IGI’s premium income has almost doubled since it listed in 2020, but how can growth still be achieved in a soft market?
President and CEO Waleed Jabsheh tells Behind the Headlines that there is still fertile ground to expand its ‘relatively small’ reinsurance portfolio, and that the company is targeting specialty treaty business.
But as the soft pricing cycle ramps up, the executive said that he is prepared to walk away from inadequately priced business, and underwriting profitability will always come first.
He explained that the company’s attitude is not top line driven, and he has no intention of deploying capital ‘for the sake of it’.
Plus, Insurance Insider’s Sam Casey explains what is fuelling the increasing interest in the active assailant market.
Episode transcript
Samuel Casey: Hello and welcome to Behind the Headlines, brought to you by Insurance Insider. I'm Sam Casey and thanks for tuning in to another episode. Remember, you can subscribe to the podcast either on our website or on your podcast platform of choice. In today's show, I will be speaking with Wally Jabshow, president and CEO of IGI. Since listing on the NASDAQ in 2020, IGI's story has been one of steady and profitable growth. The insurer now writes over $700 million of business in both insurance and reinsurance and has offices across the globe. The dominant theme of the discussion was the company's underwriting philosophy, prioritizing underwriting profitability over a race to scale. As the market softens, Woolly explained to me how he plans to manage the next phase of the cycle.
Waleed Jabsheh: You know, we're not deploying capital for the sake of deploying it. We are in that same fortunate position where, you know, we have generated healthy capital over the years. And now we find ourselves in a market that is not as abundant in opportunities as it was last year or two or three years ago. That doesn't mean there aren't any opportunities. There's plenty of opportunities still out there. They're just more difficult to find and seize.
Rachel Dalton: The table turned. So Sam, can you tell me why we've been recently investigating the active assailant market?
Samuel Casey: Sure. In the more general news headlines, I think recently there's been a number of tragic incidents in the US relating to gun violence, which have been very prominent. Most recently, we have the murder of the political activist Charlie Kirk. Before that, obviously, during the campaign for the presidency, Donald Trump himself was targeted by a shooter. And these high-profile incidents, sadly, are just well-known examples of what's a daily reality of life in the United States. It's beset by high levels of gun violence. They have increased significantly in the last five years or so. And as with many problems and challenges faced by businesses and institutions, which this is one of them, there is an insurance aspect to it, which we look to investigate. In the mid-2010s, more or less, there was a this new newish class of business, active assailants, started to grow, which has been created by insurers in response to this threat. So we just wanted to really explain more about it because it's one of those smaller niches in the market which people outside of it don't know too much about.
Rachel Dalton: Okay, great. And can you walk us through how a typical active assailant policy would work?
Samuel Casey: Yes. So they're liability policies, and they're really created to fill a gap in coverage for clients from their general liability coverage, which often will exclude shooting type events. So really it provides very specific indemnity in the case of it's not just a shooting, actually. That's the most prominent example, but a lot of the policies will cover instance like stabbings, any other kind of violence. So it indemnifies clients if these things happen on their premises. Pay out for the crisis response, settlement costs if these institutions are sued, which is a real possibility. So that's the basic insurance aspect, but it's also as a policy everyone who writes it, and there's not that many carriers who do, they're very keen to highlight that it's a real risk management tool as well. Nobody wants this kind of incident to happen on their premises. So insurers have risk mitigation strategies which they walk clients through. And they also have very sophisticated crisis response offerings. So in the awful event where something like this does happen, insurers can help with a sophisticated response to help clients reduce stress and handle the situation appropriately.
Rachel Dalton: Okay. And so there'll be a certain type of buyer for this sort of policy.
Samuel Casey: Yes. I think to date, the most prominent buyers have been hospitals and universities, these kind of public institutions, which kind of mirrors where these incidents tend to take place. I mean, school shootings are sadly something which you often see headlines about in the US. And on top of that, you know, different carriers have different approaches, but a number of people are trying to actually sell this policy to more people in the SME space because the risk is in many ways just as high if you own a small shop in the in a small town in the States as if you're a big school or hospital. There's still a very real risk. So it's still not a hugely penetrated insurance product. So I think insurers are trying to do is to market this, tell people it's available, and explain what they can offer. So it's a growing, growing product.
Rachel Dalton: Okay, so that's the product offering side of it. And then from the insurer's perspective, what's driving the appetite to write this kind of business?
Samuel Casey: On the one hand, it's a new product and it's providing a real solution for client needs. Ticks a box for insurers, it's a good thing they can do for clients. It's typically written by political violence and terror underwriters. And if you think about a typical PVT book, a lot of the exposures are very large, but they're very spiky, and the events are infrequent. So you have very high severity claims, but the frequency is low. So in terms of the active assailant market, the limits purchased tend to be a lot lower. We're talking kind of three to 10 million, but the events are more frequent. It's a more attritional class of business. So if you think about as an underwriter or you know, a CUO type person trying to build a balanced portfolio, I think having that attritional business to pair with the high severity business just makes for a more rounded, balanced underwriting portfolio.
Rachel Dalton: It's a diversification effect using much the same expertise.
Samuel Casey: Yes, it's something which political violence underwriters is very sophisticated in analysing these kinds of uh risks. So it's some way they can help clients on that front.
Rachel Dalton: It's definitely a market we'll be following closely. Thanks, Sam.
Samuel Casey: It's a pleasure. Thank you, Rachel. Walid Jabshay has worked for IGI since its founding in 2001, becoming president in 2011 and taking over as CEO in 2023. The company prides itself on its underising discipline, so I was keen to get his insight on how he plans to navigate the emerging soft market. To discuss this and much else, I am pleased to be joined by Walid now. Waleed, thanks for coming and speaking to me today. My pleasure. Thanks for giving me the opportunity. So, IGI, it's coming up to six years since you um you listed as a public company. That's right. First off, can you just tell me a bit more about the business and the journey that you've been on since that moment back in 2020?
Waleed Jabsheh: I don't necessarily like to use the word transformational, but it has been somewhat of a transformational five or six years now since we've become public, as you're aware. I mean, the business has been around and was established back in 2002 as a private company, but really the last five, six years have been incredible for us. We took the company from being private to public back at the beginning of 2020, at a time not many people probably would have done so or have been able to do so with the outset of COVID and the volatility and the turmoil.
Samuel Casey: It was a crazy, crazy time back then.
Waleed Jabsheh: Very, very crazy and very challenging to go public at a time like that. For a business like ours, when you're just going public, we went public via SPAC. So that essentially is what solidified us becoming a public company at that time. Otherwise, had we been going down the traditional IPO route, that would have definitely been pulled and not achieved. But, you know, the time for us to go public was very opportune. Coincidentally, it was the same time that we had entered the US markets. And a time when the market was in an extremely positive trajectory, and you know, the better part of those five or so years. So we managed to achieve a lot.
Samuel Casey: Um, you managed to grow pretty substantially. I think you're over 700 million premium now.
Waleed Jabsheh: We just ticked over the 700 million GWP mark last year. I mean, when we went public, we were about half that size. In that five or six period, we've you know expanded into new business lines, established new offices, such as our operation in Bermuda, Malta, Oslo, and we've generated some of the best results, or maybe the best results in the history of the business. Obviously, you know, a stars aligning type scenario where market was positive, you know, investment income was a lot healthier with interest rate environment. You know, our loss ratios, combined ratios were at best. We've averaged now, you know, over the last three or four years, average combined ratios in the mid to high 70s and ROEs in the low to mid 20s. And honestly, numbers that ourselves, you know, did not expect to be able to achieve. We always expect top echelon type results from our business compared to our market peers, but these results honestly were above expectations.
Samuel Casey: That growth you've managed to achieve with the strong underwriting performance as well. It's been a great market to be an underwriter the last few years. It's been lots of opportunity. And now we're kind of seems like we're reaching the peak of that cycle. And as we look for the next five years, it's a very different market you're going to have to be navigating. How do you kind of think about shaping the business and navigating through that next phase of the cycle which we're entering?
Waleed Jabsheh: The simple answer to that is that this is nothing different to what we've seen in the past, nothing we haven't experienced in the past. You know, our business is all about managing the cycle. The cycle needs management, whether you're in a hard market or a soft market or in between. The strength of our business per se is in the diversity of it. You know, we write almost 25 different lines and sublines, broken down to three segments, very balanced portfolio across the piece. Reinsurance, you know, historically has only made up 5% of what we do. But over the last almost three years now, you know, we've taken advantage of that positive momentum and rating environment. And that portfolio is more than tripled in size. So if you look at the landscape as it is now, the market has done extremely well over the last few years. The reinsurance market, in particular, over the last couple of years, and 2025 is proving that it's going to turn out to be similar, having almost gone through the first three quarters of the year. Excess capital is abundant within the industry. And at the end of the day, what the market is looking, you see, and you saw that in Monte Carlo just only a few weeks ago, is you know, what do you do with that excess capital? You know, we're not deploying capital for the sake of deploying it. We are in that same fortunate position where, you know, we have generated healthy capital over the years. And now we find ourselves in a market that is not as abundant in opportunities as it was last year or two or three years ago. That doesn't mean there aren't any opportunities. There's plenty of opportunities still out there. They're just more difficult to find and seize. But at the end of the day, you know, for us, that diversity, whether it be by business line, by geography, you know, the office network that we have, allows us so many levers to pull when we need to pull them. And when certain areas are not performing or markets are not performing, we've got other options to direct our focus and resources to.
Samuel Casey: And if you look across that broad portfolio, are there any areas in particular where you think there's still opportunity there, the going is good, we want to expand, and likewise any areas where you think it's time to cut back on growth. Or and I think in the the PI market, you've changed the spread of your business there because of what you think the results are going to look like.
Waleed Jabsheh: If you go back to all our public announcements and all our public, you know, we've always said we are an underwriting shop, plain and simple. Our core and top priority, you know, we're an underwriting company, our underwriting business, which is our core business, has to be the leading and most profit-achieving part of our business. We're all talking about how the market is softening. But at the end of the day, we always say, you know, it's not about rate movements, it's about rate adequacy. And rate adequacy, by and large, remains across most of the insurance and reinsurance spectrum. As I mentioned earlier, I mean, we're pretty light on reinsurance. And even with the tripling of the size of the portfolio, our reinsurance book is still relatively small, amounting to about 50% of what we do as a business, roughly $100 million. We're building that reinsurance team. We've got a renowned underwriter joining us next month, you know, to focus on specialty treaty, which is an area where even with the growth that we've achieved in that book over the last three years, is an area we're super light in as well. And certain aspects of that still very attractive, and actually more attractive than writing that business on the primary side. On the direct lines, I think short tail is mixed. There are many areas that are very soft at the moment and continue to soften, but areas such as construction engineering, marine lines, you know, cargo, ports and terminals, marine liabilities, and even within property, because property is such a vast and widespread market, and the opportunities differ from one area to the other. You know, property is still an area where for IGI we can continue to grow and develop. That being said, at the end of the day, we will write the business that we feel is going to generate the returns that we expect. And when we can't find those opportunities, when markets become too difficult, too challenging, we are the market and we will walk away from business. And you mentioned the PI. I mean, uh, PI is a big class of business for us. We remain committed fully to the class. But what we did is we walked away from an element of that portfolio, but representing a significant part of it, about $50 million of GWP. Now, on a gross basis, a big number, net basis, you know, a small fraction of that. But still, I think it's telling to the type of business that we are and the discipline that we exercise that we are willing to walk away from a portfolio that represents 7-8% of our group GWP because we don't believe in the performance, the future performance of that portfolio. It's putting your money where your mouth is, is the phrase. And at the end of the day, you know, what good is business if it doesn't generate the profitability that you need to cover your cost of capital? And in some cases, it doesn't generate any profitability whatsoever. And this is an ethos that we sink into. It's in the DNA of this business. We're not a top-line driven company. We are as ambitious as anybody else, as any other business out there. But at the end of the day, top line, you know, if that is your ultimate measure of success, you're bound to fail at some point and and feel the pain of that. Say your ultimate measure of success is underwriting results, of course. Loss ratios, combined ratios, 100%. You know, so it puts aside any investment income, you know, benefit. We do not measure the success of our underwriting portfolios based on any benefit from investment income, even for the long-tail lines. You know, uh, we measure the success and measure the profitability of these lines based on pure underwriting results. And we view investment income now, obviously, is more than just icing on the cake because it's become a lot more significant over the last few years than prior to that. But that is a separate it can come, but it can also go in your interest rates. 100%. 100%. You've got to focus, keep the mind focused on pure underwriting. And if maintaining profitability means shrinking your GWP, then that's exactly what we need to do.
Samuel Casey: You're one of the company market companies which has made a decision to take box space in the Lloyds of London building. Um it's been a bit of a structural shift. We've seen quite a few people doing that recently. What was the thinking behind doing that? And are you are you pleased with the results it's bringing you?
Waleed Jabsheh: We came into Lloyd's about a year and a half ago now, with the uh with the company box. I believe it was in May of last year. And we had looked at Lloyd's. Lloyd's is a fantastic institution, as we all know. Whether the shape and form that you decide or one decides to be in Lloyd's with, you know, is I think dependent on the business and the needs and characteristics of that business. For us, you know, we had looked at Lloyd's previously and decided it was not for us at the time. You know, after internal discussions, talking to our underwriters, we decided that actually a company box at Lloyd's would be, you know, quite fruitful, beneficial. It's quite affordable to have that set up. And whilst it doesn't give you prime space within the Lloyd's building, it does give you a spot within the Lloyd's market where there is healthy broker traffic, business traffic.
Samuel Casey: Yeah, I think well, some of the some of those specialty lines that you operate in, they do quite often rely, as you say, on brokers walking the room and getting filling up slips.
Waleed Jabsheh: Absolutely. And for us, it's just another distribution source. It's almost like another office for us, right? And you're gonna get business that goes through the Lloyd's market that will not come to us sitting here in this uh Is there an element in, as we've talked about, the softer market that just being out there and having the IGI brand visible and present is useful as well. 100%. And I think that is the case, whether it's a soft market or a hard market. You know, you want your brand as visible as possible at any time. You know, yes, business development marketing in this type of environment becomes even more critical and has to be sort of elevated. But those types of things help you regardless of where you are in the cycle. And just being in there in the Lloyd's building, our underwriters being there, you know, the passing traffic, interaction with brokers walking by, underwriters, you know, underwriting peers, the intel that you gather, the the it all helps.
Samuel Casey: Some feedback we've been getting anecdotally, which some thought was counterintuitive, is that it's younger people actually who really are at the forefront of enjoying that because it's a great chance to grow their network and learn through osmosis and get themselves out there into the market.
Waleed Jabsheh: Absolutely. And and I commend them for that because obviously, since COVID, there's been a lot of you know, working from home bias. I personally think that that's detrimental to especially the younger generation's development in the industry and building their skill sets, their expertise. You need to be in the market, you need to be in the office. It's still a very personal business. And the Lloyd's market being in Lloyd's is an experience nobody really gets to take advantage of except people over here in London. And that should not be taken, you know, for granted.
Samuel Casey: Yeah. And how would you describe your leadership style? What are your priorities being the head of the company?
Waleed Jabsheh: On a personal basis, you know, we always refer to the IGI team as a family. It's a family business. We are a public company now. We're a lot bigger than when we started, almost coming on almost 500 employees across eight different locations. But we try to be as close as possible with our teams. We've got a very, you know, open-door policy, very entrepreneurial business, flat management structure where communication is instant. Access to whoever you want within the business is practically instant here. Yes, we are a $700 million company now. Yes, we are a public business now. Yes, we're almost 500 employees. Yes, we have eight offices worldwide. But approach to the business and running the business and the leadership style is practically the same as what it was when we were 20 years ago, 15 years ago. Again, you know, we go back to diversity. We're a very diverse business, yes, from a business perspective, but from a people perspective. And the core aspects we believe, in terms of your business being as strong as it can be, is it's diversity. You know, whether it's with business line geographies, but with its people. The fact that we have offices in almost every continent across the globe means that our business is diverse and our people need to be diverse. And we always say this internally: diversity is strengthening.
Samuel Casey: Looking ahead, we're speaking in uh in September time, in the autumn. Thinking about 2026, what are your key priorities looking to next year? And you know, if we sat down again this time next year, what do you think you'd most like to have achieved?
Waleed Jabsheh: For a company like IGI, we were a $700 million business. We just walked away from a $50 million portfolio, right? We're managing the cycle. Do we want to grow? Do we believe we can grow in this market? Absolutely, 100%. And for a company like us, growth, you know, if we want to go by 10%, that's $70 million. If a much larger competitor wants to grow, that's hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. That being said, I think the strength of a business is understanding, you know, the business itself, understanding who we are, where we stand. Our capabilities are different than others' capabilities. That's a fact. And there's nothing wrong with admitting that and saying that. You know, understand who you are, what your capabilities are, whether they be financial, intellectual, and work within those capabilities. Never think you're bigger, better, smarter, stronger than you really are. Work within those boundaries, set your risk appetite, set your risk tolerances tightly, and work within them, never veer out. Maintain that discipline. And as a result of our size and our uh and those characteristics, you know, ultimately we're out there to write profitable business. We'll write as much of it as we can. Are we going to influence the market to shift in certain directions? No. We don't have that clout, we don't have that influence. But what we are in control of is our own decisions. We'll get out there, we'll fight for the business, we'll leave as many stones unturned as possible. If we find the right business, we will undoubtedly pounce and capitalize on that business. If we don't, then there's nothing wrong with not growing, biding your time until the next phase of the market presents you that opportunities to double in size like we did over the last five years. And at the end of the day, we tell our uh, you know, uh, yes, the market is getting tougher, the market is getting stronger, the market is still adequate. We've been through a great run. We always knew this was gonna come at some point. So no drama. Stay calm and keep underwriting.
Samuel Casey: Sounds good. Well, Walid, it's been a great pleasure to speak to you today. Thanks for taking the time to come and appear on the show.
Waleed Jabsheh: Thank you, sir. I really appreciate it.
Samuel Casey: Before you go, here are some of the other top stories from the past fortnight. Insurance Insider revealed that Marsh is poised to launch a wholesale team in London as it looks to divert its book of McGriff business away from Howden. RSA completed its rebranding to Intact Insurance and laid out plans to double its size by 2030. And it emerged that Bermudian mortgage carrier Essence Re is branching into the PC market, starting out with a portfolio of specialty reinsurance business. That's all for this episode, but we'll be back again in two weeks' time.