The Voice of Insurance

Top-tier MGA CFC Underwriting has undergone some very well-publicised leadership changes in the last few months and Andy Holmes is the business’s newly-appointed CEO, so I’m delighted to have him on the show as this week’s guest. Andy’s been part of this organisation since very early in its remarkable growth story and was previously its Chief Underwriting Officer, so he knows the business inside a...

Today’s guest is well on the way to cracking a problem that has been vexing the market for thirty years and something I have been writing about specifically for the last twenty. We all know that the process of syndication of risk in the London and other international insurance and reinsurance markets is full of inefficiencies and ripe for reform. But just because a problem has been around for a lo...

Today’s guest is VIPR’s Client Services Director, David Butler. On this show I speak to lots of CEOs and that means my guests are sometimes quite far removed from the day-to-day solving of problems for clients. David’s job is to be as close to the client as possible, finding out what their real problems are and therefore what they really need. It’s then his job to make sure that what VIPR are prov...

Today’s guest has quickly shown himself to be one of the industry’s most accomplished leaders. When he took over at SiriusPoint just over 18 months ago he gave the business a clear but tough turnaround plan that he executed quickly. Now just coming through the other side of a remarkable change in fortunes, he is brimming with confidence and ambition to move the business he runs further up the perf...

Today’s podcast is a real tour de force with the founding CEO of a maturing Lloyd’s market business that is starting to come into its own in its eleventh year of trading. Fresh from a takeover by blue-chip private equity investor CVC and now boasting a sub-90 percent combined ratio and $450mn in capacity for 2024, Duncan Dale, CEO of Dale Underwriting Partners, is full of confidence and is excited...

How do you get big, globally diversified insurance companies to innovate? It’s something that we all know is way easier said than done. That’s what today’s podcast is really all about. Today I’m joined by two senior executives who are working together to implement change, improve efficiency and do new things at global insurer QBE. Global Head of Cyber Serene Davis has been tasked with creating a g...

Today we’re doing something completely different. We are going to try to look into the future. In this Episode none of the people we are going to talk to are senior insurance leaders. But they might be the insurance leaders of the future. We in insurance know that we’re not likely to be at the top of young people's wish lists when it comes to a future career.  But it’s only recently, as we have fo...

Greg Hendrick is a dream guest. He’s smart, incredibly knowledgeable and experienced, but also really easy and fun to talk to. He’s also still only in the fourth year of building out a major insurer, reinsurer and capital markets partner completely from scratch. For Greg and Vantage Risk, time moves a lot faster and experience is accelerated and compressed compared to the rest of us. There’s a hug...

Today’s guest has one of the biggest jobs in the London Market. Kate Markham is CEO of Hiscox London Market and the last time we spoke she had just brought her business unit through a remediation strategy that was beginning to bear fruit. Eighteen months later, and the results have been stellar. Today the best are looking to invest and grow and get out on the front foot and lean into the opportuni...

Today’s guest is one of the most remarkable and exceptional people I have had on the show. Guillaume Bonnissent is the CEO of Quotech, a business he founded just over four years ago. With over 20 years in underwriting Guillaume can boast one of the most eclectic resumés of any of his peers. He’s written almost every class going, via almost every distribution channel in the insurance value chain, s...

Most of my interviewees are good at using insurance to solve problems, but today’s guests Natalia Dorfman and James Kench of Lloyd’s Lab Alumnus Kita are taking this to a whole new level. This is because the problem Kita wants to help solve is what most would say is the biggest of our generation: Climate change. Kita’s still going to do this by solving client problems and making underwriting profi...

Today’s guest has just taken over the running of a reinsurance business that, like many other in the sector has been right-sizing and re-focusing its underwriting over the past few years. But now Renaud Guidée and AXA XL Re are clearly out the other side and are looking to grow from their $2.5bn global premium base. In this podcast we focus on the state of the reinsurance market, Renaud’s plans fo...

Today’s guest has had one of the broadest and most diverse careers of anyone I have interviewed. Today Kera McDonald is the Chief Underwriting Officer of Swiss Re Corporate Solutions but over more than 25 years she has been an actuary and a pensions consultant, a risk manager, an aviation underwriter and a senior executive in an internal audit team. I’d say that unique blend of experience is an ex...

Today I’m talking to someone with an incredibly long and varied career at the intersection between science, technology and insurance and reinsurance, on both the broking and underwriting sides of the business. Now Mike Steel is General Manager of Moody’s RMS and is serving all facets of the industry from an independent perspective. The legacy RMS business effectively invented the insurance and rei...

Today’s guest is Tom Clementi, CEO of UK Government-backed terrorism reinsurer, Pool Re. Now over thirty years old, Pool Re has been through a lot of recent changes that have reflected its growing maturity. It has been classified as a Central Government Organisation by the Office for National Statistics and the UK Cabinet Office designated it as an Arm’s Length Body of the UK Treasury. To add to t...

Today’s guest is Robert Wiest CEO of MS Re. After a long and distinguished career in both insurance and reinsurance, much of which was spent at Swiss Re, Robert took on his latest role in September 2022. With prominent career roles in both P&C and Life - in Europe and Asia Robert is an extremely well-travelled and well-rounded professional and this broad experience shines through in the podcas...

Today’s episode showcases a really important advancement in the provision of technology to the insurance industry. Back in the early days of computerisation we installed different systems in our businesses to do different jobs. We didn’t expect them to talk to each other. And because each was made of proprietary tech  – they almost certainly didn’t. Nowadays we want systems to ingest data sources...

Today’s guest is a big personality in the UK insurance sector who has been working in and around our industry for almost 25 years. After a working as an insurance lawyer, an ombudsman, a consultant and a Director at the Chartered Insurance Institute Melissa Collett brings a really well-rounded level of experience to her current role as the inaugural CEO of Insurtech trade body Insurtech UK. In thi...

As CEO of Beazley, Adrian Cox runs one of our sector’s fastest-moving and best-rated insurance businesses and so any time I can get him behind a microphone and talking to me is time well spent. In the past year this firm has pioneered the placement of cyber cat bonds, undergone a major restructure with the formation of a US excess and surplus lines insurance company and made the most of the new op...

Today’s podcast carries on where we left off after the State of the Reinsurance Market Special Episode which was released after the Monte Carlo Rendez-Vous of 2023. At Monte Carlo what everyone said they wanted after the great re-set of a year ago was orderliness. Buyers and sellers alike wanted a period of rational calm after the storm which could be used to clear some of the debris and to rebuil...

Today’s guest is Paul Templar, CEO of insurance technology solutions specialist VIPR. VIPR started out in the London Market 14 years ago and it’s best known for providing software solutions to the endless administrative problem of the ingestion and checking of data in the Delegated Authority (DA) space. And this goes right to the heart of what Paul and I are going to talk about today. This year is...

Today’s guest has just become the CEO of a business writing over $7 billion in gross premium a year, which if it were a standalone company, would make her one of the most powerful female CEOs in the global insurance industry. This is a major business unit that has been through a substantial amount of change and re-focusing of strategy in recent times, but which is now well placed to resume profita...

We tend to take the institutions that serve our industry for granted. It almost seems that the hundreds of industry trade and standards bodies have always been there. So that’s why this episode is so interesting. Today’s guest is working on setting up the world’s first cyber loss classificatory body that from 1.1.2024 will serve the UK insurance and reinsurance industry and the wider UK society th...

Today’s guest is a well-known and respected senior underwriter with a career going back forty years. Simon Bird, Group Executive Underwriter and Active Underwriter of Brit Insurance’s Syndicate 2988, is someone who I’d heard of thirty years ago when I was a broker, but I only ended up meeting  him twenty-nine years later. Regular listeners will have heard his wise contributions to the last two Mon...

Today’s episode is a real treat. That’s because I’m talking to an underwriter with encyclopaedic knowledge and over thirty-five years in the insurance industry. But what makes this interview special is that I am talking to someone with huge experience but very specifically the opportunity to put all that experience into practice for a second time. Paul Brand was Chief Underwriting Officer at Catli...