The Voice of Insurance

In my job I talk to a lot of entrepreneurs and particularly insurtech entrepreneurs. Very often I find that they know their tech but really haven’t yet got to understand the insurance world. And that often means that they are solving problems that perhaps don’t exist in the minds of insurance people and their business are unlikely to succeed. Well today I’m talking to a start-up founder who has in...

Nick Cook of BMS Group is a man in a hurry to make the most of global opportunities to grow the 41-year old firm he runs. Nick is refreshingly straightforward and to the point and here we get detail on BMS’s ambitious global buildout away from its more traditional markets in London and North America and into Latin America, Asia and Europe. We also get a strong view on the opportunities being throw...

Today we're talking to Matthew Moore President & Managing Director at Liberty Specialty Markets – LSM. Matthew is one of the rising stars of the London Market and is currently serving as the chair of industry trade body the London Market Group. Yet his role is global in nature. He oversees a specialty, wholesale and reinsurance operation with gross written premiums of around $7bn of which London b...

Today’s podcast is a meeting with a senior market figure most of us have known for many years. Sean McGovern served in different board level capacities at Lloyd’s for just over 2 decades, before leaving to join the then XL Catlin in 2016 ahead of its 2018 acquisition by AXA. Last summer he was made CEO of AXA XL’s UK and Lloyd’s business – the first time he has held a CEO post. This interview is a...

This podcast is all about looking to the future of broking. In a world of automatic, algorithmically controlled capacity where huge rivers of data flow direct from insureds and reinsureds to carriers and beyond where does this leave the broker? Brokers and technological change haven’t necessarily always gone hand in hand in our markets. It was brokers that spurned the early versions of electronic...

Today’s guest is one of the industry’s smartest analysts and it is great to welcome him back to the show. David Flandro is the Managing Director of Analytics at HX, the tech and research-focused part of the Howden Group and today we are dissecting the state of the market after the 1.1.21 renewals. David has had a long career in the financial markets and at major broking houses and is one of the be...

Today’s guest is one of the industry’s most experienced and most respected reinsurance brokers with an incredibly broad and deep perspective to share on the industry. His broking house Willis Re is always first out of the blocks after the major renewal dates with its first view reports into the state of the reinsurance market Given the exceptional nature of this particular renewal I was delighted...

Today’s guest is someone highly thought of in the London Market whose skills are in high demand.  Three years ago he set out to start his own business and reshape the MGA model in a highly radical way that seeks to align the agent as closely to the carriers backing them as possible. Many businesses say they are going to break the mould but what Talbir Bains is trying to achieve at Volante has neve...

Today’s guest is a year and a half into a role running the best performing major reinsurer of the past 15 years. Hannover Re has been a business that has managed to grow profitably in hard and soft markets alike, maintaining a lean structure and keeping underwriting and rigorous capital management to the fore. With a global market hardening in full swing and one of the most important 1.1 renewals...

Today’s guest is one of the most experienced and widely travelled executives in the global insurance world and someone I have been interviewing regularly for the past 15 years. During that time he has been in the fairly unique position of having worked on either side of the fence for a broker and carriers alike as well as for the Corporation of Lloyd’s. But what all his roles have had in common ha...

As journalists we tend to sprinkle superlative terms such as industry legend around a little too liberally. But today’s guest definitely qualifies. As a founder of Renaissance Re Jim Stanard helped completely transform the way the industry analyses and underwrites catastrophe risk and cemented Bermuda’s place in the insurance and reinsurance world. He also co-founded global challenger reinsurance...

Ascot has been one of Lloyd’s great success stories of the past 2 decades yet its CEO Andrew Brooks doesn’t have the sort of public profile that one would expect to go with the job. After many years waiting out the soft market Ascot is now in aggressive expansion mode backed by a very patient, very deep pool of capital. Given its cautious and prudent track record its diversification plans make for...

Alex Maloney has been running the Lancashire group of companies for six-and-a-half years. For much of that time the business has been keeping its powder dry waiting for a moment to exploit a change in market conditions and resume growth. That moment seemed to come in Q2 of this year, with a new equity capital raise. In this interview I ask Alex all about his plans to deploy this renewed firepower....

Mapfre Re is a top 20 global reinsurer but it probably doesn’t have the public profile that this size should command. Given my insurance work experience in the Spanish market I thought this was a wrong that needed righting. Mapfre Re has many peculiarities, not least that it is one of the few reinsurers to still be part of a major global insurance group decades after it became fashionable to dives...

I’ve known David Howden for a very long time. When I became a broker in 1992 he was the wholesale D&O specialist who looked after a big book of business for the Spanish broker I worked for. When Aon took over that broker it was my cue to go off and become a journalist and for him it fired the starting gun on an adventure that doesn’t show any sign of stopping. That’s why this episode is a bit spec...

In today’s episode we meet a strong broker of many years’ experience and with subject expertise and contacts that many would take multiple careers to accumulate. She has had a senior career at many of the top independent brokers. Over recent times I have come to know and respect her as one of those people that always speaks their mind and comes as a breath of fresh air with their own perspective o...

Today’s guest is someone with a long history of implementing technology into the Insurance Market. Bart Patrick, Managing Director, Europe for Duck Creek really understands the demands of the industry and the sometimes fractious and strained relationship with technology that it has had over the years. Well all of that is changing and this discussion is all about how that is going to come about. Wi...

I’ve got to know the interviewees in today’s episode quite well over the last few years. That means I have been able to follow closely their remarkable journey from small subsidiary of the Hyperion Group to an independent employee-owned MGA writing over 500 million dollars of premium in 2020 and still projecting organic growth of 20% in 2021. So how have David Walsh and Graeme Newman of CFC Underw...

Welcome to the Voice of Insurance in association with Advantage Go - enabling Underwriters to increase the speed and accuracy of decision making. It was great experience recording today’s episode because it was the first time since the Covid 19 crisis began that I was able to do an interview face to face instead of a video call. And it seemed even more poignant that this first face to face intervi...

The seeds for today’s episode were sown at a meeting in Chicago in the early Spring of 2019. I had been chairing a conference there and was making the most of the trip by visiting as many of the insurance people with their offices in the Windy City. So it was that I met today’s guest for the first time over breakfast in the centre of town. It was a great meeting – my host was full of energy and in...

We all know about the protection gap and financial sustainability and resilience goals for the developing world set by global bodies such as the World Bank and the United Nations. We also know about the massive growth potential of many emerging economies and the role the insurance industry can play in enabling and accelerating its development. This episode goes into the detail of how to approach t...

Most Voice of Insurance episodes tend to be with industry CEOs. This way you can get to know the real people behind the public persona and learn about how the industry really works by finding out what makes its leaders tick. But of course it doesn’t give you a huge amount of class-specific detail. Industry titans at public companies know a ton of detail about high finance and deal economics, but i...

What is the greatest quality of the best business builders in our industry? After putting together today’s episode, I’m now certain it must be the ability to get the best out of people. Pat Ryan is a broking legend. He’s the visionary who saw that globalisation was going to create the need for global brokers to serve the global companies that it would create. But it’s one thing having a vision – i...

When I book an interview guest in for the show it is usually at least few weeks and often a few months in advance. When I open up my diary I can see them lined up ahead. I build up expectations in my mind about what the interview is going to be like. It never turns out the way I think. Today is a case in point. I have got to know David Croom-Johnson of Aegis London over many years while covering t...

Here at the Voice of Insurance we look at an extremely broad cross-section of the global insurance and reinsurance markets, form fascinating niches right to the top, to the giants of the sector. Today’s guest is right at the top. He has the biggest underwriting job in the world, with the size and scale to be able to move global markets. That means knowing how he is thinking is required knowledge f...