The Voice of Insurance

Today’s guests are the executives behind the fast-growing specialist aviation broker start-up Piiq Risk Partners. In a very short space of time Philip Smaje CEO [picture left] and Marcel Chad President [picture right] have put Piiq on the front pages of the trade press with some eye-popping household name client wins. In a time of seemingly permanent consolidation and the homogenisation of so much...

Clive Washbourn is a legendary figure in the marine insurance market. His enviable track record of profitability has made him probably the nearest thing to a celebrity within that very particular, and often very difficult to underwrite, subset of our sector. So when the news came out that he had started his own marine MGA Navium, on Fidelis’s Pine Walk platform I made sure I put in a request for a...

Today’s guest is part of a team busy building a reinsurance broker to challenge the big three almost across the board. We’ll never see the numbers but it is highly likely that his firm has invested the most of all the challenger reinsurance brokers in the past two years. During that time it has seen its headcount quintuple to two hundred and twenty-five and it has opened twelve new offices to be r...

Today’s special episode does exactly what it says on the tin - plus a little more. AdvantageGo organised a prestigious panel of three prominent US-focused P&C CEOs and I got to work with them on dissecting the state of the market. Marc Adee, CEO of Crum & Forster, Andrew Robinson CEO of Skyward Specialty and Greg Hendrick the CEO of Vantage Group were all on excellent form as we examined rate adeq...

I have to admit that today’s guest took me by surprise.  Could she be the most powerful female CEO in the world? Well, maybe. She sits at the head of a global broking organisation that has six billion dollars in revenue and handles around sixty billion dollars in gross premiums. If Willis and Aon finally merge, Olga Collins will be the CEO of the world’s third-largest broking organisation. In this...

Today’s special episode is all about how to build a company culture that helps your business to win. To this end I was very lucky to be joined by John Fay MBE (pictured bottom right) and Edward Gordon Lennox (pictured bottom left) of Delta V Partners to help me dig deeply into the subject. John and Edward are experts in the field who are much in demand across all sectors and in multiple countries...

It is only a recently rebranding exercise that has made the size and scale of today's guest's broking and MGA operation come into view. David Bearman is the founder and CEO of London-based Aventum, a group that houses the Rokstone MGA and broker Consilium and controls over £600mn in gross written premium. The group has been around for 25 years but has only just put its head above the parapet and s...

Today’s guest is someone I have known for almost 30 years. That’s because I used to broker business to him back in the 1990s when I was working in the London Market. Back then he was making a name for himself as a lead market in the international casualty class at UK composite Eagle Star. As my career changed completely his took off and at QBE Europe he swiftly rose the ranks to become its most se...

As Chief Underwriting Officer of Tokio Marine Kiln (TMK) Matthew Shaw has one of the top ten individual underwriting jobs in the London market, marshalling a stamp capacity of one and a half billion pounds at one of Lloyd’s best-known lead markets, Syndicate 510. In many ways this business is a microcosm of the London Market as a whole. A soft market fall into loss was followed by significant re-u...

Executive Chairman Neil Eckert and Group CEO Trevor Carvey are the team behind Conduit Re, a new London-listed Bermuda-based reinsurer. Neil is one of the insurance industry’s most successful serial entrepreneurs, so when someone of his experience and pedigree senses an opportunity we should all take notice. Conduit’s single-location pure reinsurance design is quite different from its class of 202...

Today’s podcast with Steve McGill, Founder and CEO of McGill and Partners was recorded live. The Voice of Insurance was invited to produce the opening fireside chat at the highly successful Insurtech 3 point 0 insurtech event and we thought it would be fun for a change. Doing things truly live is always different and often unexpected. You’ll find this one a bit faster than usual – that’s not becau...

Today’s guests head one the largest and best-placed new businesses in the market. This is because it had a long head-start on the class of 2020. Before the market turn became obvious last year it already had $1.7bn in capital committed and underwriting teams in place. Then with the hardening in full swing it accelerated its growth plan and almost doubled that capital base. Convex’s Chairman and CE...

Today’s guest has one of the biggest single jobs in our business. As President of Property & Casualty for Swiss Re in the US Keith Wolfe has huge responsibility This is because on most measures his employer is the largest writer of reinsurance in the US. This gives him unrivalled visibility on what is the largest insurance market in the world. I have met Keith many times in the past, chairing him...

Today’s guest is the leader of one of London’s oldest independent broking houses. Greg Collins is CEO of Miller, which via major new investment has just extricated itself from the Willis Towers Watson Group. In this podcast we get right to the heart of why the firm’s innovative experiment with Big-three ownership didn’t work out and what this wholesale specialty broker plans to do with its new-fou...

Today’s guest is an amazing person with an incredibly interesting story to tell. After 10 years in the British military and distinguished service in Iraq, Forbes McKenzie was determined to apply the skills he had learned in military intelligence in the civilian world. A decade and lots of hard work later, McKenzie Intelligence Services (MIS) is bringing real-time intelligence to bear on natural di...

Today’s guest is an example to those of us who feel we ought to change with the times but might not feel we are fully equipped to do so. Matthew Wilson is the Group CEO of Brit and is a Lloyd’s man through and through. He has spent most of his career going about his business in the same analogue way that most of us are familiar with. Yet he has embarked on a transformation programme at Brit to ove...

I really enjoyed interviewing today’s guest. I think it was because I was picking up on the energy, enthusiasm and buzz emanating from someone who is running a start-up business. Mitch Blaser, the CEO of Mosaic has done this before and it is his clarity of vision and purpose that shines through our discussion. He has the benefit of experience to know what he would do differently and he also has a...

This week’s podcast is a great encounter with a UK MGA pioneer at the top of his game. Colin Thompson is the CEO of Nexus Group, a firm he founded in London 13 years ago. That business is projecting punchy organic growth of a third this year to $600mn in premiums written. It is also on the hunt for ever larger acquisitions and is looking to back some of its own underwriting with a risk-bearing ent...

Today’s guest is one of the best-known and most experienced executives in the reinsurance broking world. Ross Howard is Global Executive Chairman of Lockton Re and has launched himself into a major project to help build a challenger reinsurance broker for the Lockton Group. In this podcast we find out why he thinks the current market opportunities are some of the best he has seen in his long caree...

This episode could easily be called “everything you wanted to know about insurtech but were afraid to ask.” This is because today’s guests are insurtech pioneers who spend their time finding new insurance ideas and the entrepreneurs behind them. They knock the rough edges off, apply expertise, lend regulatory licences so that ideas can be tested and make connections with incumbent insurers as well...

Today’s guest is one of the industry’s brightest stars and I think the podcast you are about the listen to amply proves why he has earned that moniker. The Voice of insurance has also been lucky enough to speak to him at an exciting time for him and the industry itself.   A veteran of the Bermuda class of 1992, he is back again with a substantial start-up looking to capitalise on major opportuniti...

Today’s special guests are technology entrepreneurs looking to digitise and revolutionise the reinsurance marketplace. Their radical free-to-use platform has the goal of making the cumbersome submission and placement process pain-free for practitioners. But with these two there’s a big difference. Both Jerad Leigh and Ben Rose of Supercede gave up successful careers in the underwriting, broking an...

After an extended build-out Pina Albo’s Hamilton Group now has significant Lloyd’s, Bermuda and Dublin platforms covering specialty insurance, reinsurance and third-party asset management and is building further capabilities on the ground in the US E&S market via an MGA structure. It’s also fully committed to a tech-enabled US brokered small commercial joint venture operation in Attune. Listen to...

Today’s guest is a broking CEO on an ambitious mission to grow global revenues many times with the backing of a strategic owner. That may sound familiar to regular listeners, but Steve Hearn of Corant Global is going about things quite differently. At a time when most broker holding companies are at pains to hive up all their underlying brands into an overarching global brand identity, Steve is al...

This week’s guest is a longstanding and integral member of one of the most successful underwriting teams in the specialty insurance and reinsurance world. Charles Mathias was an original member of staff at Lancashire and is now a core member of the team at Fidelis. As Chief Risk officer and board member he has total visibility of Fidelis’s strategy and here he doesn’t duck any questions. I was sur...