The Voice of Insurance

I’ve known David Howden for a very long time. When I became a broker in 1992 he was the wholesale D&O specialist who looked after a big book of business for the Spanish broker I worked for. When Aon took over that broker it was my cue to go off and become a journalist and for him it fired the starting gun on an adventure that doesn’t show any sign of stopping. That’s why this episode is a bit special. It’s also a bit longer than usual. A good interview is a bit like a portrait and the art of the interviewer is to coax the interviewee to reveal perhaps more of themselves than they were originally planning to. David doesn’t really need much coaxing because he is always himself, and the most remarkable thing about him is that he hasn’t changed at all in the last 28 years. Here we talk about everything you would expect to talk about, but a lot more. For instance this is the first interview I’ve ever done where poetry has been recited. Today I really think you will get to see what makes David tick and understand what has driven him to be the most successful insurance entrepreneur of his generation. We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo - enabling underwriters to increase the speed and accuracy of decision making: 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/

In today’s episode we meet a strong broker of many years’ experience and with subject expertise and contacts that many would take multiple careers to accumulate. She has had a senior career at many of the top independent brokers. Over recent times I have come to know and respect her as one of those people that always speaks their mind and comes as a breath of fresh air with their own perspective on what is happening in the marketplace. Vanessa Macdonald Smith is a former CEO of JLT Fac and is now in a new role as Executive Director and Head of D&F at Oneglobal Broking. She has a broad and senior view of the market but has her feet close enough on the ground to be fully in touch. In this podcast we look at today’s hard market and OneGlobal’s plans to grow into it, the opportunity for independents as the big brokers consolidate and what it is like to be a senior woman working in a time of cultural turmoil and great change. I always enjoy time spent with Vanessa and I think you will too. --------- We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo - enabling underwriters to increase the speed and accuracy of decision making: https://www.advantagego.com/ We also thank Claims Direct Access (CDA) for their support today: https://www.claimsdirectaccess.com/

Today’s guest is someone with a long history of implementing technology into the Insurance Market. Bart Patrick, Managing Director, Europe for Duck Creek really understands the demands of the industry and the sometimes fractious and strained relationship with technology that it has had over the years. Well all of that is changing and this discussion is all about how that is going to come about. With the advent of cloud computing the industry finally has an opportunity to leave technology to the experts and simply get on with doing what it does best – market, transact and execute innovative insurance deals. In this brave new world, the software and systems we use are becoming simply a utility that we can avail ourselves of and don’t have to own and maintain anymore. What’s more the best platforms can now allow us to configure them in the way we want to work and let us plug in any of the tools we want to use to help us do our jobs better and compete in the marketplace. This is what people are describing as an ecosystem. But transitioning away from legacy systems that are in fact many systems all bolted together is not easy, particularly if we have limited budgets and the massively important requirement that nothing falls over while we are making the switch to the new way of working. Technical debt is the difference between what you should be spending on innovation and the amount of money you are spending on just keeping the old inefficient systems running. This talk explains how to get out of this debt. My role in this discussion is to be the layman with insurance knowledge and make sure Patrick doesn’t get bogged down in technical jargon. Luckily Patrick is a great explainer who knows how to talk to insurance people. I recommend this podcast to anyone wanting to gain a broad understanding of what our legacy industry tech problems are, where the future lies and more importantly, how we are going to get there. Many thanks to Duck Creek Technologies for their support today. Find out more at: https://www.duckcreek.com/  

I’ve got to know the interviewees in today’s episode quite well over the last few years. That means I have been able to follow closely their remarkable journey from small subsidiary of the Hyperion Group to an independent employee-owned MGA writing over 500 million dollars of premium in 2020 and still projecting organic growth of 20% in 2021. So how have David Walsh and Graeme Newman of CFC Underwriting done it? I think one of the most striking things is what a partnership these two entrepreneurs make and how their characters compliment each other. It is hard to think of one without the other and of CFC without either of them. They’re also a notch below the average age of many among their peers and I think this translates to a slightly more progressive feel for the business. But you should listen for yourself and make up your own mind. In this episode we talk a lot about CFC’s core line of cyber insurance and building a long-term comparative advantage, its response to the Covid pandemic, what David and Graeme’s long-term plans are for CFC and how the firm is trying to distil its entrepreneurial culture as it begins to grow beyond its core London roots. It’s a great discussion and one which I would highly recommend to any budding entrepreneurs out there looking for pointers to see how it’s done. We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo - enabling underwriters to increase the speed and accuracy of decision making: https://www.advantagego.com/ We also thank Claims Direct Access (CDA) and Insurtech Gateway for their support today. Here are links to their websites: https://www.claimsdirectaccess.com/ https://insurtechgateway.com/

Welcome to the Voice of Insurance in association with Advantage Go - enabling Underwriters to increase the speed and accuracy of decision making. It was great experience recording today’s episode because it was the first time since the Covid 19 crisis began that I was able to do an interview face to face instead of a video call. And it seemed even more poignant that this first face to face interview should be at Lloyd’s – the only physical marketplace where insurance is traded by multiple counterparties all in the same room. Technology has been a saviour for all of us in these difficult times, but I think this interview shows that there are some elements of genuine human social interaction that it can never replace. Tasked with turning the market’s performance around and driving through a revolutionary programme of reform, John Neal has needed all his charm and skills of communication to convince the market to change the way it does almost everything. Here you can see his skills to great effect. He is incredibly personable, approachable and down to earth and certainly doesn’t get angered by any of my more provocative questions. Or at least if he does he doesn’t show it. Instead the main weapon he deploys is a stark honesty and candidness that is refreshing and endearing. In our time together we discuss the Lloyd’s 2021 business planning process and whether Lloyd’s is striking the right balance between performance and growth, the coming revolution from the imminent Blueprint 2 reform plans, what makes a good underwriter, personal conduct and the impact of the culture survey, climate change and the insurance of fossil fuels, the potential impact of the Aon-Willis merger on the market and John’s personal feelings about his role. I didn’t cut anything out because it’s all too good to miss. I also didn’t over edit it, because I wanted you to be able feel that you too are inside number 1 Lime street on the 11th floor, sitting in with John and I as the recorders are switched on and the discussion gets going. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.   LINKS We thank our supporters today. Our naming sponsor AdvantageGo https://www.advantagego.com/ Claims Direct Access https://www.claimsdirectaccess.com/ Bolton Associates https://www.bolton-associates.co.uk/ and WCL https://webconnectivityltd.com/

The seeds for today’s episode were sown at a meeting in Chicago in the early Spring of 2019. I had been chairing a conference there and was making the most of the trip by visiting as many of the insurance people with their offices in the Windy City. So it was that I met today’s guest for the first time over breakfast in the centre of town. It was a great meeting – my host was full of energy and incredibly excited over the prospects for the Excess and Surplus lines (E&S) market. He was a real broker’s broker and someone who leads from the front. I remember he had to break off our breakfast chat briefly to take a call relating to a placement that he was personally involved in. We had been waiting for the market to harden for over fifteen years and this was the first time a well-placed senior executive was sitting in front of me telling me it was finally starting. He explained that his organisation was gearing up for what he described as "the dump" that was on its way. The dump is when admitted lines carriers have had enough of losses and non-renew or dump their most unprofitable business en masse. This flow then finds its way into the only other available channel open to it - the E&S market. Tim Turner is the T in RT Specialty - one of the largest and probably soon to be the largest wholesale broker in the biggest wholesale insurance market in the world. Given the size and scale of RT Specialty and the wider RSG Group his view of the market can’t be bettered. 18 months after that meeting and all of Tim’s predictions have come to pass and that is why I was really happy to be able to get a follow-up with him for the Voice of insurance. With billions of dollars of deals running through his organisation he is one of a very select band of people with a feel for how long the hardening market might last and how deep it will hit. As a major producer his view also matters a huge amount to the major overflow wholesale markets of Bermuda and London. He’s also great company and buzzing with energy. I highly recommend a listen to what he has to say. LINK: We thank Claims Direct Access (CDA) for their support today. https://www.claimsdirectaccess.com/

We all know about the protection gap and financial sustainability and resilience goals for the developing world set by global bodies such as the World Bank and the United Nations. We also know about the massive growth potential of many emerging economies and the role the insurance industry can play in enabling and accelerating its development. This episode goes into the detail of how to approach this major opportunity and answers some common questions and upends many common misconceptions. How much is insurance understood in developing nations? Is it seen simply as aid? Also how well are its strengths understood by donor nations? Should this kind of insurance be aiming for profit from day one, or should it be more patient? How do we overcome modelling gaps and potentially crippling distribution costs in some of these nations? Will the realities of harder international markets and Covid 19 put development goals on the back burner? To answer these questions it was a great privilege to be joined by Dame Inga Beale and Lesley NdLovu of the African Risk Capacity Group (ARC). Both have pioneered work in this field and give a strong and practical flavour to this podcast. I highly recommend a listen. It might convince you that far from being just corporate social responsibility and the right thing to do, this is actually one of the brightest long-term opportunities in the global insurance market. Today’s special episode has been organised by the Commonwealth Insurance Forum – the CIF and kindly sponsored by the ARC. Set up in September 2019 the Forum was co-founded and is chaired by London market veteran Francis de Zulueta of Alpine Risk Alpine Risk currently manages the CIF. Co founded with Robert Lyle, co-founder of specialist London broker BPL, this not-for-profit organisation is seeking to ignite and accelerate insurance collaboration at all levels between the members of the 54-nation Commonwealth with the added support of the Commonwealth Enterprise and Investment Council. The Commonwealth Insurance Forum has been formed as the UK is deepening and rapidly accelerating global trade links within the Commonwealth after leaving the European Union and will seek to build insurance co-operation, education and networking based on the common legal and cultural ties that bind the global Commonwealth of Nations together for the mutual benefit of all members. LINKS African Risk Capacity: https://www.africanriskcapacity.org The Forum can be contacted on Cif@alpineriskservices.com  or directly via Francis de Zulueta on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alpine1/

Most Voice of Insurance episodes tend to be with industry CEOs. This way you can get to know the real people behind the public persona and learn about how the industry really works by finding out what makes its leaders tick. But of course it doesn’t give you a huge amount of class-specific detail. Industry titans at public companies know a ton of detail about high finance and deal economics, but if I went too deep into detail on any given class of insurance or reinsurance, they would rightly refer me to an inhouse expert for a full briefing. And that’s why I recorded this episode. In this hard and Covid-affected market, the hardest segment seems to be the International Directors’ and Officers’ liability market or (D&O) as we all know it. I wanted to get into hard detail about what is going on in this market. To do this I began to set up interviews with D&O practitioners. My aim was to put together the views of multiple experts into an in-depth report. But the first of these meetings turned out to be so strong that I have decided to put it out as an episode in its own right. David Ritchie is Managing Director of Management Liability at Gallagher UK and is a very senior broker with his finger directly on the pulse of the sector. In great detail David describes a market in a state of crisis and dislocation where cover is severely rationed and definitely not guaranteed at any price. This is a world where the prices and terms that are being dictated by the few markets that remain open are almost secondary in importance. Customers have to take it or leave it and may be forced to hit the nuclear button of invoking sunset clauses on expiring cover and renewing on extremely restrictive retroactive date inception terms just to get by. In short this is the hardest market of all time by a very, very long margin. With only trickles of new capacity on the way and more market withdrawals possible I don’t envy David’s day job one bit, but I do commend this episode to anyone who wants to know where and how many of the underwriting fortunes and reputations of 2021 and beyond are going to be forged. LINKS Once again we thank Claims Direct Access (CDA) for their support today. www.claimsdirectaccess.com PS. Don't forget to ask Mark about advertising opportunities on the podcast. mark@thevoiceofinsurance.com

What is the greatest quality of the best business builders in our industry? After putting together today’s episode, I’m now certain it must be the ability to get the best out of people. Pat Ryan is a broking legend. He’s the visionary who saw that globalisation was going to create the need for global brokers to serve the global companies that it would create. But it’s one thing having a vision – it is completely another to be able to execute on it. Today you get to find out how he did it. You meet Pat Ryan in a different context. Here he’s not standing at a lectern giving a keynote speech or being quoted in a press release, he’s in direct conversation with me. We start by dissecting his latest major broking deal to merge RSG with All Risks and move through the art of buying and building broking businesses to consolidation and Marsh-JLT and Aon-Willis. Spitzer makes an appearance and we go into business ethics and culture, his advice for anyone joining the insurance industry and finally what he would like his legacy to be. Listening back what struck me was how much we laughed during our conversation. Pat has bought and grown hundreds of businesses and this encounter proves beyond any doubt that he does this by putting people at ease and in a place of complete trust. In short he knew how to get the best out of me and he did just that, in the same way he has been doing throughout his career. The result is easily the best interview of the Voice of Insurance series so far and one that I think will stand the test of time for many years to come. We thank Claims Direct Access (CDA) and Bolton Associates for their support today. Don't forget to ask Mark about advertising opportunities on the podcast. mark@thevoiceofinsurance.com

When I book an interview guest in for the show it is usually at least few weeks and often a few months in advance. When I open up my diary I can see them lined up ahead. I build up expectations in my mind about what the interview is going to be like. It never turns out the way I think. Today is a case in point. I have got to know David Croom-Johnson of Aegis London over many years while covering the global insurance market. I knew he was great company and was often outspoken in private. But I didn’t know what he would be like with the microphone turned on. I had a fear that he might be a little more tame than he is when the recorder is not switched. Well, I needn’t have worried. I am happy to report that the David who showed up for the interview was the exact same David that I know from all my meetings and encounters with him in and around the London market over the past decade. He is someone who has to be true to himself in all situations. And because he runs a consistently top-performing Lloyd’s business which is in a very select group of managing agents that Lloyd’s has allowed to be regulated on a light touch basis this makes for a fascinating and valuable interview. The market and David’s view of what to do about Lloyd’s mediocre and major underperformers may surprise and shock you as being extraordinarily tough. But his long experience, wisdom and foresight are what shine through in this encounter. From how to behave in a hard market to lean underwriting models. From the short termism of private equity to the casualty crisis and the eventual Uberisation of the specialty market, chances are David has thought about it deeply and has a strong and unequivocal view. Once again we thank Claims Direct Access (CDA) for their support today. Don't forget to ask Mark about advertising opportunities on the podcast. mark@thevoiceofinsurance.com