The Voice of Insurance

I’m delighted to say that todays’ guest is a returning visitor and he returns very much the insurance executive of the moment. Adrian Cox is the CEO of Beazley which since we last spoke has cemented its reputation as the most dynamic and pioneering of the London-headquartered global specialty insurers and reinsurers. Late in 2022 Beazley raised fresh capital to deploy into the hard reinsurance mar...

Today’s podcast carries on where we left off after the State of the Reinsurance Market Special Episode which was released after Monte Carlo. We already knew this renewal was going to be difficult, but the subsequent intervention of Hurricane Ian stiffened reinsurers’ resolve further. The result was a bruising and often frustrating encounter. You should already know the headline numbers by now: Ded...

Todays’ guest is a highly experienced broker. And since right now is a market absolutely made for brokers of his calibre and experience, in this podcast Alastair Swift and I get stuck straight into the reality of the global specialty insurance market and the ultra-hard reinsurance market. Alastair is Head of Corporate, Risk & Broking Global Lines of Business at WTW and is CEO of Willis Limited, so...

Today’s guest is Alex Blanco, CEO of Vantage Insurance. Alex has been dealt a rare hand in the insurance world, because he has had the chance to build something from scratch with no legacy. What would you do if you could start a specialist insurance business from a clean piece of paper, and in a pretty favourable insurance market environment?  What lines would you start with? How would you use tec...

Today’s guest is one of the smartest people in the insurance sector and I am really lucky to have been able to spend time talking to him fairly regularly over the course of the last few years. I first got to know him just as the whole insurtech movement started to really take shape in around 2016 to 2017 and ever since that time he’s always been open and honest about the way he appraised the new w...

I think Talbir Bains is one of the most single-minded and driven people I have ever had on the show. He is also moving incredibly quickly. Since the last time I spoke to him back in 2020 his Volante Global business has grown premium substantially, found new ownership as part of the Acrisure Group and launched a Syndicate at Lloyd’s. I just had to get him back to make sure we kept up with all the t...

Today’s guest is one of the original poster children of the Insurtech movement and has been applying technology to solve insurance problems since long before the phrase insurtech was coined. Back when the first insurtech conferences were getting started he was a highly sought-after speaker. If you listen today you’ll soon understand why. Chris Cheatham founded RiskGenius in 2012 and in 2020 that b...

Today we have a live market where reinsurance capacity has dried up and investors are utterly fatigued or are openly on strike, and so every dollar of spare capital feels twice as valuable as it did last year But at the same time we have a highly sophisticated legacy market that is well capitalised and, because of its relatively solid recent track record, has access to more funding if it needs it....

Normally I have C-suite guests on the programme who are working for companies with tens, hundreds and sometimes low thousands of employees. They generally write between the tens, hundreds of millions or single-digit billions in annual gross premiums. But today’s guests are working on behalf of a marketplace that directly employs 47,000 people and many more offshore. It writes well over a hundred b...

Regular listeners will know that I really rate today’s guests and what they are trying to do for the market. I also find them really good company – they are fun, smart infectiously enthusiastic and are always brimming with new ideas. Every time I have a meeting with them I come away with something new to think about. Listen on and you will too. The Insurtech Gateway has been a pioneer in the insur...

Today’s guest is someone who is bringing a rigorous and effective management style that the London Market might not previously have been accustomed to. Kate Markham brings extensive business experience to the role of running Hiscox London Market. Some of this comes from entirely outside our industry as well as the retail insurance space. Her work in restoring top performance to this Lloyd’s blue-c...

Mark Cloutier is a dream guest. And that’s not just because he’s the person some of the smartest financial minds in the industry turn to to shepherd and shape their strategic turnaround investments. Mark Cloutier knows the insurance industry inside and out and from top to bottom, but what makes him a great podcast guest is his openness and willingness to talk about how the insurance, reinsurance a...

Building a fully digital marketplace for insurance in London has been a tantalising long-term goal for all of my 30-year career. Only too often this has proved a mirage that has turned to sand as the market got close. Dare I say it but this time things seem very different. Now robust core standards are providing foundations of solid rock upon which the market can build with greater confidence. Tec...

Anyone keeping an eye on the overarching trends in the global wholesale and speciality insurance and reinsurance markets of the last few years cannot have failed to notice the explosive growth of the hybrid insurance carrier. Burgeoning Billions of dollars of premium are being directed in new and interesting ways through a cohort of businesses that ten years ago didn’t really exist. Regular listen...

Regular listeners will know that usually I talk to one person at a time, but over the course of four days in Monte Carlo I managed to record over 20 short interviews with industry leaders. This means this podcast is an in-depth documentary on the state of global insurance, reinsurance and the insurance-related capital markets. It’s a document detailing the state of mind of key actors that make and...

Some people seem to have things happen to them, while others make things happen. Richard Brindle (pictured right) and Dan Burrows (pictured left) of Fidelis are in the latter category and are about to make history by becoming the first traditional balance sheet insurance company to split its underwriting and its capital into two independent entities. It’s a typically bold and fascinating move and...

Anyone listening to this podcast over the past couple of years can’t have failed to notice the way that Environmental, Social and Governance or ESG has moved quite quickly to the top of the industry agenda. Taking into consideration the Environmental Social and Governance impacts of all of our customers, all of our investments, all of our suppliers and all of our own activities is something that m...

What an absolute blast this episode was to record! I often interview irrepressible, energetic and ultra-enthusiastic executives on the podcast – it goes with the territory after all. Indeed I have had both of today’s guests on the show before, but there is something about bringing them together that caused sparks to fly and brought a different dynamic into play. David Howden of Howden Group and Ro...

Today’s guest is someone who, despite being the CEO of a very prominent publicly-quoted global speciality insurer and reinsurer, has been keeping himself out of the media spotlight for the last couple of years. This is because like many other leaders in our world, Albert Benchimol CEO of AXIS Capital has been busy overseeing underwriting remediation and a wholesale re-set of his business’s strateg...

Today’s guests are InsTech CEO Matthew Grant (pictured top right) and Research Analyst Henry Gale (bottom right). Regular listeners will know that the InsTech team are my go-to experts from the world of Insurtech. I rely on them to keep me informed and connected with the most important developments in that burgeoning field. Matthew Grant has spent over 30 years at the intersection of technology an...

Today’s guest is a former Microsoft, CIA and Goldman Sachs employee who, perhaps unsurprisingly, has found his way to somewhere very close to the top of the Cyber Insurance tree in the past few years. With a billion dollars in run-rate GWP after just five years, major VC funding, aggressive international expansion plans and now a newly-acquired US admitted carrier, Coalition and its CEO Joshua Mot...

Today we are going to be doing something completely different. We’re not going to talk about insurance. Regular listeners will know that AdvantageGo has been a great supporter of the Voice of Insurance since the early days of the podcast. But you might not have known that this excellent technology company is also an important backer of UK military charity, ABF The Soldiers’ Charity. AdvantageGo is...

Today’s guest is someone I’m delighted to be welcoming back to the podcast after just under two years. Back then he was the relatively new CEO at Hannover Re and some of my questioning probed what sort of things he might do differently from his predecessors. Now into his fourth year in charge and Jean-Jacques Henchoz is the seasoned boss of a reinsurer that has not skipped a beat since its leaders...

Today’s guest is Sean McGovern CEO, UK & Lloyd’s at AXA XL. Sean was first on the show a year and a half ago when he was less than a year into his first industry CEO role. When we last spoke he was in the middle of a root-and-branch remediation of AXA XL’s book, the severity of which had taken many by surprise. As a senior Lloyd’s executive and spokesperson Sean had been in the public eye for many...

Today’s guest is the sort of reinsurance broker I’d want out broking for me in this tough and difficult to call market. Simon Hedley CEO of Acrisure Re Group is a real broker’s broker. What you see is what you get. By his own admission he is someone not averse to rolling up his sleeves and getting out into the market. He is really down to earth and straight talking. But don’t let this demeanour co...