Episodes
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I would have to spend some time checking the numbers, but today’s guest is the Chief Underwriting Officer who oversees arguably the largest amount of Gross written premium in the world.
That’s because Rachel Turk is really a Chief, Chief Underwriting Officer who oversees forty to fifty of her peers in the $70 billion dollar Lloyd’s market.
Whatever the final numbers, her job gives her one of the best vantage points anywhere in global insurance, so learning what she thinks is incredibly useful.
Also given the authority she wields, it’s incredibly important to know, why she’s thinking what she’s thinking and how those thoughts might be turned into actions in the Lloyd’s market.
Given the pivotal importance of the job and the huge diversity within the Lloyd’s market, being a strong communicator and being relatively easy to read must be highly desirable qualities in a candidate for a role such as this.
Happily Rachel is a brilliantly clear communicator – what you see is what you get.
Sometimes interviewing people in very senior, very sensitive jobs like this I have to grapple with cryptic answers or political-style evasion techniques where the difficult questions seem to be there to be avoided.
There’s absolutely none of that in the interview that follows. Rachel is a blast of new energy with a refreshingly down-to-earth and approachable personality.
In this podcast we rattle through a tour of where Rachel sees the Lloyd’s portfolio and global insurance and reinsurance markets today and more importantly in what directions she is looking to nudge and steer the market in the future.
A listen will give you a really clear idea on where Rachel stands on overall performance, casualty rate adequacy, reinsurance at Lloyd’s, captives, innovation, the opportunities for profitable growth and even AI.
You’ll also come away with a pretty clear idea of what she would be like to deal with.
It became clear to me that she’s an underwriter’s underwriter. Having sat on the other side of the table she really understands the commercial pressures that underwriters face in the real world.
But because she has sat in those shoes she can recognise all the ways that even the smartest underwriters might start to repeat the mistakes of the past.
I really enjoyed this. I think this is one of the best Episodes of the year so far and can highly recommend a listen.LINKS:We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com
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Today’s interviewee is making his fourth appearance on the podcast, which I think makes him my most interviewed guest.
But as he is the CEO of Hannover Re, one of the world’s largest and most consistently outperforming reinsurers, I’d love to be able to have Jean-Jacques Henchoz on the show even more regularly.
That's because very few underwriters have such a global view of the market and the timing is impeccable. A week before the festival of reinsurance that is the Monte Carlo Rendez-Vous is the perfect time to catch up with someone like Jean-Jacques.
This time we have an encyclopaedic conversation that somehow manages to encompass the state of the treaty and facultative reinsurance market, Life reinsurance, AI, carbon capture and climate change as well as lessons learned from the recent Baltimore Bridge and CrowdStrike loss events
Jean-Jacques is always unassuming but disarming in his directness. In many ways he is the epitome of the adage that in life one should speak softly, but carry a big stick.
Happily, with the market in such a strong position, it looks like the stick won’t be needed and I find Jean-Jacques in excellent spirits and looking to continue growth and further deepen his partnership with clients.
With the reinsurance market at a far more nuanced stage than it has been for the last couple of years, there is a lot of insight packed into the next forty minutes and I can highly recommend a listen.
LINKS:We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com
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Missing episodes?
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It's the ultimate job of a Broker to make insurance and reinsurance deals happen.
You can’t make things happen if you’re too shy to talk to anyone, or not good at listening.
Once you have listened you then need to be empathetic and understand the nuances and intentions of the parties to a transaction.
You also need to be able to make a point eloquently and sometimes forcefully.
All the above explains why brokers tend to make such good podcast guests!
And today, as our thoughts start to turn towards reinsurance, the autumn conference season and the 1.1 renewals that eventually follow, it’s fitting that we have a prominent reinsurance broker on the show.
Tim Ronda the CEO of Howden Re is the consummate reinsurance broker and Howden Re is the largest and probably most aggressive challenger reinsurance broker of the pack.
However with annual revenues approaching $600mn I wonder if the word Challenger really makes much sense any more and we might soon be simply describing Howden Re as an additional global reinsurance broker, to the three that now exist?
This conversation is a great primer for the state of the reinsurance market with a broker who now has the critical mass to get good visibility on large swathes of it.
It’s also a chance to have an update on the most ambitious reinsurance broking build-out of recent times and check in with where this now maturing project is heading.
Tim’s a font of knowledge and really good fun to spend time with.
I really enjoyed this podcast and I’m sure you will too.
LINKS:We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com
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I’m really pleased today because after almost four years of trying I have finally managed to get someone from the Arch Capital group of companies onto the show.
Arch’s appetite to make the most of market opportunity and react quickly to a lack of the same has led to long-term outperformance that speaks for itself.
That is perhaps just as well in a business that is really quite media-shy for such a substantial and well-regarded public company.
Numbers only tell a small part of the story and that’s why I’m delighted to welcome Hugh Sturgess, President and CEO of Arch Insurance International to the show.
Hugh’s division is a global operation that encompasses everything that Arch does in insurance outside of North America. It stretches from the London market to Bermuda and from the UK regions to Continental Europe and Australia.
The business has grown many multiples in the harder market of the last four years and now writes over two billion dollars in premium and employs a thousand people.
Hugh has been with Arch for 19 years, so is steeped in the Arch culture and way of doing things. As such this podcast isn’t just a guide to the opportunities Arch is seeing in the Specialty insurance markets in London and beyond.
It definitely is that – but I think if you listen carefully you can learn a few of the little things that add up to make a business like this outperform over long periods in many different market situations.
And Arch may be a little media-shy, but Hugh certainly isn’t – this is as fun and lively a conversation as I have had with anyone in a long time.
LINKS:We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com
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Today’s guest is someone who combines well-above-average intelligence with an approachability and a willingness to study and cover risks that many of his peers can’t or won’t consider.
Ryan Mather is CEO of Ariel Re, a business that has positioned itself at the cutting edge of exciting emerging classes such as Green energy and Cyber reinsurance, while the same time maintaining an edge in more traditional lines such as property cat – all within the Lloyd’s platform.
All this makes him something a breath of fresh air.
He is also frank, open and direct but disarmingly charming.
These are ingredients that make for an excellent podcast.
In this Episode we get to grips with the state of the market from Ariel’s point of view.
Nothing’s off the menu and here we discuss topics as diverse as solar energy, Artificial intelligence, the new Lloyd’s and how investors currently view balance-sheet businesses.
Ryan’s one of those people who make you feel a little bit cleverer every time you meet them.
Listen on and see what rubs off onto you.
NOTES:
An abbreviation slipped through. HMRC (His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs) is the UK tax authority.
LINKS:We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com
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Some podcast interviews are really fulfilling to be involved with. Sometimes it’s the rapport I have with the guest and sometimes it’s the subject matter and the insights that I find the most satisfying.
Today’s podcast is a rare combination because it’s both of the above. Jeff Radke Co-Founder and CEO at Accelerant Holdings, is clearly on top of the world in this interview.
His business is absolutely flying; it’s now employing around 375 people and is connecting an amazing 190 MGAs with 12 insurers and 66 reinsurers on both sides of the Atlantic.
The organisation wrote just over $1.7billion of premium in 2023. This is about four times the size the business was when we last spoke just over three years ago.
Jeff is great fun to be around, but it’s the vision and understanding of how the whole structure of large parts of the specialty insurance sector is changing that is what makes this such a good listen.
Back in the old days growth at this speed might have been frowned upon, or at least viewed with a certain amount of scepticism.
Not now – these days technological change means that the ultimate capital providers can drill right down into as much detail of the risks their capital is supporting as they want and they can asses the quality of their book in almost real time.
Jeff has had a career that has given him an incredibly detailed view of the insurance value chain and his vision for how the new ways the constituent parts of that chain are sharing out the value that they create in much more meritocratic ways is fascinating.
So If you have been spending time wondering why the MGA boom seems to have continued unabated even with a hard insurance market and a major reset in reinsurance, this is easily the most eloquent and enjoyable explanation you’ll hear on the subject.
You’ll also learn of Accelerant’s plans around captives, his thoughts on Lloyd’s as well as underwriting classes as diverse as fish drying and credit
LINKS:We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com
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Today’s guest runs a business that this year is set to quadruple in size since the first time he was on the show just over two years ago.
What’s more it is looking to more than double again in the medium term.
Tanguy Touffut CEO and co-founder of Descartes Underwriting is one of the indispensable leaders in the burgeoning parametric insurance sector.
Descartes is probably the best-funded and certainly most ambitious of a cohort of peers to emerge in the last 5 years on the back of the insurtech boom.
It has made a large strategic bet on the sector, building a global network of offices and now employing over 200, with more offices and hires still likely to come.
Now that the sector is beginning to mature and the field of start-ups begins to thin out and parametric products are joining the day-to-day toolkit of major brokers and commercial risk managers, it was great to catch up.
Much has changed since we last spoke, not least a huge shift in the state of the reinsurance market and the emergence of artificial intelligence into the global psyche, so we had an awful lot to talk about.
In an industry where conservatism and scepticism are not only endemic but often valued character traits, Tanguy has a clear vision of how the right parametric solutions applied in the right places are going to transform insurance for the better, in consistency and transparency of pricing and coverage as well as in speed of claims handling and payment.
My job for large parts of this podcast was to play devil’s advocate and challenge Tanguy on this new modus operandi of insurance and whether it is a genuine disruptive challenge to the commercial insurance sector as a whole or something of a passing fashion.
Tanguy came though extremely convincingly.
He may be a visionary, but Tanguy is also a realist who knows that if this relatively new method of risk transfer is to succeed long-term, it must have a genuine technical edge over traditional indemnity insurance in terms of its understanding and pricing of risk – hence Descartes’ huge investment in scientific and technological talent.
This is someone who has thought deeply about the whole insurance value chain and knows where it might be improved and that’s what makes this a fascinating conversation.
Listen on for a grand tour of an exciting and fast-moving new insurance sector with one of its principal architects.
LINKS:We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com
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I have the best job in the world.
That is, it’s the best job for someone like me, who really likes talking to people and finding out what they are doing and thinking – but also as a bi-product finding out what they are really like.
The reason I am saying this is because today’s episode was so much fun to make that it didn’t feel like a standard day at the office.
I have had Warren Downey (left) and Lee Anderson (right) of London-headquartered intermediary Specialist Risk Group (SRG) on the show before and really enjoyed their company, good humour and the openness and ease with which could discuss their strategy and business philosophy, but the interview you are about to hear is exceptional.
This is because rarely do I interview two senior executives who finish each other’s sentences so regularly and enjoy each other’s company so much.
The trigger for our podcast was a change of investors that has brought Blue Chip players Warburg Pincus and Temasek into the fold at a reported valuation of over £1 billion pounds, so perhaps that is why the conversation was so animated.
Whatever the reason, what follows is a very enjoyable romp outlining the strategy and culture of an incredibly successful broking duo.
What is SRG going to do with its new investment? The answers are all in here.
And that’s because of the two people in the room with me.
A minute ago I said I have the best job in the world for me – and it seems obvious to me that these two would say exactly the same about their jobs.
NOTES:
Warren is the first to speak.
The football team owned by Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney is Wrexham.
LINKS:We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com
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Today’s guest is a leader in one of the most innovative and interesting businesses in the market.
He was last on the show as part of a duo but is now here in his own right.
This should all make much more sense when I tell you that I am talking about Dan Burrows, the Group CEO of Fidelis Insurance Group.
Since we last met Fidelis has successfully split into the balance sheet insurer that Dan runs and the MGA the Fidelis Partnership led by Richard Brindle, in a move to a hybrid structure that is the first of its kind.
Fidelis Insurance Group has also floated as a public company, completed a secondary capital raise and is to back the launch of a Fidelis Partnership syndicate at Lloyd’s.
Many of the above events are once-in-a-lifetime occurrences for most executives, but Dan moves quickly and the person I spoke to for this interview gave the impression of already being settled into his new roles and doubtless exploring his business’s next moves.
A listen back to this podcast has confirmed that time spent with Dan is enormously productive.
We cover a huge amount of ground, from the state of the market all the way through to the best application of Artificial Intelligence in the insurance value chain.
But I think one of the most valuable aspects of this encounter is that we get to hear Dan speaking clearly for himself and the interests of his shareholders.
He does so incredibly frankly and candidly. His views are never ambiguous.
So if you would like to spend some very productive time with a key player in one of the most successful underwriting organisations of its generation, please listen on.
LINKS:We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com
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Today’s podcast is all about the insurance of political risk and violence and we are going to come at this subject from all angles.
This episode is intended to be an all-round masterclass for anyone with an interest in these fascinating and fast-growing specialist lines of business.
Is the world a riskier place and are risks going to remain insurable? And where is most of the new demand of the coming decades going to be coming from? All is examined in detail.
Much has been made of the exceptional number of elections taking place in global democracies in 2024 as another possible source of political complications and conflict.
Africa has also been highlighted as a potentially huge new source of demand, driven by the global transition to net zero carbon emissions and this goal’s need for the rare earth metals that are to be found in abundance in many of its Southern and Eastern States.
But it’s no secret that many of Africa’s most mineral-rich nations with the largest development potential are also places where political stability can be in short supply.
For this reason, I talk to Lara Wolfe, Senior Sub-Saharan Africa Risk Analyst at risk consultancy BMI, which is part of the Fitch Group. (Pictured Top)
This market sounds like the ideal territory for brave underwriters to be operating in and this is where the expertise of Roddy Barnett (Pictured bottom), Head of Political Risks and Trade Credit at Beazley is invaluable.
Finally, with the help of Beazley’s Head of Political Risk and Violence Claims, Alex Hill, (pictured middle) we’ll learn how the political risk product actually works on the.
I am very pleased with how this first thematic documentary-style podcast has turned out – I do hope you enjoy it and find it useful.
NOTES:Here’s the link to the Navigating political risk in an era of heightened global tensions report: https://www.beazley.com/en-US/news-and-events/geopolitical-risk-snapshot-2024
There’s a great summary, but I highly recommend downloading and reading it in its entirety.
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Today’s Podcast is all about innovation and today’s guest has been responsible for doing more of it than most.
James Slaughter is Chief Underwriting Officer at Apollo Group, a Lloyd’s business that has been behind collaborations and new product launches galore in recent times.
Be it exploring semi-automatic underwriting and the application of artificial intelligence, the development of its own ibott syndicate, helping launch a parametric syndicate, or other specialist start-ups focusing on risks as diverse as Cyber, Drones, employee parental benefits or unlocking new business from Africa, Apollo has become one of the go-to market enablers for innovation in the London Market in recent times.
James is always incredibly direct as an interviewee – and what you see is what you get – I find he’s exactly the same person whether the microphones are switched on or off.
And that’s why this Episode is such a treat, James always says what he thinks - and it’s clear he thinks a lot more than most.
Listen on and you’ll learn a lot about what is coming down the track, how some of the vanguard technologies are best being exploited and which of the newest developments at the insurance cutting edge James is most excited about.
It’s breathless stuff – I had a lot of fun recording this one and I think you’ll enjoy a listen.
NOTES:Abbreviations:
UNL – Ultimate Net Loss. In this context it is shorthand for traditional contract-of-indemnity insurance versus a parametric insurance structure.
GUA – the General Underwriters Agreement, which is a leading underwriters agreement designed to govern and streamline how amendments to subscription market placements can be carried out, often allowing a leader or leaders to bind on behalf of following markets.
ICX and TCX – Lloyd’s class of business codes for innovation and the energy transition respectively.
LINKS:We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com
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Today’s guest carries out an incredibly important role representing the whole London Market in the UK’s corridors of power.
That means looking out for a market that wrote over $100bn in core gross written premium and controlled just under $160bn in all in 2022, increasing its global market share to over 8 per cent.
That also means representing a market that now employs some 60,000 people and produces two percent of UK GDP and eight-and-a-half percent of London’s GDP.
Caroline Wagstaff, CEO of the London Market Group, was born to do a job like this.
She’s passionate and very difficult to say no to, but she’s also a great communicator and is very good at reading a room and understanding a collective mood.
The London Market Group (or the LMG) allows Lloyd’s, Liiba, the IUA and the LMA to speak with one voice on broad London Market-related topics and in this Episode we dissect the LMG’s latest London Matters Report and catch up with what is now top of the LMG’s busy agenda.
The Report is an essential companion to this episode and there will be a link to it in the Notes – I highly recommend a read – it isn’t long and is packed full of very useful facts about the London market’s place in the global risk ecosystem, as a well as its direction of travel.
Caroline is on excellent form in this discussion and the podcast is crackling with energy. I for one am extremely glad that we have been able to get someone of her calibre to represent us as an industry.
London has been doing relatively well of late but listening back to this recording it’s clear that there is zero complacency at the LMG.
It’s clear that Caroline is not going to rest until the UK government and regulators are working harder to make it do even better.
NOTES:The Latest London Matters report can be found here: https://lmg.london/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/London-Matters-2024-Data-Pack.pdf
LINKS:We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:https://www.advantagego.com/
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Today’s guest is in charge of a team of around 400, writing a book approaching $3 billion in gross written premium in the largest wholesale insurance market in the world
I have had many CEOs on the show who run significantly smaller operations.
And that’s what gives this podcast so much weight.
Wendy Houser is Chief Wholesale Officer of Markel Specialty and is one of a select group of people with day-to-day visibility of the booming US Excess and Surplus lines (E and S) market.
So today we are going to go into quite a lot of detail about the state of this huge and dynamic segment.
An unprecedented level of business flow and rate rises has produced something of a golden age for E&S and we’ll be trying answer how much longer this state of affairs can continue.
Wendy is great company, so along the way we’ll be getting to know a remarkable and charismatic insurance leader with a huge amount of knowledge and insight, who isn’t afraid of making difficult decisions and certainly doesn’t duck any of my more probing questions.
LINKS:We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:https://www.advantagego.com/
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I can’t believe it’s been three-and-a-half years since I had Alex Maloney on the podcast for a full episode to himself.
We’ve had brief catch-ups at Monte Carlo and when we bump into each other in the London Market, but I haven’t had time with Alex properly devoted to understanding what he and the Lancashire Group is thinking.
A huge amount has happened since we last spoke, not least Lancashire’s entry into the Casualty Treaty arena and its decision to open up a new operation in the US Excess & Surplus lines market.
Alex is a great guest because he is one of the most direct and straight-talking people I have had on the show.
What you see is what you get.
And what we get here is a tour of global insurance and reinsurance market opportunities and what Lancashire is doing to make the most of them, with a minimum of fuss.
We also get a distillation of Lancashire’s strategy of managing selective growth while trying to preserve a small company mindset and culture and at the same time pitching something slightly different to industry talent.
It’s all substance and no spin.
Listen on and I promise you’ll learn an awful lot in a very short amount of time. You’ll also get to meet probably the straightest shooter running a public company in our sector.
NOTES:
I let the abbreviation TIV sneak through. It is a property term and stands for Total Insured Values.
LINKS:We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com
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Today’s episode is a masterclass with two leaders in the North American professional liability market.
Often on this show we talk about the big picture in very broad brushstrokes, but today is refreshing because we are getting into specific and specialist detail about some of the most broad-reaching and dynamic classes of business anywhere in the world.
Danielle Librizzi, Head of Professional Liability, and Chris Cooper, Head of Media Liability, at QBE North America have a lifetime of market experience between them and this is a lively discussion.
Casualty is under the spotlight the world over, but nowhere more so than in North America, so these two senior underwriters are right at the frontline in the battle to keep on top of new perils and trends in the world’s fastest-moving and highest stakes market.
Here I ask what Danielle makes of casualty rate adequacy and I ask Chris how the pandemic, the trend to digital platforms and the writers’ strike have affected the media liability risk landscape.
How is QBE’s professional liability division responding to the call for the globalisation of QBE’s offering and far great collaboration between departments?
And how is QBE utilizing Artificial Intelligence on the ground in its own underwriting processes and, perhaps more importantly, how does Chris view it as an emerging media liability and potentially systemic general E&O peril?
I got all the answers I was looking for and if you stay tuned so will you.
Danielle and Chris are excellent company and this will be a very rewarding listen for anyone wanting to get a better perspective on the North American professional liability market
LINKS:We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:https://www.advantagego.com/
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Today’s podcast is one of the most eclectic and far-reaching I have produced since founding the Voice of Insurance over four years ago.
And that is entirely down to today’s guests. Ian Summers Global Business Leader of AdvantageGo (pictured top) is a well-known figure to anyone who has worked in the Global Insurance Market and has a full career of pioneering market modernisation behind him from within the market as Global Information Officer at Aon and serving the market at major Software companies.
And if were possible, Bill Pieroni (pictured bottom) has had an even more all-encompassing career to date than Ian. Starting outside the industry at top consultancies, a senior role at State Farm and five years as Global Chief Operating Officer at Marsh followed.
For the last eight years Bill has headed up global insurance data standards body ACORD.
But if you thought that meant our chat would be limited to global data standards, you’d be completely wrong
At their core what Bill and Ian do is provide the tech and the utilities to help insurance get on and do what it does best.
Bill and Ian have only been so successful so far because they understand the industry inside and out and that means this podcast is far more wide-reaching than you would imagine.
For instance, you wouldn’t expect tech experts to commission a historical study on the efficacy of M&A for the insurance industry, would you? But these two have, principally because they are so embedded into the sector that their level of understanding matches most of the most seasoned Executives and analysts.
So get ready for a real feast.
The winners and losers in insurance M&A, really-detailed insights into the best applications for Artificial Intelligence, the real reason why insurance is so hard to transform and the prospects for the London Market if its latest digital reforms are successful are all to come.
And the style of delivery may surprise you. If Ian is a strong and forthright character, Bill is almost off the charts in the energy and passion that he brings to this discussion.
I had a real blast and learnt a huge amount. Listen on and so will you.
NOTES:
The M&A study we discuss can be downloaded here. I highly recommend a read – it’s fascinating stuff (and could potentially save you $billions!)
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Top-tier MGA CFC Underwriting has undergone some very well-publicised leadership changes in the last few months and Andy Holmes is the business’s newly-appointed CEO, so I’m delighted to have him on the show as this week’s guest.
Andy’s been part of this organisation since very early in its remarkable growth story and was previously its Chief Underwriting Officer, so he knows the business inside and out.
Nothing was off the table in this discussion, so we started where we needed to, but soon got swept away in a whirlwind of M&A, new product launches and insights into the world of cyber, embedded insurance, parametric covers and, of course, Artificial Intelligence.
Andy is incredibly engaging and easy to talk to and in this podcast he reveals a huge amount of accumulated insurance business wisdom and fills in many details about CFC’s original and highly successful insurance philosophy.
Listening back to this interview it’s clear that although CFC might have had big changes at the top, it’s definitely not slowing down and its body corporate and innovative culture remain as effective and worth studying as ever.
NOTES:We mention Ciaran Martin, who is former CEO of the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre and chairs the Technical Committee of the Cyber Monitoring Centre (CMC).The CEO of the CMC is William Mayes.
LINKS:We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:https://www.advantagego.com/
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Today’s guest is well on the way to cracking a problem that has been vexing the market for thirty years and something I have been writing about specifically for the last twenty.
We all know that the process of syndication of risk in the London and other international insurance and reinsurance markets is full of inefficiencies and ripe for reform.
But just because a problem has been around for a long time and has been well documented, it doesn’t make finding and implementing a solution any easier.
I have lost count of the number of insurance and reinsurance exchanges I have seen launch and then wither and die over the last two decades.
Gilbert Harrap, the CEO of InsurX is someone who is setting out to change all of this.
Many exchanges failed either because they were founded by people with little understanding of complex insurance or they alienated their potential users, particularly the brokers, who often rightly or wrongly perceived them as a threat to their businesses.
InsurX is different because Gilbert is someone with market experience who is focusing on building a utility that could help both underwriters and brokers increase volumes and improve margins.
This is a fascinating conversation with someone running a business that has already gained significant traction in two classes of business and is looking to expand across the board.
Gilbert is one of us and I think that’s a big part of why InsurX has been well received. He is laser-focused on helping brokers serve customers better while allowing underwriters to diversify in smart new cost-effective ways.
He doesn’t want to be an underwriter or a broker – he just wants to be the one connecting them using intelligent new methods that add value to both parties.
I really enjoyed my time with Gilbert and left feeling that InsurX might be one of the first exchanges to make it in the complex syndicated risk space.
I also ended this conversation feeling much more optimistic about the future of the London Market and its prospects of increasing its global share of high-quality insurance business.
LINKS:We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
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Today’s guest is VIPR’s Client Services Director, David Butler.
On this show I speak to lots of CEOs and that means my guests are sometimes quite far removed from the day-to-day solving of problems for clients.
David’s job is to be as close to the client as possible, finding out what their real problems are and therefore what they really need.
It’s then his job to make sure that what VIPR are providing those customers with is exactly what’s required – and more importantly that customers have all the training and support to make sure they can get the maximum benefit out of a product and can adapt and reconfigure it effectively as their business develops.
All this means is that he probably has his finger closer on the pulse of what is worrying carriers in the market than almost anyone around.
So as the market digitises and looks to analyse the new data pools that it is collecting and apply new technologies like AI at many different points in the value chain, it is people like David who are going to be doing all the heavy lifting.
David is a technology specialist with just under 30 years’ experience and his insights into how to make the most of all the exciting new tech at our disposal or just coming onstream, is hugely valuable.
He’s also a really friendly person who has spent much of that long career explaining complicated ideas in ways that are really easy to understand and that’s why I can heartily recommend a listen today.NOTESI promised to look up what the common computing term BUS stands for:
BUS is an acronym for Binary Unit System. These are used to used to transfer data around a network (a bit like the way a real-life bus moves people about).
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Today’s guest has quickly shown himself to be one of the industry’s most accomplished leaders.
When he took over at SiriusPoint just over 18 months ago he gave the business a clear but tough turnaround plan that he executed quickly.
Now just coming through the other side of a remarkable change in fortunes, he is brimming with confidence and ambition to move the business he runs further up the performance percentiles.
Scott is a very strong communicator and the next forty minutes are packed with very specific ideas, strategies and clear direction.
With someone like Scott, you get the impression that you will always know where you stand and exactly what he expects of you, but the very detailed nature of his responses shows that he also listens extremely carefully to what questions he is asked.
SiriusPoint is very much marching to his beat and he is a very engaging, disarming and direct podcast guest.
LINKS:
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/
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