The Voice of Insurance

This episode could easily be called “everything you wanted to know about insurtech but were afraid to ask.” This is because today’s guests are insurtech pioneers who spend their time finding new insurance ideas and the entrepreneurs behind them. They knock the rough edges off, apply expertise, lend regulatory licences so that ideas can be tested and make connections with incumbent insurers as well as investors. They also deploy their own venture capital funds into the companies they find. In short they provide one of the few full service platforms for innovative new ventures and fulfil the role of translators between the often disconnected worlds of technology and insurance. Now with five years’ experience The Voice of Insurance spoke to Stephen Brittain and Robert Lumley of the Insurtech Gateway to find out what they had learned after being at the bleeding edge of insurance innovation for such a long time. The results may surprise you. Here you can get to half a decade’s learning compressed into half an hour. A pioneer like The Gateway has often had to learn the hard way. By listening to this excellent episode you won’t have to...   LINKS https://insurtechgateway.com/

Today’s guest is one of the industry’s brightest stars and I think the podcast you are about the listen to amply proves why he has earned that moniker. The Voice of insurance has also been lucky enough to speak to him at an exciting time for him and the industry itself.   A veteran of the Bermuda class of 1992, he is back again with a substantial start-up looking to capitalise on major opportunities in the global wholesale specialty insurance and reinsurance market. Here Greg Hendrick the CEO of Vantage Group runs us through his vision from top to bottom and dissects in great detail how he and his team is attacking a market opportunity. Greg has long been one of the best speakers on the insurance conference circuit and here it soon becomes obvious that podcasting comes naturally to him. Here is someone happy, confident, energised, completely at the top of their game and ready to put a career’s worth of knowledge and experience to work in a favourable marketplace. There is a ton of useful information here and I think you can learn a lot from listening over the next 35 minutes or so. LINKS: We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo - enabling an enterprise view of exposure: https://www.advantagego.com/ We also thank Claims Direct Access (CDA) for their support today: https://www.claimsdirectaccess.com/

Today’s special guests are technology entrepreneurs looking to digitise and revolutionise the reinsurance marketplace. Their radical free-to-use platform has the goal of making the cumbersome submission and placement process pain-free for practitioners. But with these two there’s a big difference. Both Jerad Leigh and Ben Rose of Supercede gave up successful careers in the underwriting, broking and advisory side of reinsurance to found their business. Past attempts at reinsurance platforms have tended to focus on getting the boardrooms of the biggest players signed up and mandating usage on the ground but as former practitioners their focus is on solving the problems of the individual users themselves. As we move to an expense conscious world where big IT spend for no discernible competitive gain is no longer a boast but potentially a source of embarrassment, their free and fully independent model is a compelling one. In this special episode we naturally go for a whirlwind tour of the Supercede product offering, but we stay much longer and get to the heart of what these two founders think the reinsurance market of the future is going to look like and their part in enabling it. Not only are Ben and Jerad exceptionally bright, they are excellent company. I highly recommend listening to what they have to say. NOTES: You may already know Supercede by its original name, Riskbook. Ben mentions a business called Rightmove. For non-UK listeners this is the main UK platform for residential real estate, connecting realtors/(real) estate agents and individual buyers. LINKS: https://supercede.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/supercede1/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeraddleigh/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-rose-supercede/

After an extended build-out Pina Albo’s Hamilton Group now has significant Lloyd’s, Bermuda and Dublin platforms covering specialty insurance, reinsurance and third-party asset management and is building further capabilities on the ground in the US E&S market via an MGA structure. It’s also fully committed to a tech-enabled US brokered small commercial joint venture operation in Attune. Listen to Pina as the group moves to the execution phase of its strategy and looks to be rewarded for the patience it has shown throughout the prolonged soft market into which it was born. Pina is a focused leader with strong convictions about where the market is headed. Her conclusions are concise, unambiguous and easy to follow. I highly recommend a listen. NOTES: Pina refers to Ada Re in relation to Hamilton’s party capital management operation. Ada Re is specifically Hamilton’s retro sidecar vehicle. She of course meant to say Ada Capital. LINKS: We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo - enabling an enterprise view of exposure: https://www.advantagego.com/ We also thank Claims Direct Access (CDA) for their support today: https://www.claimsdirectaccess.com/

Today’s guest is a broking CEO on an ambitious mission to grow global revenues many times with the backing of a strategic owner. That may sound familiar to regular listeners, but Steve Hearn of Corant Global is going about things quite differently. At a time when most broker holding companies are at pains to hive up all their underlying brands into an overarching global brand identity, Steve is allowing multiple broking houses to flourish under the newly-minted Corant banner. A veteran of senior executive positions at large and small brokers alike, Steve now runs a holding company and not an operational broking business.   This means he isn’t bogged down or distracted by the day to day and has the job of thinking strategically about where broking in our market is going in the short, medium and long term and positioning Corant accordingly.  Corant also has a different sort of owner – the capital markets focused BGC and ultimately the Cantor Fitzgerald group. And the influence of this different variant of financial services culture is highly noticeable. And that’s what makes this podcast special. Rarely have I had such a focused conversation on what is happening in the broking landscape and where things are headed. LINKS. We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo - enabling an enterprise view of exposure: https://www.advantagego.com/ We also thank Claims Direct Access (CDA) for their support today: https://www.claimsdirectaccess.com/

This week’s guest is a longstanding and integral member of one of the most successful underwriting teams in the specialty insurance and reinsurance world. Charles Mathias was an original member of staff at Lancashire and is now a core member of the team at Fidelis. As Chief Risk officer and board member he has total visibility of Fidelis’s strategy and here he doesn’t duck any questions. I was surprised by how open he was with me about which segments of the market the now capital-loaded Fidelis is finding most attractive as well as its approach to developing proprietary technology. Again he is completely transparent about the special culture and work ethic that has made Richard-Brindle led carriers so distinctive, and so successful in the past 15 years. This longstanding market practitioner is also incredibly polite and good humoured company. All this makes this episode one not to miss for anyone who wants to learn the secrets of underwriting success in the hardening market of 2021. NOTES Charles refers to a charitable foundation, he is of course referring to the Fidelis Foundation. LINKS We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo - enabling an enterprise view of exposure: https://www.advantagego.com/ We also thank Claims Direct Access (CDA) for their support today: https://www.claimsdirectaccess.com/  

In my job I talk to a lot of entrepreneurs and particularly insurtech entrepreneurs. Very often I find that they know their tech but really haven’t yet got to understand the insurance world. And that often means that they are solving problems that perhaps don’t exist in the minds of insurance people and their business are unlikely to succeed. Well today I’m talking to a start-up founder who has insurance running through his veins. James York knows the insurance value chain inside and out. Because of that he knows that anyone who can cut into the savage acquisition costs insurers load onto themselves year after year is onto a winner. In an industry that spends billions on marketing anyone who can make that spend more effective is going to be in high demand. James is the founder of Worry + Peace, which is aiming to do just this via the medium of insurance reviews. It’s a bold and extremely ambitious global vision that goes way beyond reviews and into a whole insurance ecosystem that will aim to bring buyers and sellers together in a trusted world but which isn’t actively trying to sell insurance to anyone. Are you intrigued? I certainly was and the more I talk to James the more I think he is onto something. I think you should hear him out. LINKS and Contacts: https://worryandpeace.com/ James’s Twitter handle is: @JamesJWYork

Nick Cook of BMS Group is a man in a hurry to make the most of global opportunities to grow the 41-year old firm he runs. Nick is refreshingly straightforward and to the point and here we get detail on BMS’s ambitious global buildout away from its more traditional markets in London and North America and into Latin America, Asia and Europe. We also get a strong view on the opportunities being thrown up by big broker M&A as well as the capital factors driving substantial investment and consolidation at independents. Nick also dissects the current fight to build challenger reinsurance brokers and how he thinks this particular game might not end well for everyone. Finally we hear of bullish prospects for the London market and Nick’s thoughts and misgivings about the current vision for London’s future. We pack in a lot here but listening back it is Nick’s boundless energy and no-nonsense passion for the task in hand that really shines through our exchange. Enjoy the podcast. LINKS We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo - enabling an enterprise view of exposure: https://www.advantagego.com/ We also thank Claims Direct Access (CDA) for their support today: https://www.claimsdirectaccess.com/

Today we're talking to Matthew Moore President & Managing Director at Liberty Specialty Markets – LSM. Matthew is one of the rising stars of the London Market and is currently serving as the chair of industry trade body the London Market Group. Yet his role is global in nature. He oversees a specialty, wholesale and reinsurance operation with gross written premiums of around $7bn of which London business is a minority. In this wide-ranging podcast we get the benefit of this global perspective on opportunities in the hardening market as well as going into the detail on the drivers behind the essential reform process that the London Market is currently undergoing. We also got to hear about Matthew’s thoughts on the future of insurance, industry price adequacy and reserve strength, Covid 19 estimates and how he is trying to make LSM differentiate itself in a competitive and capital-abundant marketplace. Matthew is very enjoyable company and an insightful insurance thinker and communicator. LINKS We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo - enabling an enterprise view of exposure: https://www.advantagego.com/ We also thank Claims Direct Access (CDA) for their support today: https://www.claimsdirectaccess.com/

Today’s podcast is a meeting with a senior market figure most of us have known for many years. Sean McGovern served in different board level capacities at Lloyd’s for just over 2 decades, before leaving to join the then XL Catlin in 2016 ahead of its 2018 acquisition by AXA. Last summer he was made CEO of AXA XL’s UK and Lloyd’s business – the first time he has held a CEO post. This interview is all about his plans for the role now that the difficult remedial actions aimed at turning around the large London Market insurer’s underwriting performance have been taken and market conditions have taken a decisive turn for the better. As a veteran Lloyd’s spokesperson Sean has been in the public eye for many years and in this encounter I found him easy-going, relaxed and excited to be running a major London operation with the backing of the world’s largest P&C group behind him Listen on for an insider’s view of the opportunities currently presenting themselves in the London market. LINKS We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo - enabling an enterprise view of exposure: https://www.advantagego.com/ We also thank Claims Direct Access (CDA) and Insurtech Gateway for their support today: https://www.claimsdirectaccess.com/ https://insurtechgateway.com/