Today’s Episode is exceptional because in terms of his seniority and the sheer size and global nature of his role, my guest is in a very small peer group.

Chris Williams is Chairman of International Business at the Tokio Marine Group and that means he helps oversee a business with a $75bn dollar balance sheet and 44,000 employees, operating in over 40 countries.

Only a handful of my guests on this show in the last five years have a role of such global depth and breadth.

An Australian who has worked in London and spent most of his career in the US, Chris is very much a model citizen of the global specialist insurance and reinsurance world that this podcast looks to serve.

In the past twenty years Tokio Marine Group has embarked on a highly successful internationalisation strategy that has entailed multiple blue-chip acquisitions in countries all over the world.

This has turned it from a dominant Japanese insurer with only around 3% of earnings coming from overseas into a global force that already makes around 75% of its earnings outside of Japan, with that proportion almost certain to continue growing over time.

Chris joined the group through its 2015 acquisition of HCC so in many ways is the personal embodiment of this strategy.

This podcast is a great distillation of that Tokio global plan and where it may be heading next, but it’s also a chance to pick the brains of an industry veteran who can combine a fifty-year career with a genuinely global overview.

Chris’s views on the rise of MGAs, the prospects for renewed M&A in 2025, the best application of AI, the debates over rate and reserve adequacy in the casualty space and the overall state of the global market are all unequivocally and candidly expressed here.

Chris is exceptionally good company and I caught him on great form in this podcast.

He may be one of the most senior executives in our world but at heart he still comes across as a genuine, down-to-earth Australian who tells things the way he sees them.

The fact that he has seen so much in such a wide and varied career just makes this Episode all the more valuable.

Listen on and you’ll see what I mean. I guarantee you’ll enjoy it and learn a huge amount.

LINKS:
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com

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 half of a duo of special podcasts released simultaneously that are looking to summarise the 1.1 reinsurance renewals.

In previous years I have compiled these interviews into a documentary-style episode to work as a précis, but this year I enjoyed my interactions so much that I really didn’t want to be chopping them up into clips, so I have produced two separate episodes instead.

Both my guests will be familiar to regular listeners and they both bring very different, very complimentary qualities. For a full picture of the renewal and the current state of the reinsurance market I highly recommend you listen to both

This Episode is with James Vickers, Chairman of Gallagher Re International, who has been at the forefront of the reinsurance broking world for over forty years.

The other, Episode 237, is with David Flandro, Head of Industry Analysis and Strategic Advisory at Howden Re. With David we examine all the broad macro factors washing across the reinsurance market and get a great feeling for the big picture.

But in this podcast with James we get into much more micro detail.

This satisfying discussion examines the annual close encounter between clients’ wants and needs and reinsurers’ appetites as well as their red lines.

A listen will tell you that this market is not as black and white as a quick read of some of the simple headlines about declining prices might have you believe. There are many shades of grey and an enormous amount of differentiation is happening between reinsurers and their customers

James is on exceptional form and in this episode he doesn’t duck any of my questions and we don’t leave any stones unturned.

If you want to be really well informed you need to talk to someone as personable and in the know as James – come and join us!

Gallagher Re has published its comprehensive 1.1 First View report entitled Differentiation Rewarded.

Make sure you Read it along with this Episode

LINKS:
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com

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 half of a duo of special podcasts released simultaneously that are looking to summarise the 1.1 reinsurance renewals.

In previous years I have compiled these interviews into a documentary-style episode to work as a précis, but this year I enjoyed my interactions so much that I really didn’t want to be chopping them up into clips, so there are two instead of one.

Both my guests will be familiar to regular listeners and they both bring very different, very complimentary qualities. For a full picture of the renewal and the current state of the reinsurance market I highly recommend you listen to both

This Episode is with David Flandro, Head of Industry Analysis and Strategic Advisory at Howden Re. David has a deep analytical background, but in his long career has not, as far as I am aware, had to broker and place a risk in anger.

The other, Episode 238, is with James Vickers, Chairman of Gallagher Re International, who has been at the forefront of the reinsurance broking world for over forty years.

With James I will be getting more into the detail of the cut and thrust of the annual duel between clients’ wants and reinsurers’ red lines and ascertaining this highly experienced broker’s feel for today’s marketplace.

But let’s get back to this podcast.

In this lively discussion we examine all the macro factors washing across the reinsurance market in great detail.

A listen will be a great education on how the best analysts gain their understanding of the market and will give you a good idea of where we are now and where we might be heading in 2025, provided external events don’t blow us off course.

David may be one of the smartest people in our business, but he’s also great fun to spend time with. He is so good at explaining complicated ideas about the fundamental capital building blocks of insurance and reinsurance and the factors that affect them, that he always makes me feel a lot smarter for having spent time with him.

NOTES

Howden Re has published an extremely detailed and comprehensive report full of insights entitled Past the Pricing Peak Read it along with this Episode. 

LINKS:
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com

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 guest is a rare breed of broker looking to build a sophisticated new intermediary operating at the higher end of the market.

In the past two years the business he leads has gone from a standing start to handling around $1.6bn in premiums.

Andrew Matson and Augment Risk have done this by being very targeted and very progressive, breaking insurance and reinsurance down to its core element – capital.

At a fundamental level insurance is a tool for capital protection and capital management. If designed and executed well this is a tool that produces better outcomes for clients and these benefits are ultimately measurable in improved return on equity.

Of course, what I have just described is about as far removed from the traditional broker model as it is possible to be.

This model might not be for everyone, but that is beside the point. Augment is already demonstrating that there is an eager community of sophisticated global buyers keen to discover what a holistic client- and capital-focused broker might be able to do for them.

And that’s what makes this encounter so interesting. Andrew has a singular vision for what he wants to achieve and after this podcast you’ll be in on the act too.

But we don’t just talk about Augment’s plans: legacy, parametric insurance, the future of insurance securitisation and the long-term effects of the digitisation of the insurance value chain are all examined in depth.

Andrew is ultra-smart and highly passionate and his ambition sears through this episode.

For anyone disillusioned with siloed, product-focused and constrained broking, here is someone with a genuinely attractive and genuinely original proposition to put to you.

LINKS:
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com

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 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 that late.

Graham Elliot 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, Mike 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.

This is a great way to start the year.

LINKS
We thank our Special Episode sponsor Stephens Rickard:
https://www.stephensrickard.com/

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 Re 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 parametrics 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.

LINKS:
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com

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 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 thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com

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://www.advantagego.com

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.
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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 thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com

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.

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.

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.

Get 20% off using the code ‘voice’ when you sign up Here

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:
Oasis LMF has produced a fascinating report Navigating the Storm that makes a great accompaniment to this podcast.

Download it Here