The Voice of Insurance

NEW EPISODE: SEEKING ALPHA Today’s episode is an absolute blast. That’s because the person I am talking to is unique. And I think that’s because he spent quite a large proportion of his career a long way outside insurance and discovered our sector relatively late. But the crucial point is that it wasn’t too late. Graham Elliott CEO of Crux Underwriting had enough experience outside the sector not to be too dyed-in-the-wool and full of industry preconceptions, but he has been with us long enough to have had time to have already made a serious entrepreneurial impact on our sector at Oxygen Insurance Brokers, Aqua Underwriting and Azur Group. I first met him about eight years ago at the beginning of the #insurtech boom and found him incredibly valuable as someone who was very eloquent and adept at explaining the benefits of technology to a traditional insurance audience in words it could understand. Graham’s latest venture is Crux Underwriting, a new Lloyd’s MGA he has set up with experienced Political Risk and Political Violence underwriter, Michael O'Connor. But this podcast is way broader than Crux’s opening line of business. Our talk is an incredibly wide-ranging tour of the most advanced thinking around how global wholesale and specialty insurance and reinsurance is set to develop in the digital age that is currently dawning. AI, algorithmic trading, genuinely realtime digitised underwriting systems and the reasons behind the boom in MGAs are all discussed in great detail. If you still haven’t quite got your head around where the market is likely to be heading after our digital big bang is finally reached, I recommend this talk as a wonderful place to start. Graham is charismatic and charming and I guarantee it won’t be long before your imagination is sparked and you are swept up in the positive appreciation of some of the enormous opportunities that are available to smart entrepreneurs in today’s market. #insurance #insurancepodcast #reinsurance Stephens Rickard https://lnkd.in/eJ-647YH

NEW EPISODE: A CONSISTENT VIEW OF THE MARKET 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. Dieter Winkel is President of Liberty Mutual Reinsurance and this podcast is very timely, given its positioning just ahead of the key 1.1 #reinsurance renewal season. Dieter is everything you want in a reinsurer: experienced, probably unshockable and very measured and consistent, as well as being easy to talk to. In this Episode we cover all the major issues affecting the global reinsurance market, from the general state of the market cycle, and trends in global specialty, property and casualty and retro all the way through cyber to the burgeoning world of #parametricinsurance and the best applications of AI in reinsurance. This a very enjoyable interview with a consummate reinsurance professional, who has lived through multiple market cycles and is an excellent communicator and great company to boot. LISTEN HERE: https://lnkd.in/etn_5MVw #insurancepodcast

NEW EPISODE: DISTRIBUTION AND EXPERTISE - WALKING THE CITY WITH DAVID HOWDEN David Howden 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. 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. LISTEN HERE: https://lnkd.in/e25Pqf7r #insurance #insurancepodcast #reinsurance

NEW EPISODE: HIGHER ADDED VALUE & BETTER SERVICE 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 and AdvantageGo Global Business Leader Ian Summers 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 clearly 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. https://lnkd.in/eH_6wC6d #insurance #insurancepodcast #reinsurance #insurtech

NEW EPISODE: DEBUNKING THE OLD LLOYD'S MYTHS 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. https://lnkd.in/eqqeE7F4 #insurancepodcast #insurance #reinsurance AdvantageGo The Insurance Network

NEW EPISODE: MAGIC MOMENTS Today’s episode is a real treat. With all The 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. 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. 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. But by the end it’s almost as if the champagne were flowing as tongues and jaws were loosened and expansive ideas were unleashed on the world. This makes for a fun listen that is brimming with smart observations and interesting takes from Nick. LISTEN HERE: https://lnkd.in/gujQvBMs #insurance #insurancepodcast

NEW EPISODE: MASTERCLASS IN EXPOSURE MANAGEMENT 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 SYNDICATE MANAGEMENT LIMITED 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. LISTEN HERE: https://lnkd.in/ecZn-8iT #insurance #insurancepodcast #reinsurance

NEW EPISODE: EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT TRANSACTIONAL RISK, BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK 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 Alexander Guilford 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 https://lnkd.in/ezwBPfX2 #insurance #insurancepodcast #reinsurance AdvantageGo The Insurance Network

NEW EPISODE: WHY DIDN'T WE DO IT BEFORE? 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 Placing Platform Limited (PPL) and can boast a glittering career running the core systems and platforms that support hugely important global 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 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. John 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. LISTEN BELOW: https://lnkd.in/ekUhx8y6 #insurance #insurancepodcast #reinsurance