The Voice of Insurance

There’s a lot of received wisdom in our industry.
You know, the sorts of things that we tell each other often enough that we all begin to accept them as true without really questioning the assumptions behind them with rigour.
Here are three common ones: you have to have meaningful scale if you want to get involved in Reinsurance, or open up operations in the London Market or the US.
This podcast is with the leader of a business that is a repudiation of most of the canons contained in the book of received insurance wisdom.
He leads a business that has grown to write around $700mn in gross premiums across a broad base, diversified by line and geography in both insurance and reinsurance, while maintaining very healthy profitability throughout the cycle.
Waleed Jabsheh is the CEO of IGI and this podcast highlights the very singular path that IGI has trodden on its way to success.
What emerges in this detailed discussion is in many ways a picture of a bold and ambitious company with representation in all the major global insurance jurisdictions.
But it is also a company that is at its core relatively conservative, looking to play in areas it knows and understands well and leaving the unknown territories of the bleeding edge for others to explore and map out before it takes a view.
IGI is still very much a family firm, but it is also one that is publicly-traded and listed in the US.
Any apparent contradiction in the above is explained by Waleed in this broad and deep interview, in which we are treated to a very strong common sense analysis of the opportunities and threats facing the global insurance and reinsurance market of today.
Waleed is very calm, clear and unambiguous in his style and makes for an excellent interviewee
LINKS:
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo, now part of Sapiens:
https://www.advantagego.com

Today’s podcast is with someone who has one of the biggest and most important and influential jobs in our industry, yet you wouldn’t necessarily know that if you spoke to him.
As the CEO of Hannover Re Clemens Jungsthöfel may be carrying a very large reinsurance stick, but he speaks very softly.
He is approachable and someone who inspires trust. You get the feeling you could tell him anything, or come to him with a very delicate problem and he would neither be shocked nor would judge you too harshly, but just calmly help in any way he could and point you in the right direction.
Clemens personifies a very clear continuum from the reinsurance leaders who came before him and a listen to a discussion with him goes a long way to understand the enduring success of the reinsurer he and his predecessors have managed to build.
And what they have constructed is an all-permeating reinsurance culture that works for the real world.
As we head down to Monte Carlo this podcast covers everything you would expect it to.
We examine the state of market, and Hannover Re’s positioning within it, in great depth and we debate some of the hottest topics of the day, most pressingly the emergence of AI into the global risk environment.
But what I think will endure after time erodes the relevance of what we are discussing is a timeless sense of who my interviewee is and the institution he represents.
Approachable and friendly, calm, strong, knowledgeable, consistent, measured, flexible, responsive and pragmatic are all words that come to mind.
And I think we can all agree these are absolutely the qualities we are all looking for when we are buying reinsurance.
LINKS:
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo, now part of Sapiens:
https://www.advantagego.com

Over the past couple of years we’ve been talking a lot about the potential applications of AI in insurance and where in the value chain it is going to make the best impact.
But what we haven’t done is follow the logic further and start to look into the medium term consequences for the industry.
This is why what follows is so interesting. My conversation with George Beattie (pictured, Left), Head of Innovation and Chris Mullan (pictured, Right) Head of Data and AI at CFC starts off as an examination of the innovative MGA’s application of agentic AI into its underwriting process.
That in itself is interesting enough. For example the 70-80 times speed gains for delivering bindable quotes are eye-opening, but it’s what follows that makes this podcast special.
George and Chris have done a lot of thinking about what the application of AI can really mean for the sector. They’ve done the intellectual homework and some of their conclusions will surprise you.
For example they don’t feel that AI exclusions are going to be workable and are only likely to lead to an embarrassing future climbdown for the industry.
But it’s their views on how the age of AI gives us a chance to completely re-design the insurance product from the ground up that are perhaps more insightful and offer a cautionary tale for incumbents.
Those who simply think AI will make the existing business process quicker and more efficient will almost certainly be right in the short-term, but they might be outmanoeuvred in the longer term as whole new business models emerge and leave them in their wake.

When smart and articulate experienced insurance people really grapple with tech, it helps the rest of us understand much better. George and Chris are great communicators who can translate tech jargon into practical insurance ideas. What’s even better is that they are both very grounded and are really good at deflating the tech hubris that puts so many of us insurance folk off.

In short, this one is a must-listen and alongside the recent fascinating Episode with Clyde Bernstein of Aon, ranks as one of the most insightful discussions I have had on the intersection of insurance technology and innovation for a very long time.

LINKS:
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo, now part of Sapiens:
https://www.advantagego.com

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