The Voice of Insurance

This podcast was a really satisfying one to make because it is unrelentingly positive in its outlook and highlights how insurance can underwrite its own sustainable growth by being in the right place at the right time.
The promise of Africa is alluring - 54 countries, a vast land mass with huge untapped resources, a young population, growing trade that is now freeing up and massive potential economic development.
But it’s not at all easy in practice to enable and harness that growth. Many have tried, got it wrong and ultimately withdrawn.
So when I meet someone who has brought the best of Lloyd’s and other specialty markets to bring sophisticated insurance products to these and other developing markets I really want to find out how they have gone about it.
Mikir Shah is the charismatic CEO of Africa Specialty Risks (ASR), a fast-growing business that is now writing around $500mn GWP and which has just secured support from growth investor Vitruvian Partners.
Mikir is a Kenyan who combines actuarial training with long experience in investment banking and so comes to the insurance industry with a unique perspective.
In this relaxed interview we run through ASR’s strategy to bring corporate specialty insurance to developing markets through the combination of localised underwriting with advanced technology.
Mikir is irrepressibly positive, very smart and very friendly and shares his insights and hard-won knowledge extremely freely. By the end of the next half hour, I guarantee you will be feeling as positive about the prospects for African and other emerging markets as he is.

NOTES:
More information on the Vitruvian Partners investment in ASR can be found here:
https://www.asr-re.com/press-releases/africa-specialty-risks-announces-agreement-for-strategic-investment-by-vitruvian-partners/
LINKS:
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo, now part of Sapiens:
https://www.advantagego.com

Most episodes of this podcast deal with the here and now, the day-to-day cut and thrust of what is going on in the market.
This podcast is completely different because it gives us a view into the future of broking.
Clyde Bernstein is the Placement Technology & Trading Analytics Leader at Aon and in the first half of this podcast we examine the global broker’s new Digital Placement Exchange (DPX) placing system, designed to automate the placing of following lines.
Once that essential building block of the conversation is out of the way, the interview really begins to take off.
What Aon is in the middle of doing is removing friction and cost from the placing process, while fully connecting all its brokers with the whole global market and all the insights the vast amount of risk and market data it has at its disposal can afford.
Exploring the logical medium- and long-term consequences for the market is the really interesting part of our discussion.
The transformation is profound. A market with far greater liquidity, access to deeper pools of capital and an ability to trade risk much faster and more efficiently is what emerges. Productivity, customer service and product innovation should also surge.
The role of the broker could also change fundamentally.
But the best thing about this conversation is not the clarity of the blue-sky thinking on display, but rather the fact that the person shaping the vision is resolutely a broker and not a technologist.
In his long career Clyde has brokered claims, reinsurance and specialty risks. He is one of us – a lifelong broker who has learnt to engage with cutting edge technology and not the other way around.
This means that our discussion is always grounded from the perspective of the real life of a broker solving client problems and not the utopian vision of a technologist who has never placed a risk or paid a claim.
It’s mind-expanding stuff and one of the best discussions on the future of broking I have ever recorded. I highly recommend a listen.
LINKS:
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo, now part of Sapiens:
https://www.advantagego.com

Today’s Episode is one of those interviews that give you a warm feeling of anticipation when you get it in the diary, then when you’re researching and preparing the questions, you’re really looking forward to it, and finally the recording itself session happens and it goes even better than you hoped.
Now a couple of weeks later I have just listened back and I’m still smiling because this is something quite special and very different from the everyday.
Richard Brindle and Clive Washbourn are two of the most celebrated underwriters of their generation and have each been on the podcast more than once in their own right.
For the last five years Richard and Clive have been underwriting under the same group organisational roof in The Fidelis Partnership and Navium respectively. Richard even cited Clive’s new-found joie de vivre at Navium as the inspiration for the bifurcation of Fidelis into the Fidelis Partnership and Pelagos.
This podcast is only briefly about the grand issues of the day. My interviewees very quickly deal with these and then we start examining much more timeless and valuable questions.
The core of this meeting is really a long discussion about what makes a good underwriter and then what makes a good underwriter a great one.
We examine all of this in the context of the AI revolution and how to apply it to the business of outperforming in insurance underwriting.
This is a masterclass that will teach you an awful lot. Along the way you’ll also spend quality time with two of the market’s strongest and most charismatic personalities.
The result is an instant classic that provides a valuable listen for any insurance professional at any stage in their career.

NOTES:
At time of recording Fidelis Insurance Group had only just rebranded to Pelagos Insurance Capital, so if there is the odd slip of the tongue, be clear that we should have referred to Pelagos, and will definitely be doing so from now onwards.

Richard mentions the Sharpe Ratio, which is an investment metric used to measure the relative volatility of the returns of a company.
Events in Iran, the Gulf States and the Straits of Hormuz are incredibly volatile and have already changed fundamentally, even in the short time between recording this interview and its release date. Please keep yourself best informed by using up-to-the-minute news and intelligence sources.
Finally Richard mentions that there are two charities. The Fidelis Foundation is The Fidelis Partnership’s charity, and Richard’s personal charity is called The Muriel Jones Foundation.
LINKS:
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo, now part of Sapiens:
https://www.advantagego.com

Today’s podcast is a rare encounter with someone looking to revolutionise the insurance industry from its core.
We are at one of those generational moments when a big tech question is right at the top of the board agenda in almost every industry sector in the world. That question is AI.
Insurance is no different.
As AI moves from the experimentation phase to the delivery phase, insurance businesses are going to be faced with a key dilemma – should they try to run AI as a new tech layer on top of their current core IT systems or should they take the plunge and use the opportunity to install a whole new system that has been designed and built with AI at its heart?
Will Ross is the co-Founder and CEO of Federato and he is betting that enough companies will choose the latter path.
Will is an AI native with post-graduate degrees from Stanford University and has been building Federato over the past six years.
He is also a very special type of entrepreneur. He discovered insurance when working on wildfire models, but he saw an even bigger business opportunity across the core of insurance and co-founded Federato while still working on his Stanford studies.
Federato has built substantial scale and has raised $180mn to date, with the latest round of $100mn lead by Goldman Sachs.
This is clearly a firm that means business and is intent on taking a permanent seat at the Insurance IT table.
Will is charismatic and fun to talk to and is probably the best-placed guest I have had on the show to date to really examine what the successful embedding of AI into insurance underwriting will mean for the sector as a whole.
Some of what we discussed was highly reassuring, but some of his insights were surprising and challenging to conventional wisdom.
Much of the industry is at a crossroads over the AI revolution and the next steps are going to be key. Senior decision-makers looking for guidance on their next move would be well advised to listen to Will set out his clear vision in this enlightening interview.
LINKS:
For more information visit www.federato.ai

Today’s guest has a job that is almost unique in the global insurance industry.
That’s because his organisation has been formed through a unique exercise that split a standard insurance company into an MGA in charge of underwriting and a balance sheet in charge of allocating capital to risk.
All this means that Dan Burrows, Group CEO Pelagos Insurance Capital, is probably the only pure capital allocator in existence.
There are lots of investors in the global insurance market, allocating capital to insurance companies, but they are many steps removed from the risk and are only likely to review their allocations annually.
What’s unique about Pelagos is that it is much closer to the underwriting process, reviewing risk and capital decisions in almost real time. To paraphrase economic terms, whereas most investors in insurance are macro, Pelagos is very much micro.
It takes some unique qualities to pull this kind of thing off and that’s what makes this podcast so fascinating. Dan is a unique character in a unique job with a unique perspective on the market and I’m sure that some of what you’re about to hear will surprise you.
In this podcast we examine the re-brand to Pelagos, the maturing of the long-term relationship with the Fidelis Partnership and diversification into other underwriting channels, the prospects for profitable trading as the market becomes more competitive, thoughts around carrier M&A, as well as the big questions such as the best applications of AI in insurance and the seemingly relentless advance of portfolio solutions underwriting.
Dan is calm, softly-spoken and thoughtful, but is also razor-sharp and able to provide instant feedback or pushback. In short he strikes me as the ideal foil for smart, entrepreneurial underwriting teams.
This is an engrossing and revealing encounter which I can I highly recommend to anyone.

NOTES:
Dan was too polite to correct my initial mispronunciation of Pelagos. The stress is on the first syllable, not the second.
LINKS:
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo, now part of Sapiens:
https://www.advantagego.com