The Voice of Insurance

Today’s guest is a master of the aviation class of business, but is also a well-known and respected market figure across classes, holding key positions in market committees and international insurance trade bodies and non-insurance organisations alike.

Bruce Carman has been a leading aviation and war underwriter since the late 1980s and after over 30 years at the heart of the Lloyd’s market, started his own specialist MGA, Hive Underwriters in 2017.

That business has grown rapidly and has begun to mature and scale and so now seems an excellent time to get Bruce on the show.

The aviation market is in a fascinating position post the Russian invasion of Ukraine and part of our talk will be an incredibly useful listen for any generalist who might feel that aviation is sometimes a specialism too far for them.

But that wouldn’t be doing justice to Bruce and this discussion.

Listening back, what this podcast is really about is examining the art of becoming a good and highly focused underwriter and insurance entrepreneur.

Bruce is incredibly good company and is very generous with his time and insights.

My overriding impression is of someone having the time of their life.

NOTES

Abbreviations:

EASA = the European Union Aviation Safety Agency

WAIG and BAIG = Respectively the Westminster and British Aviation Insurance Groups – early UK aviation pools. BAIG is a forerunner of today’s Global Aerospace.

Appointed Rep = Appointed Representative. A UK term where a younger firm gains regulatory (usually FCA) authorisation via an arrangement with a fully-regulated firm.

Bruce mentioned an Allianz aviation report, which is a highly complementary read to accompany this podcast:

Aviation risk, claims and insurance outlook 2024 | Allianz Commercial

https://www.advantagego.com

We also thank new 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.

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.

https://www.advantagego.com

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:

https://www.advantagego.com

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:

https://www.advantagego.com

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:

https://www.advantagego.com

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:

https://www.advantagego.com

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:

https://www.advantagego.com

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:

https://www.advantagego.com

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:

https://www.advantagego.com

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:

https://www.advantagego.com