The Voice of Insurance

This week’s guest has probably the best 360-degree understanding of the insurance value chain of anyone I have had on the show. This is because Mike Keating has a career that spans collecting insurance premiums in person and runs all the way through underwriting, backing MGAs, working for and founding MGAs, to working for Private Equity and helping find investment to start new insurance businesses...

Today’s guest is making a return to the show after a three-year gap. That’s way too long for me because the last time she was on the podcast she made such a strong impression that I described her as a dream interviewee. But there are good reasons for the gap – not least a year’s gardening leave as she moved to take on one of the biggest jobs in broking. Luckily for all of us Lucy Clarke, President...

Today’s episode is different because I’m not talking to an industry CEO, but somebody who has made a career of holding industry CEOs to account. Since before the turn of the millennium Ian Gutterman has been analysing the insurance industry on behalf of investors and in that time has sparred with all the top CEOs and executive teams. Analysts and journalists are kindred spirits – we both sit on th...

Today’s episode is packed full of really practical insights because this one is all about making things happen. So often in our sector we can very clearly see the change we have to make or the new system we have to adopt to be able to improve the way we do things, but we find it really hard  to achieve final implementation. It’s as if the green pastures are right in front of us, tantalisingly in v...

Today’s Episode has a really special feel to it and that’s all down to this week’s guest. Graham Evans is Executive Vice President and Head of International Insurance at Westfield Specialty Insurance and is bringing all that experience to bear as US Mutual Group Westfield looks to build out a globally diversified specialty operation to complement its core US insurance business. In this podcast we...

Cyber insurance has been on an epic growth journey in the past decade and in that time has been transformed from a new and exciting product into a maturing pillar of the global specialty insurance and reinsurance market. This is a class of business that has come so far that is now developing its own catastrophe treaty reinsurance and Insurance-Linked Securities (ILS) markets Those developments has...

Today is a first. I’ve had a many senior industry executives on the show who have started their careers as actuaries, but I’ve never met anyone who already knew when they left school that they definitely wanted to be one. Martin Burke is different and this is what makes him an excellent podcast guest. In his own words he has walked something of a squiggly career path that has brought him to his cu...

I’d like you to cast your mind back to 2016 when the insurtech phenomenon really started to emerge. It was a very exciting time as tech entrepreneurs and venture capitalists had finally spotted the huge opportunities that would become available if they started to use their skill and financial wherewithal to help transform the way the global insurance industry goes about its business. The task was...

Today’s episode is going to dive deep into the fascinating world of Employment Practices Liability, or EPL. This $4-5bn premium class of business is one that has grown into a standalone specialist line over the last 25 years and is one whose growth is almost guaranteed to continue into the future. I say that growth is almost guaranteed because its progress is almost wholly aligned with the paralle...

Today’s guest is someone with the essence of insurance running right through his veins. That’s because he has been working in our industry since the age of sixteen and has accumulated over forty years of experience. Now as CEO of the Lloyd’s and Bermuda insurer and reinsurer Antares Mike Van der Straaten has a unique viewpoint of the global insurance market from which to apply his accumulated know...

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...

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....

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 w...

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 –...

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...

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, probabl...

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...

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. Aid...

Summary 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. --------- The oldest showbiz adage of them all is t...

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 Mar...

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 play...

Today’s guest is going to be giving us a masterclass in a really specialist and relatively new class of business that most of us will have heard about over the last 15-20 years, but few will have had the chance to get to know intimately. The class is Warranty and Indemnity (W&I) which is also often known as Reps and Warranties, and the expert who is going to guide us through this fascinating w...

Today’s guest is quite out of the ordinary for the Voice of Insurance. Normally guests on the podcast can recount multi-decade careers in insurance from the time they fell into the industry up to the present day. Today’s guest is extraordinary because he is someone of vast experience in his field but who has only just been recruited into the insurance industry. John Mason is the CEO of London Mark...

Today’s guest is a longstanding executive with an incredibly strong resumé who is running one of the legacy sector’s most respected outfits. Bill O’Farrell is CEO of Premia Holdings and as such has an excellent overview of this rapidly maturing segment of the market. In the podcast Bill and I look at the state of the legacy market and how it is likely to be interacting with the live market going f...

Todays’ guest is a senior treaty underwriting executive with such a strong technical and systems background that he ended up joining a firm dedicated to solving his sector’s problems. Bevis Tetlow is CEO of Imaginera, a business that produces specialist IT systems specifically designed for the big-ticket end of the market. Imaginera is also a highly specialist IT consultant to the industry. Bevis...