The Voice of Insurance

One of the only real qualifications for my job is to be good at getting on with all sorts of people – I really couldn’t do it if I was too cranky or too shy. In contrast some of the people I talk to aren’t natural communicators but as their careers have progressed and they had to take on more public-facing duties within their organisations, they have been forced to learn that particular skill. Hap...

The more time we spend in this industry the more we learn that there is very little that is genuinely new. Take the insurtech community’s recent discovery of the idea of embedded insurance. To read some of the posts about this on social media, this is an idea forged in the white heat of technology and so recently-minted that it’s still hot to the touch. Well, today’s guest puts that idea into cons...

Today’s guest is back on the show in a role he has only recently accepted – that of Chair of the London Market Group (the LMG). Sean McGovern is probably the market’s best qualified incumbent for this job, and in this podcast I found Sean completely on top of his brief; Pushing the UK political establishment hard for changes to the UK regulatory regime to make it more accountable and conscious of...

Today’s episode is a real treat because we are doing something that we rarely do. That something is to undertake a genuine appraisal of what has gone well and what hasn’t in a business in the time since we last spoke. I often interview tech-focused entrepreneurs who have visions of how to transform the industry for the better. But what I almost never do is get them back on the show to examine in d...

Todays’ guest is a broking pioneer with a very clear vision and an even clearer plan for how to achieve that vision. Steve McGill founded McGill and Partners almost four years ago and first appeared on this podcast about a year into the firm’s existence. It’s been over two years since he came on the show. Two years is a long time for anyone, but for a start-up business it is practically a lifetime...

My career in insurance was spent largely as a generalist and that’s why when I meet a specialist I really enjoy it. There is something amazing about the level of nuance and detail that specialists can reach into that adds enormous value to the rest of us if we have time to get all of the details out of them. Today’s specialist is James Boyce CEO of Global Specialties at Guy Carpenter which means w...

I really enjoy talking to people who are full of energy because some of that energy rubs off. Bob Kimmel CEO of K2 Insurance Services’ return to the podcast with K2 CAT’s Head Underwriter David Carson is a case in point. Here we find Bob buzzing with the possibilities that significant new investment from Warburg Pincus can afford the firm as it looks to accelerate growth and double in size to a $3...

Today’s guest is Andrew Horton Group CEO of QBE insurance. His job is to run a global insurer and reinsurer that writes over $20bn in gross premium that originates from almost every market in the world. The business has just posted a very solid set of results and at the same time issued guidance for this good run to continue in 2023. Andrew has been in post for around 18 months and in this podcast...

Welcome to a very special episode because today’s guests are MGA royalty. Luis Muñoz-Rojas (pictured left) is the founder and Richard Clapham (right) is the CEO of the global MGA DUAL Group, which is part of the Howden Group. DUAL is now a business that writes more than $3bn in premium and employs 1,300 people in 19 countries. And the firm is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. Luis and I...

Sometimes CEOs can be a little evasive. Of course they’re nowhere near as evasive as politicians, but, particularly if they are the CEO of a public company, they do have to be quite careful what they say to journalists. That can make interviews with them a little unengaging. All this makes today’s guest a real breath of fresh air. SiriusPoint’s various twists and turns in strategy and changes in s...

Today’s guest is returning to the show after a 2-year gap. For most that would be a reasonable time difference between appearances on the podcast, but today it’s different because Greg Hendrick is the CEO of the start-up Vantage Risk and two years in the lifetime of a company that is less than 3 years old is practically a lifetime. We’ve got a lot of catching up to do and this episode sets everyth...

One of life’s great paradoxes is that when something is so core to everything that you do that you can’t imagine being able to do your job without it, that’s often when take it a little for granted. And I think that’s what the insurance industry is guilty of when we think of loss adjusters and other trusted third party claims professionals. That’s why I’m delighted I was able to have such an in-de...

Today’s guest is returning after a very busy couple of years during which he has re-shaped, re-branded and now floated the business he runs on the public markets. Andrew Robinson came to this meeting fresh from presenting Skyward Specialty Insurance Group’s maiden results. Perhaps understandably Andrew was buzzing with energy, insight and good humour in this encounter and our conversation is at ti...

Today’s guest is John Neal CEO of Lloyd’s, back on the show after an absence of more than two years. Back then he described an ambition to put the Lloyd’s halo back in place. Well, two full years of underwriting profitability later and the market has regained a huge amount of its cachet and prestige and begun to reap the rewards of its painful remediation process. But this podcast is as far as you...

Today’s guests are a pair of broking executives clearly relishing an opportunity to lead a business through a period of accelerated growth in a market that is extremely favourable. James Baird (pictured left) and Paul Richards (right) are co-CEOs and Managing Partners of Consilium, the wholesale and specialist insurance and reinsurance broker that is part of the expansive Aventum group. Aventum Gr...

Today's podcast is slightly shorter than many. At first I was wondering why. but listening back just now it’s actually quite clear. Long conversations come about because there are complicated structures, products and new ventures to explain. Or sometimes it’s because the people I talk to say things that I am not expecting them to say and then we have to spend time clarifying exactly what they mean...

Today’s guest is someone you might not know but I think he is someone you should definitely listen to. That’s because Killian McDermott, Co-Founder & Executive Partner of POP Holdings is someone who is quietly innovating and applying technology and the analysis of data to the business of underwriting. Killian is an insurance professional with a long pedigree and so doesn’t come from the school of...

In many ways today’s guest is an archetype of a traditional Lloyd’s Managing Agency business and the lifeblood of the London Market. It’s specialist, not generalist, it’s not too big but not too small. It’s nimble and agile, but also rarely strays from its chosen areas of expertise. And it’s also fiercely independent and supported - but not controlled by - its capital backers. Duncan Dale is CEO o...

Todays’ guest is a CEO who has just started in post at one of the London Market’s longest-running independent broking houses. As one would expect James Hands of Miller is full of energy and ideas on how to continue the broker’s impressive run of growth. James is a broker’s broker and our discussion rarely beats around the bush. He tends to get straight to the point. Miller is going to grow organic...

Imagine a world where your underwriters can design their own insurance products in front of their eyes. A world where you don’t wait months for developers to come back to show you things they have built that end up bearing no relationship to what you asked them to do. In this world if you don’t like it you can just dump it and start again. And in this world the idea of legacy technology is meaning...

Today’s Guests are Richard Watson and Stuart Bridges of Inigo This podcast is a really enjoyable encounter wholly because of the unexpected way these two executives decided to conduct themselves. In the build up to an interview like this I usually circulate some sample questions beforehand. This is to get the subjects comfortable and to be able gather their best thoughts before we start recording....

Today’s guest is a real insurtech innovator with a story that is all the more remarkable because is bringing cutting edge tech to one of the oldest and most traditional lines of insurance, cargo. Ben Hubbard CEO and co-founder of Parsyl is an insurance outsider, who now finds himself running a Syndicate in the beating heart of the global cargo market – Lloyd’s of London. How did he get there? The...

Today’s guest is Phil Hobbs President & Managing Director at Liberty Specialty Markets. In the past Liberty Mutual businesses used to be run allowing a lot of autonomy and sometimes geographical and operational overlap. But these days Liberty is a business that has undergone a huge amount of work to unify in structure and present much more of a united front globally. And when you hear that Special...

Todays’ guest is from Insurtech royalty. He’s part of a select club of executives running youthful insurance businesses with valuations exceeding a billion dollars.  Bolttech and its Group CEO Rob Schimek have been in a hurry, building technology and a licensed ecosystem that is connecting large companies and their customers, brokers and other intermediaries, carriers and thousands of their insura...

Today’s guests are brokers - a London Market wholesale veteran and a rising star executive. John Sutton (CEO) and Jonathan Tritton (SVP) work together at Acrisure London Wholesale (ALW). The business does exactly what is says on the tin – it’s fast growing retail broker Acrisure’s London Wholesale operation It’s almost five years since ALW was formed and for the incredibly acquisitive Acrisure gro...