The Voice of Insurance

Welcome to the third instalment of the podcast where I use the annual Monte Carlo RendezVous to gauge the outlook ahead of the key 1.1 Reinsurance renewals.

This year, a lot had changed in the preceding 12 months. 2023 results had been almost universally excellent for all reinsurers and capital had returned to very healthy levels.

Colour and confidence were visibly returning to the market.

Smiles and receptive ears were in far greater supply than a year previously and the grim mood of two years ago had been almost completely forgotten.

The only flies in the ointment were continued emergence of poor back year performance in some US casualty classes and a hesitancy among investors who still seemed more ready to punish any bad news, than reward the good.

Whatever had been black and white two years ago was becoming progressively greyer and choice and options over what - and how and in what shape or size reinsurance could be bought - were beginning to open up for cedants.

In short this is a market of nuances and one where experienced traders are going to be given an opportunity to shine.

So join me as I root them out from either side of the underwriting desk and find out what’s going on.

My promise to you is that if you weren’t lucky enough to be down on the Cote D’Azur in early September, listening to this podcast will be the next best thing to having been there in person, in the rooms, suites, cafés, restaurants and lobbies with me as I interrogate a large number of key industry personnel.
Give me the next hour and I’ll give you the State of (Re)insurance.

NOTES:

GL = General Liability

LINKS:

We thank our sponsor Stephens Rickard:
www.stephensrickard.com

Today’s guest can boast a 40-year career in the reinsurance business and now leads a global reinsurer with around $3bn in gross written premium and approximately 250 employees.
Dieter Winkel is President of Liberty Mutual Re and this podcast is very timely, given its positioning just ahead of the key 1.1 reinsurance renewal season.
Dieter is everything you want in a reinsurer: experienced, probably unshockable and very measured and consistent, as well as being easy to talk to.
In this Episode we cover all the major issues affecting the global reinsurance market, from the general state of the market cycle, and trends in global specialty, property and casualty and retro all the way through cyber to the burgeoning world of parametrics and the best applications of AI in reinsurance.
This a very enjoyable interview with a consummate reinsurance professional, who has lived through multiple market cycles and is an excellent communicator and great company to boot.
LINKS:
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com
We also thank audio advertiser, The Insurance Network (TIN), organiser of the highly-successful TINtech events series. This week they are advertising their successful TINtech London Market event, which will be happening on 4th February 2025.

As CEO of Ryan Specialty Tim Turner has arguably some of the best visibility of the global insurance market and its stress points of anyone in the industry.

The business that Tim has helped to build with founder Pat Ryan is a broad, deep, complex and highly efficient insurance distribution machine, that picks up and serves wherever local markets are unable or unwilling to provide the insurance solutions that its retail brokers’ clients around the world need.

The firm works with over 20,000 brokers of all sizes and handles more than $25 billion dollars in annual premiums.

Ryan Specialty has also been a major consolidator in its segment, executing many large and complex deals on both sides of the Atlantic.

In this podcast I was able to quiz Tim on all the trends in the market and he was really open and forthcoming in all his answers.

So if you’d like to know where the major friction points and opportunities are, whether the boom in E&S submissions will continue and wonder where ongoing retail broking consolidation and the continuing wave of MGA formations are likely to be leading then listen on.

You won’t be disappointed.

But more importantly you’ll be spending time with one of the sector’s most successful, experienced and dynamic executives and learning how he thinks about the insurance world and how he intends to make the most of all the many commercial opportunities it is currently affording a business like Ryan Specialty.

Tim’s also great company and his drive and enthusiasm for our sector is undiminished and I’ll wager a listen will put a renewed spring in your step.

LINKS:
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:

https://www.advantagego.com

We also thank audio advertiser, The Insurance Network (TIN), organiser of the highly-successful TINtech events series. They are advertising their new London-based event, Data Jam, which is focused on exploring the implications and opportunities of data, analytics, AI and automation in the insurance sector.

It’s on 28th November at Convene, 133 Houndsditch, London EC3. I’m going to be there.
Get 20% off using the code ‘voice’ when you sign up Here

Today’s podcast is a first for The Voice of Insurance. It’s the first time I’ve done an outside broadcast.

And the reason is a special one. David Howden started what was then Howden Pangbourne just over thirty years ago with two others and, famously, a dog, in a tiny office on St Dunstan’s Hill in London.

Now that business is around six thousand three hundred times bigger in terms of staff numbers and infinitely larger in terms of revenue and has become a major global insurance and reinsurance operator working all over the world.

I had been trying to get David back on the show for a while as it had already been 2 years since his last appearance alongside Rod Fox after the acquisition of reinsurance broker TigerRisk.

The message came back that he might be tempted to do it as long as we could do something different.

So this is indeed completely different.

David and I met up at St Dunstan’s one morning two weeks ago and went for a walk around the Insurance district of London we both know so well, taking in the sights, but also all of Howden’s five London head offices past and present along the way.

Inevitably we get a bit of a history lesson and hear lots of insightful stories and some fun anecdotes from along the amazing Howden entrepreneurial journey of the last three decades amid a fast-changing London and international insurance market.

But far more importantly we also discuss the core issues affecting the present and the future of that market and how Howden is positioning itself within it.

Howden Re, Dual and the MGA boom, the big question over whether Howden might enter US retail broking, ongoing broking consolidation, big capital questions around what structures make the most sense as Howden continues to scale, the firm’s latest 30/30 strategic plan and other key decisions facing the Howden Group now and over the decades to come all get comprehensively dealt with.

There’s nothing like a good walk for opening up a better quality of conversation.

David’s passion and enthusiasm are fizzling through every second of this fun and all-encompassing discussion.

If you want to know how David got this far do listen on, you’ll learn an awful lot.

But I think a better reason to carry on listening will be to hear where he is heading in the next few years and how he plans to get there.

By the time we close our conversation in Dave’s Wine Bar at the foot of Howden’s current HQ, you’ll be much wiser, but probably needing a sit down and a cup of coffee as much as I was.

NOTES:

If this has piqued your interest, there are some handy highlights of the Howden story here:

https://www.howdengroupholdings.com/about-us/our-story

The other broking firms that get the most mentions in this Episode are Spear Gulland, acquired by Howden in 1997 and major Spanish intermediary Gil y Carvajal, bought by Aon in 1998.

I worked at Gil y Carvajal’s London office from 1992-95 and again 1997-98, hence my extra inside knowledge of St Dunstan's.

LINKS:
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com

We also thank audio advertiser, The Insurance Network (TIN), organiser of the highly-successful TINtech events series. This week they are advertising their successful TINtech London Market event, which will be happening on 4th February 2025.

Today’s guest is a master of the aviation class of business, but is also a well-known and respected market figure across classes, holding key positions in market committees and international insurance trade bodies and non-insurance organisations alike.

Bruce Carman has been a leading aviation and war underwriter since the late 1980s and after over 30 years at the heart of the Lloyd’s market, started his own specialist MGA, Hive Underwriters in 2017.

That business has grown rapidly and has begun to mature and scale and so now seems an excellent time to get Bruce on the show.

The aviation market is in a fascinating position post the Russian invasion of Ukraine and part of our talk will be an incredibly useful listen for any generalist who might feel that aviation is sometimes a specialism too far for them.

But that wouldn’t be doing justice to Bruce and this discussion.

Listening back, what this podcast is really about is examining the art of becoming a good and highly focused underwriter and insurance entrepreneur.

Bruce is incredibly good company and is very generous with his time and insights.

My overriding impression is of someone having the time of their life.
Bruce is someone who has been given the opportunity to start from scratch and be fast-paced and nimble in applying the best practices and technology available today to a lifetime of frontline high-performing underwriting experience.

NOTES

Abbreviations:

EASA = the European Union Aviation Safety Agency

WAIG and BAIG = Respectively the Westminster and British Aviation Insurance Groups – early UK aviation pools. BAIG is a forerunner of today’s Global Aerospace.

Appointed Rep = Appointed Representative. A UK term where a younger firm gains regulatory (usually FCA) authorisation via an arrangement with a fully-regulated firm.

LINKS:

Bruce mentioned an Allianz aviation report, which is a highly complementary read to accompany this podcast:

Aviation risk, claims and insurance outlook 2024 | Allianz Commercial

We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:

https://www.advantagego.com

We also thank new audio advertiser, The Insurance Network (TIN), organiser of the highly-successful TINtech events series. They are advertising their new London-based event, Data Jam, which is focused on exploring the implications and opportunities of data, analytics, AI and automation in the insurance sector.

It’s on 28th November at Convene, 133 Houndsditch, London EC3. I’m going to be there.
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