Listen on and you will too. The Insurtech Gateway has been a pioneer in the insurtech space, providing early stage investment as well as licences, insurance knowledge and industry support and connections to entrepreneurs trying to put innovative insurance ideas into practice. It’s just come through an important milestone. Its inaugural fund is maturing and it second fund has now been raised. In a cooling tech investment climate this as clear a validation of the Gateway’s business model as you’ll need. My conversation with director and co-founder Stephen Brittain (bottom right) and CEO Richard Chattock (top right) is valuable because it brings together everything the Gateway has learned from the cutting edge of insurance investment from the past six years. None of this is theoretical – this is all hard-won experience earned by the risking of real capital in the real world with real people. We examine what has worked and what hasn’t and look at the emerging trends that are going to drive the successful insurtechs of the future. Richard and Stephen make a great pairing. Stephen has been on the podcast many times before but Richard hasn’t. Yet it is Richard who will be familiar to many listeners as he is an insurance lifer with a high profile and long and successful underwriting career who has made the move to venture capitalism. Meanwhile Stephen is an outside innovator looking inwards to insurance. This is an excellent combination and makes for a really relaxed, highly enjoyable and insightful listen. I’m pretty sure you’ll find it both inspiring and useful. LINKS www.insurtechgateway.com

Today’s guest is someone who is bringing a rigorous and effective management style that the London Market might not previously have been accustomed to. Kate Markham brings extensive business experience to the role of running Hiscox London Market. Some of this comes from entirely outside our industry as well as the retail insurance space. Her work in restoring top performance to this Lloyd’s blue-chip and keeping it there has entailed a lot of new management thinking and not inconsiderable culture change to embed a performance mindsight that is bottom-up rather than top-down. It’s refreshing and this podcast dives right into the issues facing Hiscox and the wider London Market on immediate concerns about reinsurance renewals and how they will affect coverage such as property cat, and classes such as specialty and cyber. We also talk about the bigger picture, addressing digital transformation, algorithmic underwriting and the diverse talent requirements of the market of the future. Kate is personable, eloquent and concise as well as being direct and this is a really enjoyable exchange with someone who is right on top of their brief. LINKS We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo: https://www.advantagego.com/ We also thank this Episode’s advertising supporter Oxbow Partners https://oxbowpartners.com

Mark Cloutier is a dream guest. And that’s not just because he’s the person some of the smartest financial minds in the industry turn to to shepherd and shape their strategic turnaround investments. Mark Cloutier knows the insurance industry inside and out and from top to bottom, but what makes him a great podcast guest is his openness and willingness to talk about how the insurance, reinsurance and capital markets fit together and interact with each other. He’s also one of the most easygoing people you’ll meet. His job must involve huge stresses and strains, but you would never know if you met him. Well today you do get to meet him and together we’ll go on a grand tour of Aspen and its place in the most dynamic and challenging markets for a generation. Mark’s long career and perspective combined with Aspen’s multi-faceted business model bring a really great insight into this jittery and completely plastic market environment. Inflation, industry capital and investor appetites, property cat, specialty in a post-Ukraine world, the explosion in hybrid carriers, how to handle the ESG challenge – there is valuable understanding and a calm authority backing every statement. LINKS We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo: https://www.advantagego.com/ We also thank this Episode’s advertising supporter Oxbow Partners https://oxbowpartners.com

Building a fully digital marketplace for insurance in London has been a tantalising long-term goal for all of my 30-year career. Only too often this has proved a mirage that has turned to sand as the market got close. Dare I say it but this time things seem very different. Now robust core standards are providing foundations of solid rock upon which the market can build with greater confidence. Technology is also more advanced and more readily available at a much more reasonable cost. Today even the smallest player can jump ahead without busting the bank. Indeed the biggest obstacle to accelerated change is now cultural. And that is where the biggest transformation has taken place – in the minds of market leaders. Now instead of the technologists trying to drag the market kicking and screaming towards modernisation change is starting to be demanded of technologists from practitioners themselves. The stars are finally coming into alignment. That’s why I am delighted I could talk to three highly experienced insurance technology experts about this. Kirstin Duffield is CEO of Insurance software business Morning Data and is an advisor to the London Market Data Council, Hélène Stanway also advises the Data Council and is a strategic adviser at r10 Consulting as well as being a senior counsel to numerous other tech bodies. Finally Marcus Broome, is Chief Platform officer at insurance trading platform Whitespace. All have experience providing technological solutions to the Insurance market going back to the early-to mid-1990s. These people have been at the heart of London’s digital journey for the last 25-30 years. They are technologists steeped in deep insurance understanding and their cumulative knowledge of every step and mis-step that the market has taken in that period is second to none. Luckily for you and me they are also a trio of concise and passionate communicators who know how to speak to laypeople. So what follows is a really useful run through of the current market modernisation programmes that dispels a lot of myths and clears up a lot of misunderstanding we might all have about what exactly the latest reforms are and the benefits they might bring to the market. I found it really inspiring and helpful and I’m sure you will too. After this encounter I feel much more confident that the first fully digital fruits of the last 30 years’ labours may finally be within our grasp, particularly if these three have anything to do with it. NOTES: Two acronyms got through unexplained. PAS is a Policy Administration System And GLRC standards refer to the Global Reinsurance and Large Commercial Carrier electronic standards produced by ACORD. LINKS We thank Whitespace for its support today https://www.whitespace.co.uk/

Anyone keeping an eye on the overarching trends in the global wholesale and speciality insurance and reinsurance markets of the last few years cannot have failed to notice the explosive growth of the hybrid insurance carrier. Burgeoning Billions of dollars of premium are being directed in new and interesting ways through a cohort of businesses that ten years ago didn’t really exist. Regular listeners to this podcast will know that this has been a repeated topic of conversation with guests on the show. I think today’s guest will be able to put this topic into context better than almost anyone else. That’s because Bill Jewett CEO of Obsidian Insurance Holdings boasts a more than forty-year career right in the heart of the US and Bermuda reinsurance community. This means Bill is very much one of us and can speak our language. He can also articulate what is happening on the ground because he is personally one of the architects of the hybrid carrier revolution and what looks very much to be a secular change in the distribution of commercial insurance. I had known Bill since his decade at Endurance and was really glad to catch up with him again after such a long time. I’m sure many of you out there will similarly be re-acquainting yourself with an old friend from the business. Bill’s got a great story to tell and this podcast will dispel any lingering myths or doubts you have about the major changes afoot in how many MGAs will source their capital in the future. LINKS We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo: https://www.advantagego.com/ We also thank this Episode’s advertising supporter Oxbow Partners https://oxbowpartners.com

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/