The Reinsurance Podcast

The Reinsurance Podcast

Navigating the world of reinsurance can feel complex, but it doesn’t have to be dull. Join Jerad Leigh and Ben Rose—co-founders of Supercede and genuine reinsurance nerds enthusiasts—as they unravel the nuances of market dynamics. With industry expertise, they dive into the trends, challenges, and stories shaping the reinsurance landscape. Whether you're a seasoned professional or just looking for a little more knowledge to ensure the glazing over of eyes at parties, tune in for an engaging journey through the world of reinsurance!

  1. 19h ago

    Nick Hankin: What Earns a Cedent More Capacity | TRP #178

    Nick Hankin spent thirty years buying reinsurance at RSA, Zurich, AXA, AIG and Aviva. Now he runs QBE Re, and he is unusually direct about which cedents get his capacityand which part of the book quietly stops getting renewed. Three months out from 1/1, that is a useful thing to hear said out loud.WHAT YOU'LL LEARN:- How a top-20 reinsurer sorts its book into global, key and transactional clients, and what moves you between them- Why consistency through a softening market buys more capacity than opportunism ever will- Where attachment point discipline needs to hold at 1/1, and where Hankin thinks the market could slip- What a casualty sidecar actually lets a reinsurer say yes to- Why 170 people and a $6bn ambition makes AI a force multiplier rather than a headcount question EPISODE LINKS: Nick's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nick-hankin-b538595/ QBE Re: https://qbere.com/ CONNECT WITH US: Say Hello: ⁠producer@thereinsurancepodcast.com⁠ Website: ⁠https://www.supercede.com⁠  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/supercedehq  X: ⁠https://twitter.com/SupercedeHQ⁠  YouTube:⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@SupercedeHQ⁠  RSS Feed: ⁠https://anchor.fm/s/7e741c8c/podcast/rss⁠  OUTLINE & TIMESTAMPS: 00:00 Intro & Nick Hankin’s Journey to QBE Re01:53 From Insurance Buyer to Reinsurer03:12 Why Reinsurance Is a People Business04:19 Local Decision-Making, Global Thinking06:27 QBE Re’s Growth Strategy & the Softening Market09:37 Product Innovation & Growth Levers11:12 Sidecars, Parametrics & Emerging Risks14:28 Broker Partnerships & New Markets15:27 Property, Casualty & Market Discipline20:10 AI & the Future of Reinsurance21:56 Attracting Talent & Building the Right Culture23:35 AI Skills, Reverse Mentoring & LLMs25:33 Closing Thoughts

  2. Aug 18

    Build an MGA That Keeps Growing | TRP #177

    There's a reliable way to spot a boom in insurance: count the conferences. Cyber got its own, then AI, and now MGA events have taken over the calendar. Tom Spier joins Cordy on The Reinsurance Podcast to work out whether the MGA surge is a real shift in how risk reaches capacity, or just a lot of good underwriters building their own wealth instead of somebody else's. WHAT YOU'LL LEARN: Why MGA fortunes track the insurance cycle, and where margin hides when it softensWhy underwriting discipline alone won't win capacity in a soft market, and what actually doesHow insurers are getting their arms around a third of the book they didn't underwrite, from the Fidelis split to Axis's $10bn delegated authority ambitionWhat reinsurers should be asking about an MGA's distribution health instead of reading last year's bordereauWhere AI genuinely speeds up MGA quoting, and where it just makes the inbox louder EPISODE LINKS: Tom's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomspier/ BindSignal: https://bindsignal.com/ CONNECT WITH US: Say Hello: ⁠producer@thereinsurancepodcast.com⁠ Website: ⁠https://www.supercede.com⁠  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/supercedehq  X: ⁠https://twitter.com/SupercedeHQ⁠  YouTube:⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@SupercedeHQ⁠  RSS Feed: ⁠https://anchor.fm/s/7e741c8c/podcast/rss⁠  OUTLINE & TIMESTAMPS: 00:00 Intro 01:32 MGAs in a Softening Market02:43 How the MGA Model Works03:59 What Makes an MGA Stand Out?05:14 Growth, Distribution & Underwriting Discipline07:22 How Insurers Manage MGA Portfolios09:45 How MGA Business Flows Into Reinsurance10:58 Data, Bordereaux & Assessing Performance12:44 Why Distribution Health Matters14:12 AI, Submission Ingestion & the Human Bottleneck16:14 Will the MGA Boom Keep Going?

  3. Aug 11

    One Spreadsheet Error Away From Disaster | TRP #176

    Every reinsurance office has a spreadsheet only one person understands, and this episode is about why that's the industry's biggest quiet risk. Jerad and Ben start by defending spreadsheets properly, Spreadsheet Olympics included, before turning on the very flexibility that makes them dangerous. It's not really about Excel: it's about what happens the day the person who built it doesn't work there anymore. WHAT YOU'LL LEARN: Why the industry's "singular greatest key person risk" isn't a person — it's whoever built the spreadsheet they left behindHow a single overwritten cell can undo months of pricing or placement work, and why "version 9 vs version 10" rarely tells you what actually changedWhy massive spreadsheets grind to a halt, and the workaround actuaries already use to keep them aliveWhat reinsurance can borrow from software engineering's approach to tracking changes, instead of hoping nobody touches the macroWhy most firms are already auditing which processes are one bus ride away from disaster CONNECT WITH US: Say Hello: ⁠producer@thereinsurancepodcast.com⁠ Website: ⁠https://www.supercede.com⁠  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/supercedehq  X: ⁠https://twitter.com/SupercedeHQ⁠  YouTube:⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@SupercedeHQ⁠  RSS Feed: ⁠https://anchor.fm/s/7e741c8c/podcast/rss⁠ OUTLINE & TIMESTAMPS: 00:00 Intro01:00 Why Reinsurance Loves Spreadsheets02:19 From Spreadsheet Olympics to Spreadsheet Risk05:14 When Spreadsheet Utility Starts to Break Down08:23 Why Replacing Excel Is So Hard11:30 The Problem with “Utopian” Spreadsheets14:06 Key-Person Dependency & the Bus Factor17:12 Keeping Flexibility, Adding Auditability20:04 Rethinking Data Transformation23:19 What Reinsurance Can Learn from GitHub24:57 What Shouldn’t Live in a Spreadsheet28:37 Spreadsheet Dystopia & Outro

  4. Aug 4

    Maurits Van Joolingen: The Insurability Crisis No One Is Pricing In | TRP #175

    Everyone in reinsurance obsesses over the claims side of the balance sheet: what happens when things go wrong. Maurits Van Joolingen, Managing Director of Climate Scenarios & Sustainability at Ortec Finance, spends his time on the assets insurers actually hold, and whether the models pricing that risk are dangerously optimistic. WHAT YOU'LL LEARN: Why the industry-standard NGFS climate scenarios might be underestimating the real riskHow nonlinear warming assumptions change the math on portfolio exposureWhat a 25%-uninsurable-housing scenario means for insurers' long-term business modelsWhy divesting from high-emission sectors might be the wrong move for asset ownersHow leading insurers are moving from "raising awareness" to actually changing capital allocation EPISODE LINKS: Maurits's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mauritsvanjoolingen/ Ortec Finance: https://www.ortecfinance.com/ CONNECT WITH US: Say Hello: ⁠producer@thereinsurancepodcast.com⁠ Website: ⁠https://www.supercede.com⁠  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/supercedehq  X: ⁠https://twitter.com/SupercedeHQ⁠  YouTube:⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@SupercedeHQ⁠  RSS Feed: ⁠https://anchor.fm/s/7e741c8c/podcast/rss⁠  OUTLINE & TIMESTAMPS:00:00 - Intro03:44 - The Two Ways Insurers Model Climate Risk06:10 - Why Ortec Bets on Nonlinear Climate Risk08:00 - From Awareness to Decisions: Where Scenarios Fell Short08:57 - Why 25% of Housing Could Become Uninsurable by 205010:47 - Why You Can't Just Pull Out of a High-Risk Region11:45 - Should Governments Backstop Climate Risk for Insurers?13:15 - What Should Risk Officers Be Doing Right Now?15:37 - Are Clients Waking Up to the NGFS's Blind Spots?16:51 - Regulators, Governance, and the Case for Scenario Planning18:08 - What's Next: Blending Top-Down and Bottom-Up Models20:44 - Closing Thoughts

  5. Jul 14

    James Rendell: Why Your Cat Model Is Blind to Secondary Perils | TRP #175

    Better cat modelling isn't just about avoiding bad risk, it's about finding and writing the good risk your competitors are mispricing. James Rendell, CEO of BirdsEyeView, saw that gap and convinced the European Space Agency to back him, and built something that the big vendors hadn't properly tackled. WHAT YOU'LL LEARN:- Why secondary perils like wildfire and severe convective storms are fundamentally harder to model than hurricanes — and how to tackle that properly- How year-old fuel data makes most wildfire models quietly unreliable, and what it means for your next renewal- Why a higher-resolution cat model is a revenue tool, not just a risk-avoidance one — and how soft market conditions make this more urgent- The meaningful difference between physics-based machine learning models and LLMs when you need to explain your risk view to an actuary- How an ESA-backed startup went from contingency market niche to a cat modelling platform used across Lloyd's syndicates, Australian cover holders, US MGAs and beyondTIMESTAMPS:00:00 James Rendell: from broker to insurtech founder01:54 BirdsEyeView and the ESA05:34 The cat modelling landscape07:00 The contingency market gap09:30 Why secondary perils are harder to model12:35 Wildfire, SCS, and building better models14:10 Physics, machine learning, and satellite data16:06 The fuel data problem18:00 AI and the future of cat modelling21:50 Soft market advantage: write more premium

  6. Jul 7

    2030 Reinsurance Predictions We Might Regret | TRP #174

    Jerad and Ben skip the small talk and jump straight to 2030, asking the one question worth asking about AI and reinsurance: what actually changes, and what's just getting a shinier coat of paint. They cover cat models, capital allocation, contract structuring, dying market standards, and an industry expense ratio that's somehow gone up instead of down. No guest this week — just two hosts making predictions they might regret. WHAT YOU'LL LEARN: Why AI-driven cat modeling might be the one part of reinsurance that actually gets faster and better, not just differentWhy the relationship-driven, napkin-deal side of the business probably won't look any different in 2030Why the market's expense ratio has crept up instead of down despite a decade of technology investment, and what that says about how the industry should be valuing tech spend in the first placeWhy rigid market standards and clause libraries might not survive contact with natural language processingWhy nobody's handing a nine-figure placement to an autonomous agent any time soon, and where automation actually helps instead CONNECT WITH US: Say Hello: ⁠producer@thereinsurancepodcast.com⁠ Website: ⁠https://www.supercede.com⁠  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/supercedehq  X: ⁠https://twitter.com/SupercedeHQ⁠  YouTube:⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@SupercedeHQ⁠  RSS Feed: ⁠https://anchor.fm/s/7e741c8c/podcast/rss⁠  OUTLINE & TIMESTAMPS: 00:00 Intro 01:09 Has reinsurance actually changed by 2030 02:11 Cat models get the biggest AI upgrade in the industry 04:44 How AI reshapes reinsurer portfolio and capital strategy 05:46 Why brokers couldn't care less whose paper it is 07:21 Alternative capital's coopetition with reinsurers 08:06 Testing five contract structures before lunch 10:48 The expense ratio problem nobody in reinsurance can explain 12:25 What Silicon Valley's AI spend says about return on investment 14:50 Is AI reinsurance's Concorde, or its Metaverse 18:23 Why natural language could kill reinsurance market standards 21:53 Would you hand a $50m placement to an autonomous agent 25:07 The most impactful reinsurance app was never built for reinsurance 26:53 Monte Carlo, quants, and the last of the 2030 predictions

  7. Jun 30

    Why Brokers Lose Clients (and How to Fix It) | TRP #173

    Reinsurance brokers are famous for remembering the small things — the underwriter's dog, the client's restaurant preference at Monte Carlo, whose birthday party they attended last spring. Less famous for: knowing why that market got signed down two renewals ago, or finding the email that explains a call a colleague is now questioning. This episode is about that gap, and why it costs more than the industry admits. WHAT YOU'LL LEARN: Why annual reinsurance cycles mean brokers are always working from memories 12+ months old — and how that memory decays faster than anyone acknowledgesWhat most firms actually track (signings, authorisations, quotes) — and why the gaps between those tiers quietly kill your leverage at renewalHow staff movement strips firms of institutional knowledge, and what that means when a competitor tries to poach your client mid-RFPWhy charming a counterparty and remembering their portfolio history aren't interchangeable — and why one without the other falls apartWhat CEO-to-CEO meetings could look like if the full relationship picture were actually accessible, not just a deal snapshot TIMESTAMPS:00:00 Intro01:34 Is closing the deal the end of the story?02:13 How value leaks during & after placement05:00 The email archive problem08:00 What firms actually track 09:15 When human memory becomes institutional memory12:00 Staff turnover and the knowledge exodus14:20 Why brokers keep losing RFPs 16:00 Horror stories from the archives17:15 Prepping meetings with half the picture20:30 The case for technical recall CONNECT WITH US: Say Hello: ⁠producer@thereinsurancepodcast.com⁠ Website: ⁠https://www.supercede.com⁠  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/supercedehq  X: ⁠https://twitter.com/SupercedeHQ⁠  YouTube:⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@SupercedeHQ⁠  RSS Feed: ⁠https://anchor.fm/s/7e741c8c/podcast/rss⁠  OUTLINE & TIMESTAMPS:

  8. Jun 10

    How to Win a Soft Market Without Burning Bridges | TRP #172

    In a softening reinsurance market, it’s tempting to chase the cheapest capacity, squeeze every last point out of pricing, and call it a win. But that’s how you burn bridges. In this episode, Ben and Jerad unpack how cedents and brokers should approach renewal season when capital is abundant, pricing pressure is building, and everyone suddenly has options again. CONNECT WITH US: Say Hello: ⁠producer@thereinsurancepodcast.com⁠ Website: ⁠https://www.supercede.com⁠  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/supercedehq  X: ⁠https://twitter.com/SupercedeHQ⁠  YouTube:⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@SupercedeHQ⁠  RSS Feed: ⁠https://anchor.fm/s/7e741c8c/podcast/rss⁠  OUTLINE & TIMESTAMPS: 00:00 Intro01:06 Soft Market Strategies02:17 New Narratives & Softening Conditions03:49 Cedents: Opportunity or Trap?06:24 How Poor Data Damages Relationships08:27 The Broker’s Role in a Soft Market09:11 Price Cuts vs Long-Term Partnerships11:31 Why Hammering Existing Partners Can Backfire15:20 A Benign Cat Year… But What Comes Next?19:14 Spotting Gaps Across Programmes20:23 Using the Soft Market to Rethink Structures21:23 Broker Nimbleness & Proactive Ideas24:09 Closing Thoughts

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Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
12 Ratings

About

Navigating the world of reinsurance can feel complex, but it doesn’t have to be dull. Join Jerad Leigh and Ben Rose—co-founders of Supercede and genuine reinsurance nerds enthusiasts—as they unravel the nuances of market dynamics. With industry expertise, they dive into the trends, challenges, and stories shaping the reinsurance landscape. Whether you're a seasoned professional or just looking for a little more knowledge to ensure the glazing over of eyes at parties, tune in for an engaging journey through the world of reinsurance!

Information

  • Creator
    The Reinsurance Podcast
  • Years Active
    2022 - 2026
  • Episodes
    327
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © The Reinsurance Podcast
  • Show Website
    The Reinsurance Podcast

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