The Voice of Insurance The Voice of Insurance Mark Geoghegan

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 long time and has been well documented, it doesn’t make finding and implementing a solution any easier.
I have lost count of the number of insurance and reinsurance exchanges I have seen launch and then wither and die over the last two decades.
Gilbert Harrap, the CEO of InsurX is someone who is setting out to change all of this.
Many exchanges failed either because they were founded by people with little understanding of complex insurance or they alienated their potential users, particularly the brokers, who often rightly or wrongly perceived them as a threat to their businesses.
InsurX is different because Gilbert is someone with market experience who is focusing on building a utility that could help both underwriters and brokers increase volumes and improve margins.
This is a fascinating conversation with someone running a business that has already gained significant traction in two classes of business and is looking to expand across the board.
Gilbert is one of us and I think that’s a big part of why InsurX has been well received. He is laser-focused on helping brokers serve customers better while allowing underwriters to diversify in smart new cost-effective ways.
He doesn’t want to be an underwriter or a broker – he just wants to be the one connecting them using intelligent new methods that add value to both parties.
I really enjoyed my time with Gilbert and left feeling that InsurX might be one of the first exchanges to make it in the complex syndicated risk space.
I also ended this conversation feeling much more optimistic about the future of the London Market and its prospects of increasing its global share of high-quality insurance business.
 
LINKS:We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/

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 providing those customers with is exactly what’s required – and more importantly that customers have all the training and support to make sure they can get the maximum benefit out of a product and can adapt and reconfigure it effectively as their business develops.
All this means is that he probably has his finger closer on the pulse of what is worrying carriers in the market than almost anyone around.
So as the market digitises and looks to analyse the new data pools that it is collecting and apply new technologies like AI at many different points in the value chain, it is people like David who are going to be doing all the heavy lifting.
David is a technology specialist with just under 30 years’ experience and his insights into how to make the most of all the exciting new tech at our disposal or just coming onstream, is hugely valuable.
He’s also a really friendly person who has spent much of that long career explaining complicated ideas in ways that are really easy to understand and that’s why I can heartily recommend a listen today.NOTESI promised to look up what the common computing term BUS stands for:
BUS is an acronym for Binary Unit System. These are used to used to transfer data around a network (a bit like the way a real-life bus moves people about).

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 performance percentiles.
Scott is a very strong communicator and the next forty minutes are packed with very specific ideas, strategies and clear direction.
With someone like Scott, you get the impression that you will always know where you stand and exactly what he expects of you, but the very detailed nature of his responses shows that he also listens extremely carefully to what questions he is asked.
SiriusPoint is very much marching to his beat and he is a very engaging, disarming and direct podcast guest.
LINKS:
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/

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 about the opportunities that the Market is currently throwing up for his firm.
In many ways Dale Underwriting partners is a microcosm of the Lloyd’s of the last ten years. The market of the twenty-teens was a difficult one in which to start up, but patience and persistence have finally started to pay off.
The investment by CVC last year was rightly reported as a re-affirmation, not just of Duncan’s business, but of the continued attractiveness of the Lloyd’s platform itself.
This discussion is fun and is a wonderful dissection of the state of the market.
It’s also an underwriting masterclass with a canny trader sharing his long experience and deep understanding of the US casualty insurance and reinsurance market, the discussion and debate of which has been hogging the headlines for most of the last 24 months.
Listen on and hear about the opportunities that are exciting Duncan now that he has grown the underwriting platform and attracted the capital to make the most of them.
NOTES:
When Tom Bolt was at Lloyd’s his job title was Director of Performance Management.
LINKS
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/

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 global offering for cyber at QBE, where up to now development has been patchy, with different strategies playing out in various markets across the world.
And CEO of QBE Ventures James Orchard runs a small team whose job it is to assist senior executives like Serene in realising their vision through the partnerships and strategic investments that will build up the tech providers that will help them achieve their goals.
It’s a fascinating conversation and one that embodies QBE’s relatively new CEO Andrew Horton’s plan to imbue a culture of innovation across the group globally.
Indeed Mr Horton may not be on the show himself in this Episode, but his presence never seems to be far from the surface.
It’s clear from this lively chat that if you want to instil change and a culture of innovation you have to lead from the top and you have to resource it and be strong enough to accept that there will be many twists and turns on the road to eventual success.
Listen for yourself – for anyone who is grappling with the challenge of keeping a large insurance business up to speed and relevant, without throwing out the parts of its culture that have already got it to where it is, this will be a valuable listen.
NOTES
I let the abbreviation KPI through. It stands for Key Performance Indicator.
LINKS
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/

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 focused more on talent gaps, that we have started to do something about remedying this problem.That’s where today’s episode comes in. There is a wonderful talent accelerator called Startup Sherpas that goes out and engages with young people via paid work experience cohorts that are funded by industry. These projects, which take a hundred young people each, are called Supersquads.Last summer Allianz, Aviva and the London Market Group (the LMG) sponsored one of these Supersquads and three of today’s guests are graduates of that scheme. Startup Sherpas calls them Sherpees.In that project the Sherpees were asked to come up with ideas to help the Insurance sector better get the attention of young people and make them more likely to think about a career in insurance. The Sherpees came up with a huge number of ideas and these were whittled down to the best, three of which you’re going to hear about today from their creators. Howden Ventures and its insurer innovation partners are sponsoring the next Supersquad and it was the Head of Howden Ventures and recent Voice of Insurance guest, Tom Hoad who was the person who got me involved. Today’s recording happened in the Lloyd’s Lab at a live event I chaired in which the Sherpees pitched their idea to an audience of industry people. I grabbed five minutes with the presenters Chelsea Abili (Bottom left), Amaan Patel (Top Left) and Funta Olenrewaju (Top Right) just before they went on stage. But first I spoke to Dan Wyllie (Bottom Right) Managing Director & Chief Operating Officer at Startup Sherpas to set the scene LINKS: https://startupsherpas.org/Here’s the report that came out of the first Supersquad:https://startupsherpas.org/register-interest-insurance-time-machine-report-2023We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:https://www.advantagego.com/