The Voice of Insurance

Today’s episode is a real treat. With all Voice of Insurance podcasts the aim is to be able to get to a level of comfort and ease with a guest so that what we end up hearing is as close you can get to listening in on a lively conversation between two good insurance market friends in a bar.

This week I think we managed it and that’s down to my guest, Nick Line, the Chief Underwriting Officer of Markel International.

Nick has had a fascinating career, almost all of it at Markel and one of the forerunner companies that it acquired to make its entry into the London Market in the late 1990s.

Nick has been through markets hard and soft as well as reserving cycles plump with redundancy followed by equal and opposite inverse periods of insufficiency and strengthening.

You could say he has seen most things – and he also seen those phenomena through different lenses as he started his career as an actuary and only more recently took a more public-facing role.

Nick’s story is Markel International’s story too- as well as that of the evolving London and wider international insurance markets over the last 30 years.

As the market has become more technically sophisticated and reserving, pricing, capital and risk have to be measured and controlled, it has become perfectly logical that a CUO might not necessarily be someone who has written a risk in anger themselves

We cover quite a bit of history but it is the forward-looking parts of this podcast that are the most rewarding because Nick combines all the technical smarts one would expect from an actuary with the communication skills of the best CEOs.

His is a vision of the tech-and-data-empowered underwriter and global insurance market of the future, but one where the magic always still happens at the behest of a human insurance professional.

Markel International has grown quickly in the hard market of the last few years and this podcast is a record of a business that has found a groove and is firing on all cylinders.

We made this recording in Markel’s London office only aided by coffee, tea and water with no beer or wine anywhere to be seen.

This makes for a fun listen that is brimming with smart observations and interesting takes from Nick.

I hope you enjoy this one as much as I did.

We also thank audio advertiser, The Insurance Network (TIN), organiser of the highly-successful TINtech events series. This week they are advertising their successful TINtech London Market event, which will be happening on 4th February 2025.

But before then Data Jam, which is focused on exploring the implications and opportunities of data, analytics, AI and automation in the insurance sector, takes place on 28th November at Convene, 133 Houndsditch, London EC3. I’m going to be there.

In today’s Episode we are getting to grips with all the key questions surrounding the hugely important issue of exposure management and modelling in our sector.

Models are a core part of our business, but as we have come to rely more and more heavily on their output, many fundamental questions arise.

For instance, how much of a worry should it be that the market is dominated by two very large players?

Or do enough C-suite executives really understand how models work or know the right questions to ask of their exposure management teams?

And are we any closer to finding efficient cross-industry ways of making sure that the exposure data upon which our modelling is based is accurate and easily transferable in digital form?

To assist me in this task are three people with vast experience in attacking these questions from all angles.

Emma Watkins is Head of Exposure Management & Aggregation at Lloyd's and as such has oversight of one of the largest combined books of business anywhere in the world.

Rupert Atkin is an underwriting veteran who has had a long and illustrious career. The Former CEO of Lloyd’s Underwriter Talbot is also a former Deputy Chair of Lloyd’s and Chair of the Lloyd’s Market Association.

Rupert currently serves on multiple boards, including as Chairman of Lloyd’s businesses Ark Managing Agency and Carbon Underwriting as well as a Director at brokers AmWins Group and Alwen Hough Johnson.

Finally Dickie Whitaker is the founder and CEO of the not-for-profit open source modelling platform, the Oasis Loss Modelling Framework.

Dickie can trace his long career back to the foundation of cat modelling firm Eqecat and also spent over a decade in senior roles at reinsurance broker Guy Carpenter. Most recently he founded the open peer-reviewed Journal of Catastrophe Risk and Resilience.

It’s clear our panel is well qualified for the job, but what I enjoyed most about this gathering was the ease and good humour with which my guests took on the subjects in hand.

This could have been a dry and academic affair, but it was absolutely nothing like that. The conversation is lively and positively buzzes with energy.

NOTES:

Download it Here

Today’s guest is going to be giving us a masterclass in a really specialist and relatively new class of business that most of us will have heard about over the last 15-20 years, but few will have had the chance to get to know intimately.

The class is Warranty and Indemnity (W&I) which is also often known as Reps and Warranties, and the expert who is going to guide us through this fascinating world is James Dodd, founder of recently-launched specialist MGA, Devonshire Underwriting.

James is an exceptional entrepreneur and this podcast will answer all the questions you had about this exciting class of business but were too scared to ask, as well as leave you in no doubt of the scale of ambition of James and his growing team.

We’ll learn the ins and outs of this specialist line as well as the state of its finely-balanced markets.

James is a great communicator and a patient teacher and if you give me the next half an hour, I promise you’ll learn an awful lot, as well as have some fun on the way.

Today’s guest is quite out of the ordinary for the Voice of Insurance.

Normally guests on the podcast can recount multi-decade careers in insurance from the time they fell into the industry up to the present day.

Today’s guest is extraordinary because he is someone of vast experience in his field but who has only just been recruited into the insurance industry.

John Mason is the CEO of London Market electronic placing provider PPL and can boast a glittering career running the core systems and platforms that support hugely important global financial markets in other financial sectors outside of insurance.

From this encounter I can tell you straight away that I think that we have a lot more to learn from John than he does from us.

But thankfully for us John is not the sort of outsider who has come to lecture us on how to drag our antiquated trading systems into line with markets that fully digitised decades ago.

John is an experienced leader and the type of communicator who understands that a market that syndicates bespoke structured insurance coverage across the globe is bound to throw up many unique complications and challenges

He gets the tone just right – he is here to do an important job and he has a clear vision of how to go about it, but he is very conscious of the need to meet us where we are and show how tech is going to make the way we already work way more efficient and higher added value, rather than try and force us to completely change the way we do business.

And that’s where this extraordinary podcast adds its value. John is easily the most eloquent leader running a core insurance technology platform I have ever interviewed. He knows where the pitfalls lie and has the experience to know how to execute large, complicated, transformational projects.

He hasn’t been with us long, but the ideas we discuss in the time that follows are highly impressive and are set to transform frontline brokers’ and underwriters’ day-to-day relationship with the technology they use to carry out their jobs.

They could unleash a wave of productivity and creativity that would completely re-set the market’s relationship with itself and with the rest of the world.

It’s extraordinary stuff – but as I said at the beginning, John is very much out of the ordinary.

LINKS:

We mention a video that PPL has produced outlining the vision behind its recently-announced partnership with Microsoft. I highly recommend a view: https://vimeo.com/1017109828 

https://placingplatformlimited.com

Today’s guest is a longstanding executive with an incredibly strong resumé who is running one of the legacy sector’s most respected outfits.

Bill O’Farrell is CEO of Premia Holdings and as such has an excellent overview of this rapidly maturing segment of the market.

In the podcast Bill and I look at the state of the legacy market and how it is likely to be interacting with the live market going forward.

At a time when the live market is undergoing one of its periodic crises of confidence in US casualty, it is particularly valuable to talk to someone who has spent much of his career making a living out of taking on and managing long-tail liabilities of all complexions.

We also examine how the structure of the legacy market is evolving towards a partnership model in which repeat transactions with live market counterparties are much more likely than in the past.

We also look at innovation and the best applications for AI within legacy as well as the prospects for an important role for the sector to play in the nascent casualty ILS market.

Bill’s not only incredibly experienced and knowledgeable, but he’s also very easy-going and really enjoyable company and the next half an hour will pass by very quickly.

Todays’ guest is a senior treaty underwriting executive with such a strong technical and systems background that he ended up joining a firm dedicated to solving his sector’s problems.

Bevis Tetlow is CEO of Imaginera, a business that produces specialist IT systems specifically designed for the big-ticket end of the market.

Imaginera is also a highly specialist IT consultant to the industry.

Bevis is one of us and speaks our language and that’s what makes this exchange so accessible and valuable.

Here we dissect the world of workbenches and how state-of-the-art systems designed for reinsurers and other high-level specialist underwriters should look like in 2024.

We also get Bevis’s views on where the next developments in technology are likely to take the high-end underwriting and broking businesses of the future.

Bevis is great company and this podcast packs an awful lot of accumulated wisdom into the next half an hour or so.

I learnt a lot and so I think will you

NOTES:

Bevis mentions a Toby and a Michelle. These are Toby and Michelle Crawford, the original founders of Imaginera back in 2013.

An abbreviation slipped through. A PAS (sometimes spelt out P.A.S. and sometimes pronounced ‘pazz’) is a Policy Administration System.

LINKS:

https://www.imaginera.co.uk/

TRANSCRIPT HERE

With a career spanning more than 30 years, today’s guest is a senior executive who has the London insurance market well and truly in his blood.

John Fowle has changed employer since his last appearance on this podcast just under three years ago and with a year under his belt as CEO of Atrium Underwriters, now seemed the perfect time to get him back on the show.

Atrium is a Lloyd’s blue-chip performer, respected in the market for its agility and underwriting skill across the cycle, and ability to punch well above its weight.

As Lloyd’s and Atrium are experiencing some of the best market conditions and underwriting results in their histories, this was a meeting with an executive at a business with great prospects in a market that is openly supportive to growth and innovation.

With the world effectively Atrium’s oyster, there are many doors and options currently open to this carrier.

With so many potential choices available, the conversation that follows reveals a lot about John and Atrium’s singular view of the insurance world – a view that has stood them both in good stead over the last 30 years.

We talk about the prospects for pricing and continued business flow into the London Market, a new-found maturity over collaboration, smart distribution and innovation and get specific updates on some of the classes in which Atrium is recognised as a leader.

John is a straight-talking guest who doesn’t duck any of my more sensitive questions, but for me it’s his deep understanding of how the market fits together and what it does best, coupled with a senior manager’s knowledge of how to get the best out of high-performing underwriters that really shines through this Episode.

Listen on and I think you’ll see what I mean.

LINKS:

https://www.advantagego.com

We also thank audio advertiser, The Insurance Network (TIN), organiser of the highly-successful TINtech events series. They are advertising their new London-based event, Data Jam, which is focused on exploring the implications and opportunities of data, analytics, AI and automation in the insurance sector.

It’s on 28th November at Convene, 133 Houndsditch, London EC3. I’m going to be there.

As CEO of Ryan Specialty Tim Turner has arguably some of the best visibility of the global insurance market and its stress points of anyone in the industry.

The business that Tim has helped to build with founder Pat Ryan is a broad, deep, complex and highly efficient insurance distribution machine, that picks up and serves wherever local markets are unable or unwilling to provide the insurance solutions that its retail brokers’ clients around the world need.

The firm works with over 20,000 brokers of all sizes and handles more than $25 billion dollars in annual premiums.

Ryan Specialty has also been a major consolidator in its segment, executing many large and complex deals on both sides of the Atlantic.

In this podcast I was able to quiz Tim on all the trends in the market and he was really open and forthcoming in all his answers.

So if you’d like to know where the major friction points and opportunities are, whether the boom in E&S submissions will continue and wonder where ongoing retail broking consolidation and the continuing wave of MGA formations are likely to be leading then listen on.

You won’t be disappointed.

But more importantly you’ll be spending time with one of the sector’s most successful, experienced and dynamic executives and learning how he thinks about the insurance world and how he intends to make the most of all the many commercial opportunities it is currently affording a business like Ryan Specialty.

Tim’s also great company and his drive and enthusiasm for our sector is undiminished and I’ll wager a listen will put a renewed spring in your step.

LINKS:

https://www.advantagego.com

We also thank audio advertiser, The Insurance Network (TIN), organiser of the highly-successful TINtech events series. They are advertising their new London-based event, Data Jam, which is focused on exploring the implications and opportunities of data, analytics, AI and automation in the insurance sector.

It’s on 28th November at Convene, 133 Houndsditch, London EC3. I’m going to be there.

This is a great episode with someone whose job encompasses education, engagement and innovation and who has found real purpose and great satisfaction in her current role.

Rosie Denée is best known for running the highly successful Lloyd’s Lab innovation hub, but her full job title is in fact Head of Innovation, Commercial Education and Engagement at Lloyd’s.

In this podcast we get to the heart of how to foment innovation in the global specialist insurance and reinsurance market and learn about the characteristics of the top insurtech companies that give them the best chance of success and perhaps more importantly, what traits are most closely associated with failure.

We also get a sneak peek at what the next wave of new Insurtech companies are likely to be offering the incumbent market in the coming years.

Rosie is the sort of personal who lights up when she starts talking about her job and so I can guarantee that this will be an educational, innovative and highly engaging listen.

IoT means the Internet of Things – the sea of interconnected devices that make up our world today.

LINKS

Rosie mentioned Lloyd’s Lab alumnae:

Gaia https://gaiafamily.com/en-gb and

ClearConnect Solutions https://clearconnectsolutions.com/

https://www.advantagego.com

We also thank audio advertiser, The Insurance Network (TIN), organiser of the highly-successful TINtech events series. They are advertising their new London-based event, Data Jam, which is focused on exploring the implications and opportunities of data, analytics, AI and automation in the insurance sector.

It’s on 28th November at Convene, 133 Houndsditch, London EC3. I’m going to be there.

Today’s a really enjoyable episode because I am talking to someone of vast insurance market experience who is getting a shot at putting that deep knowledge and acquired wisdom into really useful practice

Greg Massey has had an insurance career spanning four decades that culminated as Head of Programs at Zurich North America.

On his retirement in 2022 he became an adviser to VIPR to help the company with its US expansion plans.

This is a great match because in this role Greg is able bring his experience to bear to introduce US Delegated authority and programme management industry peers to the products and solutions that VIPR has been providing to that same community in the London Market for almost 15 years.

Greg is a great professional and this podcast is a masterclass on best practice in the application of technology for solving core operational problems and generating a genuine data-driven edge in this burgeoning market segment.

Greg is also excellent company and is incredibly open and generous with his insights.

Half an hour with him will fly by and give you a large number of practical ideas you can apply to your own business.

LINKS