I’m really pleased today because after almost four years of trying I have finally managed to get someone from the Arch Capital group of companies onto the show. Arch’s appetite to make the most of market opportunity and react quickly to a lack of the same has led to long-term outperformance that speaks for itself. That is perhaps just as well in a …

Today’s guest is someone who combines well-above-average intelligence with an approachability and a willingness to study and cover risks that many of his peers can’t or won’t consider. Ryan Mather is CEO of Ariel Re, a business that has positioned itself at the cutting edge of exciting emerging classes such as Green energy and Cyber reinsurance, wh…

Some podcast interviews are really fulfilling to be involved with. Sometimes it’s the rapport I have with the guest and sometimes it’s the subject matter and the insights that I find the most satisfying. Today’s podcast is a rare combination because it’s both of the above. Jeff Radke Co-Founder and CEO at Accelerant Holdings, is clearly on top of t…

Today’s guest runs a business that this year is set to quadruple in size since the first time he was on the show just over two years ago. What’s more it is looking to more than double again in the medium term. Tanguy Touffut CEO and co-founder of Descartes Underwriting is one of the indispensable leaders in the burgeoning parametric insurance secto…

I have the best job in the world. That is, it’s the best job for someone like me, who really likes talking to people and finding out what they are doing and thinking – but also as a bi-product finding out what they are really like. The reason I am saying this is because today’s episode was so much fun to make that it didn’t feel like a standard day…

Today’s guest is a leader in one of the most innovative and interesting businesses in the market. He was last on the show as part of a duo but is now here in his own right. This should all make much more sense when I tell you that I am talking about Dan Burrows, the Group CEO of Fidelis Insurance Group. Since we last met Fidelis has successfully sp…

Today’s podcast is all about the insurance of political risk and violence and we are going to come at this subject from all angles. This episode is intended to be an all-round masterclass for anyone with an interest in these fascinating and fast-growing specialist lines of business. Is the world a riskier place and are risks going to remain insurab…

Today’s Podcast is all about innovation and today’s guest has been responsible for doing more of it than most. James Slaughter is Chief Underwriting Officer at Apollo Group, a Lloyd’s business that has been behind collaborations and new product launches galore in recent times. Be it exploring semi-automatic underwriting and the application of artif…

Today’s guest carries out an incredibly important role representing the whole London Market in the UK’s corridors of power. That means looking out for a market that wrote over $100bn in core gross written premium and controlled just under $160bn in all in 2022, increasing its global market share to over 8 per cent. That also means representing a ma…

Today’s guest is in charge of a team of around 400, writing a book approaching $3 billion in gross written premium in the largest wholesale insurance market in the world I have had many CEOs on the show who run significantly smaller operations. And that’s what gives this podcast so much weight. Wendy Houser is Chief Wholesale Officer of Markel Spec…

I can’t believe it’s been three-and-a-half years since I had Alex Maloney on the podcast for a full episode to himself. We’ve had brief catch-ups at Monte Carlo and when we bump into each other in the London Market, but I haven’t had time with Alex properly devoted to understanding what he and the Lancashire Group is thinking. A huge amount has hap…

Today’s episode is a masterclass with two leaders in the North American professional liability market. Often on this show we talk about the big picture in very broad brushstrokes, but today is refreshing because we are getting into specific and specialist detail about some of the most broad-reaching and dynamic classes of business anywhere in the w…

Today’s podcast is one of the most eclectic and far-reaching I have produced since founding the Voice of Insurance over four years ago. And that is entirely down to today’s guests. Ian Summers Global Business Leader of AdvantageGo (pictured top) is a well-known figure to anyone who has worked in the Global Insurance Market and has a full career of …

Top-tier MGA CFC Underwriting has undergone some very well-publicised leadership changes in the last few months and Andy Holmes is the business’s newly-appointed CEO, so I’m delighted to have him on the show as this week’s guest. Andy’s been part of this organisation since very early in its remarkable growth story and was previously its Chief Under…

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. B…

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…

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 ambitio…

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 Underwrit…

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 Cy…

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 fut…

Greg Hendrick is a dream guest. He’s smart, incredibly knowledgeable and experienced, but also really easy and fun to talk to. He’s also still only in the fourth year of building out a major insurer, reinsurer and capital markets partner completely from scratch. For Greg and Vantage Risk, time moves a lot faster and experience is accelerated and co…

Today’s guest has one of the biggest jobs in the London Market. Kate Markham is CEO of Hiscox London Market and the last time we spoke she had just brought her business unit through a remediation strategy that was beginning to bear fruit. Eighteen months later, and the results have been stellar. Today the best are looking to invest and grow and get…

Today’s guest is one of the most remarkable and exceptional people I have had on the show. Guillaume Bonnissent is the CEO of Quotech, a business he founded just over four years ago. With over 20 years in underwriting Guillaume can boast one of the most eclectic resumés of any of his peers. He’s written almost every class going, via almost every di…

Most of my interviewees are good at using insurance to solve problems, but today’s guests Natalia Dorfman and James Kench of Lloyd’s Lab Alumnus Kita are taking this to a whole new level. This is because the problem Kita wants to help solve is what most would say is the biggest of our generation: Climate change. Kita’s still going to do this by sol…

Today’s guest has just taken over the running of a reinsurance business that, like many other in the sector has been right-sizing and re-focusing its underwriting over the past few years. But now Renaud Guidée and AXA XL Re are clearly out the other side and are looking to grow from their $2.5bn global premium base. In this podcast we focus on the …

Today’s guest has had one of the broadest and most diverse careers of anyone I have interviewed. Today Kera McDonald is the Chief Underwriting Officer of Swiss Re Corporate Solutions but over more than 25 years she has been an actuary and a pensions consultant, a risk manager, an aviation underwriter and a senior executive in an internal audit team…

Today I’m talking to someone with an incredibly long and varied career at the intersection between science, technology and insurance and reinsurance, on both the broking and underwriting sides of the business. Now Mike Steel is General Manager of Moody’s RMS and is serving all facets of the industry from an independent perspective. The legacy RMS b…

Today’s guest is Tom Clementi, CEO of UK Government-backed terrorism reinsurer, Pool Re. Now over thirty years old, Pool Re has been through a lot of recent changes that have reflected its growing maturity. It has been classified as a Central Government Organisation by the Office for National Statistics and the UK Cabinet Office designated it as an…

Today’s guest is Robert Wiest CEO of MS Re. After a long and distinguished career in both insurance and reinsurance, much of which was spent at Swiss Re, Robert took on his latest role in September 2022. With prominent career roles in both P&C and Life - in Europe and Asia Robert is an extremely well-travelled and well-rounded professional and this…

Today’s episode showcases a really important advancement in the provision of technology to the insurance industry. Back in the early days of computerisation we installed different systems in our businesses to do different jobs. We didn’t expect them to talk to each other. And because each was made of proprietary tech – they almost certainly didn’t.…

Today’s guest is a big personality in the UK insurance sector who has been working in and around our industry for almost 25 years. After a working as an insurance lawyer, an ombudsman, a consultant and a Director at the Chartered Insurance Institute Melissa Collett brings a really well-rounded level of experience to her current role as the inaugura…

As CEO of Beazley, Adrian Cox runs one of our sector’s fastest-moving and best-rated insurance businesses and so any time I can get him behind a microphone and talking to me is time well spent. In the past year this firm has pioneered the placement of cyber cat bonds, undergone a major restructure with the formation of a US excess and surplus lines…

Today’s podcast carries on where we left off after the State of the Reinsurance Market Special Episode which was released after the Monte Carlo Rendez-Vous of 2023. At Monte Carlo what everyone said they wanted after the great re-set of a year ago was orderliness. Buyers and sellers alike wanted a period of rational calm after the storm which could…

Today’s guest is Paul Templar, CEO of insurance technology solutions specialist VIPR. VIPR started out in the London Market 14 years ago and it’s best known for providing software solutions to the endless administrative problem of the ingestion and checking of data in the Delegated Authority (DA) space. And this goes right to the heart of what Paul…

Today’s guest has just become the CEO of a business writing over $7 billion in gross premium a year, which if it were a standalone company, would make her one of the most powerful female CEOs in the global insurance industry. This is a major business unit that has been through a substantial amount of change and re-focusing of strategy in recent tim…

We tend to take the institutions that serve our industry for granted. It almost seems that the hundreds of industry trade and standards bodies have always been there. So that’s why this episode is so interesting. Today’s guest is working on setting up the world’s first cyber loss classificatory body that from 1.1.2024 will serve the UK insurance an…

Today’s guest is a well-known and respected senior underwriter with a career going back forty years. Simon Bird, Group Executive Underwriter and Active Underwriter of Brit Insurance’s Syndicate 2988, is someone who I’d heard of thirty years ago when I was a broker, but I only ended up meeting him twenty-nine years later. Regular listeners will have…

Today’s episode is a real treat. That’s because I’m talking to an underwriter with encyclopaedic knowledge and over thirty-five years in the insurance industry. But what makes this interview special is that I am talking to someone with huge experience but very specifically the opportunity to put all that experience into practice for a second time. …

Innovation is something we all talk about but something that is notoriously hard to do in insurance. That’s hardly surprising because in our industry we prize and incentivise all the things that are the effective opposite of innovative. We reward stable and predictable when, at least at the beginning, most innovative ventures are likely to be highl…

Given the nature of the people I talk to on this show, it’s fair to say that most of my guests are moving pretty fast. Well, in a fast-paced industry today’s guest someone who is moving noticeably faster than others. Nick Cook of BMS Group has trebled the size of this broking business in four years. And BMS has just completed a major refinancing de…

Today’s guest runs a business that has been a cornerstone of the Lloyd’s market for a generation and has a pedigree that stretches a long way further back than that. Alistair Wood is the CEO of Hampden Capital and also Hampden Agencies, the largest of the Lloyd’s Members’ Agents, with over £2 billion in funds under management. Because Hampden is a …

Normally I interview well-known senior executives in the global insurance industry, often with long and distinguished track records and a public persona within our sector, but today I’m talking to two people who I would expect only a few of the regular Voice of Insurance listeners to know. They’re here because I think what they have achieved to dat…

Cyber is rightly never far from the news. It’s a class of business that’s only 15 years old, but is already producing annual income in the billions of dollars for many insurers and reinsurers. Today’s guest is Paul Bantick, Global Head of Cyber Risks at Beazley Beazley’s gross cyber income was already well over a billion dollars in 2022 and is stil…

Often when we go to a conference a CEO will pop up to give us an inspiring pep talk about how nothing good in the world happens without insurance and how our industry is one with a genuinely useful moral purpose that has a positive effect on everything that it touches. We may nod along and then think little more of it. But today’s guest is living p…

This Monte Carlo Rendez-Vous was very different from last year’s. Last year it was all about reinsurers and brokers getting the clearest message possible across to buyers that the market was going to re-set in a major way at the first of January 2023. That made it pretty straightforward to report upon – for me or anyone listening to last year’s ina…

The Voice of Insurance podcast was very much made with guests like Richard Brindle in mind. A lot of people talk about being independent, but very few live it in the way today’s guest has done. And by that I mean independence of mind, thought and action, sometimes including independence from your reinsurers. Mr Brindle has always spoken his mind bu…

I last spoke to today’s guests as part of last year’s The State of Reinsurance Special Episode from Monte Carlo. In that documentary-style podcast I spoke to over 20 people, so a one-on-one with this duo to look more closely at their still relatively young business was long overdue. Tim Gardner (left) and Bob Bisset (right) of Lockton Re have been …

Today’s guest is exactly the right person to have on the show at exactly the right time. The reinsurance world is about to head down to Monaco for its annual global Rendez-Vous. So ahead of that, speaking to the CEO of the reinsurer that according to AM Best is now the second largest writer of gross non-life reinsurance premium in the world, produc…

Today’s guest is an insurance technology entrepreneur with a great story to tell. Arun Balakrishnan started his career at sea but went back to business school, became an internet entrepreneur and ended up captaining Berkshire Hathaway’s foray into the Indian insurance market. Ten years ago he founded Insurance technology firm Xceedence and the grow…

The older we get the more we lament the passing of the great personalities in the marketplace. Over an after-work drink we tend to reminisce about the entrepreneurial characters of old and how we wish there were more of their kind today. I know I do. Well, today’s guests are proving that this is a myth caused by old age because they are some of the…