The Voice of Insurance

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 rein...

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 f...

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 ref...

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 competiti...

Today's Episode is fun and insightful from start to finish and that is entirely down to my guests. One of the great Eureka moments in insurance comes when you meet an actuary who is a great communicator. Five minutes chatting to them usually unlocks understanding that would take you years to glean yourself, or which indeed you may never have worked out without their help. Luckily today I am talkin...

Today’s guest is a visionary and in the next 40 minutes he’s going to outline the future of broking. As insurance placement process evolves from being the movement of documents around the market to a seamless flow of data between parties, we are on the cusp of a big bang in complex insurance. If you think that this is something that won’t be happening any time soon, you are completely wrong - it’s...

Today, we’re going to go deeper into the world of cyber attacks than we have ever done before. We’ll be looking at the insurance claims that they produce as well as the longer-term consequences for their victims Often as journalists covering cyber insurance we focus on the big hacks, the headline numbers, and gloss over the detail of the personal stories and the real hard yards that have to be run...

This week’s Episode is a burst of energy. Jason Howard is President of Acrisure International and has the task of looking after everything in the Acrisure Group that is outside the US, Reinsurance and Wholesale. This means most of the world is effectively his oyster. A group as ambitious and fast-moving as Acrisure needs someone with enormous drive and enthusiasm to deliver on such a universal rol...

Today’s Episode is a really enjoyable two-hander. After over twenty years running the IUA (or the International Underwriting Association, to spell it out in full) Dave Matcham has just passed his CEO role over to Chris Jones. So this episode serves a double mission. The first is to mark the extraordinary career of Dave Matcham, the London Market’s longest-serving CEO and someone who has helped gui...

Today’s Episode is all about collaboration. To anyone in the London Market, VIPR has become a very well-known technology company, particularly in the area of Delegated Authority, where its Bordereaux management systems have achieved a critical mass of adoption. But as the business looks to expand globally, particularly the huge and strategically-crucial US market, it needs to partner with existing...

Today’s guest has one of the broadest international reinsurance roles of anyone I have interviewed on the podcast. That’s because Louise Rose has oversight over everything that TransRe does outside of the Americas. Louise has been on the show before as part of the annual Monte Carlo special Episode, but it’s wonderful to have the time for a comprehensive examination of the state of the reinsurance...

As the global subscription market digitises, the roles of market leaders and followers are becoming much more clearly demarcated. There are businesses designed to be leaders with large investments in class-specific expertise and specialist distribution relationships who are looking to align followers and consortium partners behind them. There is also a parallel class of follow-only underwriters lo...

I really enjoyed recording this podcast. That’s probably because since I last spoke to Mark Wheeler, Co-founder and Co-CEO of Mosaic Insurance, a full three-and-a-half years ago, he has been able to execute and begin to reap the rewards of all the plans he laid out in Episode 99. There’s nothing like a sub-80 combined ratio to put a spring in your step and validate the vision you had when you foun...

When I meet someone to record an interview they often ask me how long the podcast is going to be. My stock answer is that it entirely depends upon them. Some people talk more than others and some people pack an awful lot into a lot less time, while others take longer to fully express themselves. You also never quite know where the conversation is going to go and that is a huge variable. Today’s po...

Today’s Episode is special and completely out of the ordinary. Regular listeners will know that in most episodes I will talk to senior insurance and reinsurance executives and focus on what they have just done and what are about to do. Today’s no different in that respect, but it’s a far richer encounter because of who my guest is and what he has been doing since the summer of 2023. Until very rec...

At a fundamental level we all know that Insurance is a force for good in the world. You pay a relatively small premium and if your house burns down, an Insurer will help you rebuild it. But I’m sure most of us will at some time in their careers have felt that what we do day-to-day in our insurance jobs has become increasingly removed and disconnected from those basic principles. Well today I’m tal...

Today’s guests work at a Lloyd’s Members’ Agent. Their job is to give advice and guidance to Names, the high net worth individuals providing underwriting capital to Lloyd’s Syndicates, and their clients provide just under a billion pounds of capacity to the market. There was a time around 20 years ago when such a role might have been seen as perhaps a little quaint – one of those odd quirks that t...

Today’s guest was the very first interviewee on this podcast over 250 episodes and five years ago. She’s been on since as part of a multi-person episode, but it’s great to get her back on the show one on one. With a new Lloyd’s Chairman, CFO and CEO all now announced and either just starting or about to start their tenures, the timing couldn’t be better. The Lloyd’s Market Association (LMA) repres...

I love having insurance entrepreneurs on the show explaining their ideas and outlining the ambition they have for their business. It’s a great way to discover the best opportunities that are out there in the marketplace. And when the guests are highly experienced, with great track records, it just means that we should pay even more attention what they are seeing. That’s why I’m delighted that Mich...

Today’s podcast is another really vibrant and forward-looking addition to the Voice of Insurance canon. I think that’s because it’s with one of London’s most recently-appointed wholesale broking leaders, Tom Quy Managing Director Acrisure London Wholesale Acrisure London Wholesale is a little different from many of its peers. Yes, it handles most of the same sort of high-end specialist placements...

Todays’ Episode is an invigorating catch-up with someone who was last on the podcast over two years ago. Risto Rossar is CEO of Insly and is a really rare combination in that he is an insurance business builder who realised that helping the insurance industry fully digitise would be a better and more scalable business proposition than continuing to grow the highly successful digital Baltic insuran...

Todays’ podcast is another really positive and uplifting meeting with someone right at the top of their game. Fresh from posting record annual profits of over $1.4bn on a top line that exceeded $6bn for the first time, it was perhaps understandable to find Adrian Cox, CEO of Beazley in excellent spirits. Whilst the market may be peaking in terms of pricing, speaking to Adrian it certainly doesn’t...

This might be turning into a bit of a running theme, but today’s podcast is another really positive, really forward-looking encounter with the CEO of a global balance sheet business who is reaping the early benefits of a turnaround and transformation plan. President and CEO of AXIS Capital Vince Tizzio is on really strong form in this interview. In it we tally up where he feels AXIS is currently p...

Today’s podcast is one of the most positive and optimistic I think I have ever recorded. Andrew Horton Group CEO of QBE has been in the role long enough to have been able to reap some of the rewards of the changes he has made at the global insurer since he took over the top job. Having dealt with legacy issues and posted some remarkable results that have validated his strategy – the mood from this...

Today’s guest is without doubt the most successful insurance executive I have had on the show. He’s also completely unique in that he is the only insurance boss I am aware of to have run one of the world’s largest insurers and its largest broking group. Brian Duperreault is insurance royalty. Having started his career at AIG, he then transformed ACE from a Bermudian upstart to a major global playe...