The Voice of Insurance

Today’s guest is Clive Buesnel CEO of Tysers. Tysers is one of the oldest broking brands at Lloyd’s, with a history going back 200 years.  But the Tysers of today is the product of a lot of recent M&A activity involving the UK arm of Integro and London Wholesaler RFIB, all of which has agreed to be acquired by Australasian broking group AUB. Clive’s background is not as a broker, but as a financia...

Today’s guest is Waleed Jabsheh President at International General Insurance (IGI) Waleed and IGI have a really interesting story to tell. IGI is the twenty-year growth story of a very small regional insurance business founded in Jordan that over time has fully internationalised, re-domiciled to Bermuda and is now present in the major international insurance hubs. It is A-rated by AM Best and S&P...

Today’s guest is Miles Wuller, President and CEO of Ryan Specialty Underwriting Managers, the underwriting arm of Ryan Specialty. As such Miles is responsible for more than 20 MGUs, offering more than 150 lines of business and employing around 550 staff in 27 offices who wrote $2.4bn of Gross Premium in 2021. This means he has a fantastic view of the market and where all its pressure points are to...

It's been two years since I had the CEO of Oneglobal Mike Reynolds on the show. Back then he had just joined and was articulating a vision to build a global specialty broker under the newly-created Oneglobal banner. They always say that no battleplan survives to the first shots of war, so I was really keen to find out how the business had executed on its plan and how it may have iterated its visio...

Jonathan Zaffino, President of Ascot Group is one of the industry’s great thinkers Ascot is one of the Lloyd’s Market’s most successful underwriting outfits of the last 20 years and Jonathan is leading that group’s expansion into the key US market. But his style of expansion is not an aggressive kind that pursues growth by taking big bets. It is a far more nuanced and subtle approach and one that...

Today’s guest is someone I first met almost thirty years ago. In the intervening time he has had a glittering career, most of which has been on the underwriting side of the fence with senior roles at QBE, Brit and most recently at Gallagher’s Pen Underwriting MGA. But now Jonathan Turner is the CEO at Gallagher Specialty UK, he is firmly on the broking side of the box for the first time in his car...

Innovation. We keep reading about it. We keep getting harangued at conferences to do more of it. We also keep getting told that Innovation is really hard to do in insurance. But is it? After all, innovation used to happen perfectly naturally and organically in the past. It’s only in the last decade that we have started to take the business of innovation seriously and given it its own department an...

Today’s guest is someone very respected in the industry but who hasn’t spent much time in the limelight – until recently that is. Ariel Re’s CEO Ryan Mather now represents part of the significant new capital that has come into the sector since the global market turn accelerated in the last couple of years. Ariel Re is a specialist looking to be an expert and add value wherever it decides to deploy...

Today’s guest is one of the elder statemen of the Cyber insurance market and a returning guest to the show. Way back in Episode 10 of the Voice of Insurance AXIS’s Global Head of Cyber Dan Trueman made a prediction that the Cyber market was on the cusp of big change and that Cyber insurance would never be sold more cheaply than it was back then. Two years and 111 Episodes later and the hard Cyber...

Today’s guest runs a very large Lloyd’s business that in the past seven years has perhaps been the poster child for many of the problems in the London market as a whole. This is a previously star business that lost its way. It has had to retrench, contract and remediate to re-discover itself in the past three years. Johan Slabbert is the CEO of MS Amlin and has been at the Lloyd’s carrier for two...

Today’s episode brings together a trio of London Market leaders. Sheila Cameron is the CEO of the Lloyd’s Market Association (the LMA) and was the guest on the very first Episode of the Voice of Insurance. Clyde Bernstein is the Head of Broking Technology at WTW, as well as being its Head of Broking in Great Britain. Clyde appeared in Episode 63, which was all about the broker of the future. Compl...

Today’s guest is someone I have been meaning to get on the show since this podcast started over two years ago. That’s because he is one of the smartest and most eloquent executives anywhere in the sector. We overuse the word pioneer but Michael Millette has made a career out of innovating at the highest end of our business. He and a handful of others created the ILS market out of nothing in the mi...

Wow. Wow is not a word we use very much in insurance. But this special episode is full of moments where the perfectly logical response is to say “Wow!” For instance: Did you know the insurance industry had a fast-growing fleet of private satellites at its disposal, capable of giving 100% global coverage? Wow. Did you know those satellites can see in the dark and through cloud, smoke and dust? Wow....

In this podcast I’m talking to the top broking CEO in the most interesting segment of the insurance market anywhere in the world. Scott Purviance is the CEO of Amwins, the largest of the big three US wholesale insurance brokers. Because of this he has the best view of the trends affecting the world’s largest insurance market. And because wholesale is such an responsive escape valve for the market,...

Today I’m talking to Vicky Carter, a very senior reinsurance broking executive with a glittering career. As well as chairing Capital Solutions, International at Guy Carpenter, Vicky is a Member of The Council of Lloyd's and is a Lloyd's Deputy Chairman. But we aren’t going to be talking about her day job intermediating between the insurance community and the reinsurance and capital markets and hel...

Today’s guest is someone with a really difficult and really important job. You could say that the future prosperity of the insurance market is a big part of his remit. We keep fretting about how hard it is, and how it seems to be getting harder still, to innovate in our industry and how if we don’t do it fast enough we are all going to become irrelevant. Well, Head of Incubation Underwriting at Be...

Today’s guest is a major reinsurance broking CEO at the top of his game. A quarter has passed since the completion of the purchase of Willis Re by Gallagher and the integration of the 3rd largest reinsurance broker in the world into Gallagher Re. Global CEO James Kent is clearly buzzing with energy and enthusiasm for the job in hand and the prospects that new ownership and investment are going to...

Parametric insurance has been with us for quite a while now, so it is an idea that most of us have become familiar with. We can all see its advantages, particularly when it comes to almost instantaneous claims payments with practically zero adjustment cost. But until recently it has been a hyper specialist corner of the market, often restricted to very large very high value contracts such as cat b...

Today’s guest is a true pioneer in insurance and also in insurtech. In fact Richard Leftley, Executive Vice President of MIC Global has had about fifteen years head start on many of the other others in that game. As a trailblazer in microinsurance in the developing world, where premiums per customer can often be measured in $single digits, Richard learned right away that without a digital-first ap...

Sometimes you just have to give credit where credit is due. Most of the guests on The Voice of Insurance are long-term CEOs of large companies. They are all major players in the market and I don’t need any special reason to talk to them. But today’s guest is on the show, not because he runs a market-moving global insurance business, but because I think he has done something completely out of the o...

Today’s guest is a broking veteran known across the London Market and beyond. Alastair Swift is Head of Corporate Risk and Broking for Global Lines of Business at WTW as well as CEO of Willis Limited. Recently new WTW CEO Carl Hess has spoken about his desire for the group to get some of its swagger back and I think this interview could mark the beginning of that process for the firm. Following th...

Today’s guest is one of the people behind the scenes who help make the insurance market tick. With a background in finance and operations, he has made a career of helping businesses become successful and stay successful, but hasn’t necessarily taken much of the credit for doing so. Now that Rinku Patel is a CEO – running London-based MGA platform Pine Walk Capital, his profile is considerably high...

Today’s guest is from one of the highest profile firms from the group of pioneering US insurtechs that emerged in the middle of the last decade. Hippo Insurance, along with many of its trailblazing peers, is now a public company. But despite the transparency this brings, it’s easy to look at Hippo and become confused by a whirl of alliances, structures and news announcements. One analyst recently...

Corvus Insurance is a young business that is moving so fast that to those of us looking in from the outside could be forgiven for seeing something of a blur. For instance, should we look at this business as a specialist cyber underwriter or should we see a cyber technology provider or indeed a much broader data-driven insurtech company that is class-agnostic? The answer is probably a blend of all...

The idea at the heart of the voice of insurance is to give everyone access to the most senior and influential leaders in the industry. I want to democatise the sorts of insights that until recently were only available to the privileged few. Today is one of those days when the mission is properly fulfilled because my guest is a very strong leader at one of the London Market’s best success stories o...