The Voice of Insurance

Welcome to a really exciting re-encounter with someone who has been out of our industry for some years but is now back with a highly original new proposition. In my line of work I get to see an awful lot of new insurance ideas and so it takes a lot to fire up my imagination. And when I talk to people on this podcast about those new ideas – often the new product niche or service they are looking at might have a total addressable ma...

Today’s guest is making a highly welcome return to the show after a four-year absence. Since we last spoke the fortunes of the market have been transformed, her company has matured and floated successfully on the New York Stock Exchange and has had its Insurer Financial Strength rating upgraded to A by AM Best. All this means that CEO of Hamilton Insurance Group, Pina Albo and I had an awful lot to talk about. And our discussion ...

At first glance, today’s guest might have an unenviable job. That’s because that job entails trying to find the common ground between the hundreds of Lloyd’s brokers, some of whom are extremely large and very many of whom are very small and very specialist indeed. Christopher Croft, the CEO of the London & International Insurance Brokers’ Association (LIIBA)is someone who I see and meet constantly out in the marketplace, and i...

Todays’ Episode was a joy to make. It was a face-to-face meeting that crackled from the moment my interviewee walked through the door and shook my hand all the way through to a swift exit to a pressing engagement. As I was tidying cables and packing away my microphones into their case, I already knew this was going to be a really strong Episode. Now that I’ve had a listen back for the final run-through I know it to be the case. ...

I really enjoyed recording today’s episode because both my guests have been on the show before and that always makes getting a conversation going much easier. And to make the session even more lively, we had something really interesting to discuss. Andrew Robinson’s Skyward Specialty has just entered into an agreement to buy David Ibeson’s Apollo. In M&A the parties often talk about a combined entity being more than the sum of...

This episode is a very special one because, thanks to one of my guests, we are going to hear from somebody who I assumed I had missed my chance of getting to appear on this podcast. Let me explain. Tony Ursano of Insurance Advisory Partners is someone I have interviewed many times over the past 20 years. In fact I first met Tony when he was working at Willis during the thirteen-year reign of our second guest. Tony has recently exe...

The growth in Hybrid Fronting carriers has been explosive in the past seven years and this growth has both been fuelled by, and has helped feed, a parallel explosion in the formation of MGAs and the rise in commercial insurance distribution outside the Admitted Lines market. Today’s guest is one of the first movers in this relatively novel insurance carrier type and co-founded the business that is now MS Transverse. As such Dave P...

I often wonder if we in the insurance industry have any idea how lucky we are that there are so many smart people out there looking to help make the way we do business easier, more efficient, more productive and ultimately, more profitable. Today’s guest, Matt Hicks, is one of these people. Matt is the co-founder of Recorder, a next-generation broker management system that connects producers directly with underwriters and gives...

Welcome to a Special Documentary Episode of The Voice of Insurance podcast Produced in association with Stephens Rickard This is the fourth episode of its kind. The first saw a historic, chaotic, dramatic hard market renewal unfold, at the next stability and a return to orderliness was craved - and was granted. Last year animal spirits started to be talked of in hushed tones, but it was too early for anything like a full return....

The transformation of major Japanese insurers into genuinely global insurers has been one of the most remarkable long-term changes of the last couple of decades. Today’s guest is an embodiment of that internationalisation.

Ken Reilly is CEO of Insurance for Sompo in Asia Pacific but boasts a 30-year international career that has seen him work in New York, London, Bermuda and Tokyo. Ken now splits his time between Singapore and T...

Every year for the past four years I have been lucky enough to be given time with Richard Brindle at the opening of the Monte Carlo Rendezvous and every year we have had the sort of conversation that helps set the tone for the rest of the gathering and indeed the rest for the calendar year and into the next. This year was no exception. As ever, Richard was forceful, unambiguous and direct on all topics, from the state of the mar...

Successful insurers have always been in the business of gaining a competitive edge in the form of better information and intelligence. Going right back to the days of early marine underwriters funding improved communication between global ports and ship operators, the best players have always made sure they had the clearest possible view of the risk in front of them both, at a granular, individual level and then at the portfolio ...

Insurance has a huge amount of specialisms that don’t always cross over, which means that we can go our whole careers as insurance professionals, having a rough idea about what a particular class of business does, but not really ever appreciating the detailed picture. I think Trade Credit is one of those classes and that’s something we should all fix, not least because it’s a product that our clients could probably all benefit from...

Deep down we are all know that innovation isn't just a buzzword; it's really a matter of long-term survival.

It is getting increasingly difficult to argue against the idea that the speed of change keeps accelerating and we now live in a world where what was science fiction only 20 years ago could soon become the norm.

For instance, who would have guessed that the majority of our growing energy needs are going to be almost entirely ...

Today’s guest has just taken over the reins at a business that has always aimed to be a company that people find easy to work with and enjoy dealing with. Having been around long enough to have met and interviewed all three of his immediate predecessors, I can attest to this. Despite being at the head of a key global reinsurer, all those leaders were always open, accessible and down to earth: very much the sort of executives wh...

I really enjoyed today’s interview because is it packed full of eureka moments. Sometimes looking at a business from the outside it is hard to work out exactly what it does and how and why it does it. Visiting the website of a company of this sort tends to throw up more questions than it answers. And that’s frustrating for a journalist as It’s my job to make sense of these things For me cyber reinsurance underwriter Envelop Risk...

If you just confined your view to the top four brokers, you might easily assume that not much has happened in the US retail broking segment in the last ten years. But if you broadened you view to the top ten or twenty, you’d be faced with a very large number of billion-dollar-plus revenue broking groups that you would have been hard pressed to name ten years ago and many of which didn’t exist as far back as the turn of the millen...

Todays’ guest has been working on implanting the best technology into the London Market since the days when computer screens only displayed varying shades of green. He’s someone who I have known for twenty years and have come to rely upon to unpack all the jargon, spell out the acronyms and explain in layman’s terms what is really happening in the ongoing process of London Market technological reform. This is because Jeff Ward,...

The global, wholesale and specialty insurance and reinsurance segment of the global market has been putting out very strong results in recent times. If I had to highlight a consistent theme in my interviews of the past year, it would be an almost universal desire among carriers for continued growth, but without compromising on profitability as appetites return and the market becomes more competitive. Today’s guest is a senior un...