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It’s been three years since today’s guest has been on the show. In that time the business he runs has doubled in size through a combination of organic growth and targeted acquisitions. Group CEO of Miller Insurance Services, James Hands, is looking for growth at a similar pace for the next three years and this interview is an excellent 360-degree guide to how he plans to achieve his goals. A focus on specialty insurance and reinsurance, investment in people and expertise and making the most of g...
In insurance we usually spend a lot more time talking about innovation than we end up doing it. So this podcast focuses on two of the do-ers putting innovation into practice. It’s now ten years since Hiscox launched its market-first, tech-enabled, live quote and bind FloodPlus product and this Episode examines the story of that product’s development and its growth into a market opportunity that was primed for expansion. To guide me through the story I am joined by James Brady, Property Divisiona...
Today’s podcast is one of those conversations that stretched my ability to keep up with my interviewee to the limit. Andrew Johnston is the Global Head of Insurtech at Gallagher Re and has been at the forefront of understanding and chronicling the Insurtech phenomenon since it emerged over ten years ago. Gallagher Re’s quarterly reports on the topic have been required reading over the past decade for anyone wanting to understand the intersection between insurance and technology. In that period D...
In insurance we love to divide ourselves into different mutually-exclusive tribes. Life and non-life, property and casualty, marine and non-marine. Long and short tail Traditional balance sheet reinsurance and Insurance-Linked Securities. And not forgetting - live and legacy. But the fact is that as the global insurance ecosystem becomes more sophisticated there are really only two major differences. Different types of insurance skills and different types of insurance capital. Legacy is a case i...
Nick Hankin, Managing Director of QBE Re, discusses the reinsurer's bold ambition to double its size to $6 billion within five years, focusing on strong client partnerships and strategic growth. He explains how QBE Re navigates market softening with underwriting discipline and leverages alternative capital. The episode also covers emerging opportunities from the data center boom and the transformative role of AI in reinsurance operations, as well as its emergence as a new casualty peril.
I first met today’s guest just under 34 years ago on my first day at work in the London Market. Back then Alfonso Valera and I worked in the London-based Lloyd’s subsidiary of the biggest broker in Spain. Alfonso was my senior and had already been in post for a year and patiently helped show me the ropes. He spoke perfect English, was a confident, skilful and forceful negotiator who was incredibly passionate about the insurance business and was always fun, direct and easy to deal with. He was ma...
Patrick Tiernan has come into the CEO role at Lloyd’s with the market brimming with confidence after a third successive year of strong profitability. Now that competitive forces are reasserting themselves with renewed vigour, the question is what next? From this meeting the future at Lloyd’s is one full of increased velocity and innovation in all things. New leadership, new forms of underwriting, new targets and ambition, new risks, new ways to transact business, new skills and attitudes from th...
The great cliché about our sector is that while business trends come and go – it’s the people who remain the constant. Today’s guest is someone whose business follows this philosophy to the letter. Dan Topping is the CEO of London-focused, publicly-listed private equity firm B.P. Marsh with just under 20 years in the business. The firm he leads is a household name in the London Market with a 30-year often idiosyncratic pedigree backing entrepreneurs in the intermediary segment. Countless brokers...
The growth of the portfolio solutions segment of the market has been one of the most exciting and interesting developments in global insurance in the past five years. The streamlining of placements in syndicated insurance markets is producing scale, speed efficiency and cost benefits for underwriters, brokers and their clients alike. And this is a phenomenon that is really only just getting into its stride. Billions of dollars of premium are now being transacted this way as brokers look to facil...
Todays’ podcast with Scott Egan is a tour de force. I think there are various reasons for that. The first is that whereas when we first spoke in 2023, Scott was relatively new in the CEO role at SiriusPoint and his strategy hadn’t had time to bed in and take full effect, now we were speaking after a year when the business had posted another set of consistently strong results and any talk of a turnaround was clearly a question belonging to the past. Secondly this was now the third time that Scott...
Today’s guest is the CEO of an $8bn GWP global insurance business. Ivan Gonzalez has spent 25 years travelling the world within the Swiss Re organisation, from his native Colombia to New York and China. He now runs Swiss Re Corporate Solutions. After undergoing a turnaround process a few years ago this is an organisation that has regained its strategic direction and confidence and is now posting combined ratios in the 80s. So it is from a position of strategic strength that this conversation dev...
Today’s guest is Richard Milner, CEO of Chaucer Group. Chaucer is a global specialty insurance and reinsurance institution with a great pedigree and significant scale, both inside and outside the Lloyd’s market. Richard is coming up for two years in post as CEO and is beginning to make his mark on the business’s long-term strategy. Richard has had the sort of underwriting career that makes him a very relatable guest. He worked his way up from photocopying slips at a Lloyd’s box to travelling the...
Today’s guest is one of the best qualified people in the London Market. In a thirty-year career he has been a senior executive right at the top of Lloyd’s and has either chaired or sat on the board of almost all the institutions that underpin the market and represent it to the outside world. Today Sean McGovern is the CEO of UK & Lloyd’s at AXA XL and has just taken over the Chairmanship of the Lloyd’s Market Association (LMA), the trade body that represents corporate capital in Lloyd’s. Sea...
As regular listeners will know, the Voice of Insurance usually interviews people from the global wholesale, speciality insurance and reinsurance end of the market, insuring the type of risks that tend to have to cross borders to find the right type of coverage. Today’s podcast is a slight departure from the norm because I am talking to someone who is working in the general insurance space in the UK. But they are doing so from a wholly original wholesale and tech-enabled angle that also incorpora...
Today’s podcast is with the CEO of a reinsurer that wrote just under $8 billion dollars of Gross premiums in 2025. Miguel Rosa runs Mapfre Re, a Global Top-20 reinsurer with a reputation for long-term strategic thinking and consistency in an often unstable market. As the reinsurance market softens, at a significantly faster rate than many reinsurers were expecting, it is fascinating to hear Miguel’s view on the prospects for profitable growth in 2026 and beyond. With 2 decades of reinsurance exp...
I really enjoyed today’s interview because it outlines what is quite an original proposition in a very competitive marketplace. Jonathan Tritton is the Managing Director of Burns & Wilcox Global Solutions, which is the London and International wholesale broking arm of the US-headquartered Kaufman Group. The group has been formed via the coming together of the Chesterfield and Lochain Patrick broking businesses. So far, so familiar, you might say – a US-led broking group with London operation...
Today’s podcast is all about catching up with a business that was last on the show five years ago. And we’ve got an awful lot of catching up to do. Back then Carbon Underwriting was on the show because it was one of the first crop of Syndicates in a Box at Lloyd’s, laying out interesting ideas on how to modernise and optimise the underwriting of delegated authority business. Now it has matured into a carrier with GWP in the hundreds of millions that has built its own proprietary core systems and...
Today’s podcast is a first for the Voice of Insurance as this is the first time I have had an interview with a sitting Lady Mayor of London. Sue Langley or, the Right Honourable, the Lady Mayor, Dame Susan Langley, DBE, to give her her full and formal title, has worked in the insurance industry for 28 years, with senior roles at Hiscox, within the Corporation of Lloyd’s and latterly as Chair of the board of Gallagher UK. I have known her for over 20 of those years and throughout that time she ha...
Today’s episode is unique because my guest is pretty unique. Gabriel Holschneider was working as a lawyer 20 years ago when he uncovered a passion for, and an obsession with, captive insurance and started a consultancy and a very small reinsurer with his own money. Then ten years ago he founded an MGA group called XS Global. In 2026 that group is the biggest MGA in Latin America, is fully globalising and is set to write over a billion dollars in gross premiums, often from hard-to reach locations...
When the well-known banker J.P. Morgan was asked by a reporter to predict the future of the stock market, he gave this now-famous three-word reply: “It will fluctuate”. Here was someone wise enough to know that making predictions is a hazardous occupation at the best of times, and doubly so if those predictions relate to often fragile and volatile financial markets. But what the evasive and inscrutable Mr Morgan perhaps failed to realise is that the thought process required to produce a predicti...
As the global insurance market becomes more competitive, the first place to notice the change is usually the wholesale segment, because it’s always at the margins where all the most dynamic pricing action occurs. But whilst falling rates can prove a headwind to growth, as long as submission flows hold up and deals keep being done a more competitive market can be a more attractive one for new business because it is more welcoming to innovative ideas. Today’s guest is perfectly placed to see what ...
I interview all sorts of people on this podcast but today’s guest is a candidate for one of the most exceptional entrepreneurs to have come on the programme to date. Most people have the talent, a lot of people have the instincts and the drive, but few can combine that with the breadth of knowledge and ability to connect up the insurance value chain all the way from a homeowner right up to the most sophisticated capital markets. Today’s guest Terry McLean combines all three attributes and the re...
Todays’ guest has done something that only happens once in a generation. He’s helped found a new insurance industry trade body. Most insurance trade groupings tend to feel as if they have been around forever. Rightly so, because in various shapes or forms most of them have. New bodies only tend to be born because something has changed in the market that requires them to come into existence. Here the big change is the growth in MGAs on the continent of Europe and the new trade body is called FASE...
Today’s podcast forms the second and final update on the fascinating 1.1 reinsurance renewals we have just been through. Whereas Episode 283 with David Flandro was all about delivering a high-level analysis of the global macro picture, this one is designed to focus in on detailed market specifics from a reinsurance broker’s perspective. For that we need a broker of great renown and great experience. And that’s why I’m delighted that Lara Mowery, Chief Commercial Officer at Gallagher Re has been ...
Most of the time most of the people working in insurance and reinsurance are way too busy doing their jobs to stop and think and engage with the big ideas that are driving the markets they operate in. One of the great luxuries of being a journalist is that it is our day job to talk to the people with the big ideas and report back to you. And these days with the podcast medium you get to be right in the room with me when I talk to those people and you can hear and learn for yourself first hand. T...
Our industry is a mature one and because of that, growth stories are highly valuable. So today, we're looking deeply into the best growth opportunity for insurance in decades. And to that end we are going to examine an industry experiencing exponential growth and looking to multiply the amount of capital that it deploys tenfold over the next five years. We are of course talking about data centres. The huge demand for computer processing power unleashed by the boom in the application of artificia...
As an insurance journalist, sometimes I think we in our profession must be a leading indicator for the industry. When we are breaking news it certainly feels that way. But at other times it often feels like we are a lagging indicator. Today’s podcast is a case in point. From about 6 years ago the insurance media picked up on a long-term trend and told its story. The story was that transacting reinsurance within the Lloyd’s market was something that was on the wane. Somehow Lloyd’s had lost its a...
Listening back this is an almost breathless podcast. But what’s remarkable is that it should be breathless for just under an hour. Markel Insurance has been through enormous strategic changes in 2025 and its CEO Simon Wilson has been at the heart of them. The reinsurance business has been exited and management structures streamlined. Now that the heavy lifting has been done this podcast outlines the type of company Simon wants the new, revamped Markel to become. This Episode is a great advert fo...
Today’s guest is a living example of the London Market being a place where global talent can come and enjoy a varied and fulfilling career that doesn’t have a glass ceiling. He arrived in London over thirty years ago as a risk engineer and now oversees insurance businesses writing over $2.5 billion in premiums and employing around 400 people. Luis Prato is President of Liberty Specialty Markets in the UK & the Middle East and North Africa as well as being CEO of Liberty Managing Agency at Ll...
It’s great to have a guest of the calibre of Greg Hendrick CEO of Vantage back on the show, not least because his relatively new and young businesses is still growing fast and there is a lot to catch up on. Now five years old Vantage is set to write around $1.6bn in gross insurance and specialty reinsurance premiums and is managing $1.5bn in ILS funds. But listening back it’s the quality and breadth of the discussion we have that I am really pleased with. Greg is hugely experienced and once he u...
