Today’s episode is an absolute blast. That’s because the person I am talking to is unique.

Today’s guest can boast a 40-year career in the reinsurance business and now leads a global reinsurer with around $3bn in gross written premium and approximately 250 employees.

Today’s podcast is a first for The Voice of Insurance. It’s the first time I’ve done an outside broadcast.

And the reason is a special one. David Howden started what was then Howden Pangbourne just over thirty years ago with two others and, famously, a dog, in a tiny office on St Dunstan’s Hill in London.

Now that business is around six thousand three hundred times bigger in terms of staff numbers and infinitely larger in terms of revenue and has become a major global insurance and reinsurance operator working all over the world.

I had been trying to get David back on the show for a while as it had already been 2 years since his last appearance alongside Rod Fox after the acquisition of reinsurance broker TigerRisk.

The message came back that he might be tempted to do it as long as we could do something different.

So this is indeed completely different.

David and I met up at St Dunstan’s one morning two weeks ago and went for a walk around the Insurance district of London we both know so well, taking in the sights, but also all of Howden’s five London head offices past and present along the way.

Inevitably we get a bit of a history lesson and hear lots of insightful stories and some fun anecdotes from along the amazing Howden entrepreneurial journey of the last three decades amid a fast-changing London and international insurance market.

But far more importantly we also discuss the core issues affecting the present and the future of that market and how Howden is positioning itself within it.

Howden Re, Dual and the MGA boom, the big question over whether Howden might enter US retail broking, ongoing broking consolidation, big capital questions around what structures make the most sense as Howden continues to scale, the firm’s latest 30/30 strategic plan and other key decisions facing the Howden Group now and over the decades to come all get comprehensively dealt with.

There’s nothing like a good walk for opening up a better quality of conversation.

David’s passion and enthusiasm are fizzling through every second of this fun and all-encompassing discussion.

If you want to know how David got this far do listen on, you’ll learn an awful lot.

But I think a better reason to carry on listening will be to hear where he is heading in the next few years and how he plans to get there.

By the time we close our conversation in Dave’s Wine Bar at the foot of Howden’s current HQ, you’ll be much wiser, but probably needing a sit down and a cup of coffee as much as I was.

NOTES:

If this has piqued your interest, there are some handy highlights of the Howden story here:

https://www.howdengroupholdings.com/about-us/our-story

The other broking firms that get the most mentions in this Episode are Spear Gulland, acquired by Howden in 1997 and major Spanish intermediary Gil y Carvajal, bought by Aon in 1998.

I worked at Gil y Carvajal’s London office from 1992-95 and again 1997-98, hence my extra inside knowledge of St Dunstan's.

LINKS:

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.

Today’s episode is the latest in a series of podcasts that are all about highlighting the technology companies that are part of AdvantageGo’s ecosystem.

And this one is really special because it involves the boss of one of the ecosystem’s most essential core partners.

Aidan O’Neill is the CEO of DOCOsoft, which is the firm on whose systems around half of the London Market’s claims are handled.

Aidan has been involved with the London Market for around 25 years and since the advent of the electronic claims file in 2008 DOCOsoft has built a leading market position around claims software.

Aidan and Ian are both people who anyone who has been part of the London Market community is likely to know or have met at least once.

And because of that in many ways this podcast is a personal embodiment of the ecosystem that Ian and AdvantageGo are trying to build – and this itself is a reflection of the wider ecosystem of collaborating and competing entities that make up the broader London Market that it serves.

Ian and Aidan have been collaborating for many years and get on extremely well.

So in this fun episode we get an overview of DOCOsoft and all the latest news on the ecosystem, but we also get the benefit of all of Ian and Aidan’s collective wisdom looking beyond the upcoming reforms of Blueprint 2 and into a world of straight-through processing and a market where the true benefits of new technologies such as AI are going to be reaped.

Greater productivity, better client service and outcomes and a much stronger flow of business into London are some of the prizes that Ian and Aidan can see just over the horizon.

It's inspiring stuff and the next half an hour is going to rattle by.

LINKS 

https://docosoft.com/

This podcast features an interview with Dawn Miller, Lloyd's Chief Commercial Officer and CEO of Lloyd's Americas. Miller discusses her career, her dual roles at Lloyd's, and her strategies for modernising the market's image and operations. She highlights initiatives to improve transparency, streamline processes, and attract new business.

The oldest showbiz adage of them all is to always leave them wanting more and this week’s episode does exactly that

That’s because it is a very short, sharp blast of energy from start to finish.

Dawn Miller is Lloyd’s Chief Commercial Officer and has just taken over as its Americas CEO. Not many people have the energy to take on two huge roles, but it’s clear after this meeting that Dawn isn’t like many people.

Half an hour with Dawn is worth at least an hour with someone else.

So hang on as Dawn defines the essence of what her Lloyd’s roles are and she tells us her goals and strategies for presenting the best side of the marketplace to the world today.

I think Dawn is the culture change at Lloyd’s of the last few years personified.

Listening to someone as pro-active, positive and passionate as her, you already know the market has become the polar opposite of the venerable but slight stuffy institution it might once have been.

Indeed Dawn explains that probably her biggest job is debunking all the accumulated myths and baggage that have arisen around the perceived complexity, time and expense of dealing with Lloyd’s over its long history.

This one packs a huge amount into a relatively small space. You won’t have time to catch your breath.

LINKS:

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.

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.