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Lloyd’s gains leadership, and The Fidelis Partnership gets capital diversification.
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However, it doesn't prove a mutual is a wrong concept for the cyber market.
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Long-term confidence in the market depends on the details of the new tax rule.
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Sources believe Lloyd’s may be veering away from central DA systems.
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The narrative of competition between the two hubs can hold space for benefits.
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Reinsurers are reporting stellar 2023 results – what they do with the earnings will be crucial.
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Impressive results in 2023 will mean big payouts.
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The Corporation is walking a tightrope between encouraging further growth whilst maintaining discipline.
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As a drip-drip of exits have continued amid a harder cat market, broader questions arise.
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Aviva will need to manage the talent base deftly to get the most from the deal.
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Brokers face pressure on margins as the market’s firming phase slows
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A minority view gaining currency is that 2016-19 will not be the only problem.
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Rising legal costs show the risk of Howden’s growth-hungry approach.
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Changing work practices do not overshadow basic precepts of good employment.
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A hard cat market in 2023 means cedants must consider the alternatives.
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Putting together two “show me” stories risks investor skepticism.
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The depth of the retro market recovery will be an influential factor in the pace of the cat market slowdown from here.
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The company has improved performance and brought in new top management – but its direction under Covéa remains to be seen.
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The segment has bounced back from its mid-2022 nadir, but its current zenith is not that much to shout home about.
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The flight of reinsurers to mid- and upper layers of programmes is influenced by recent experience but softening at this level can be seen as a risky move.
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Lloyd’s may be wary of making disciplinary hearings more public, but it could at least make processes more transparent.
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The move points to a longer spell of independence for Miller – but possible bearishness on external interest in UK broking.
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The question is whether the inherent value in CFC was in fact concentrated in departing executives David Walsh and Graeme Newman, or if the business can trade forward as it did.
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The 200-year-old firm is not the only one to be caught up in watchdogs’ investigations into corruption and bribery controls.
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Does one party – the carrier or the cedant – have to lose out for the other to succeed?
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London’s insurance market is booming in some ways yet still has multiple challenges to address.
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Lloyd’s has been trying to simplify its story for external investors, but it has more work to do judging by the outcome of the London SPAC vehicle which was planning a new syndicate investment launch.
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Trading at just 0.6x book, the firm is a cheap option for an insurer which is looking to enter E&S, or is underweight in the sector.
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Variations between the casualty and cat markets mean 2024 cat outcomes may be far less uniform than they were this year.
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At a point when cyber rates are falling and capacity is plentiful in high excess layers, the mutual plans have the wider cyber market somewhat perplexed.
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The 3x3 plan takes the things about the firm over the last decade that have been distinctive and intensifies them.
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With new leadership at some of the largest continentals, there will be close attention to how their tactics in changing lines of business will evolve.
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Halfway through a complex restructuring is not the time for a CEO (and CFO) change.
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As the algorithmic syndicate has diversified its capital base, the risk-modelling world provides a parallel with regard to how these initiatives could develop.
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Investors are beginning to push insurers harder to deliver on diversity and inclusion, but the culture around speaking out and recruiting talent suggests new ideas or broader execution is needed.
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The lopsidedness of the ILS recovery means more confidence around prolonged hard market rates but also raises the bar on competing for third-party capital.
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Strong words from Patrick Tiernan have caused a stir in the market as pricing continues to fall off fast.
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Insurance Insider has compiled a digest of a complex web of regulatory reforms that will take shape during the next 18 months.
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The pressure is on Lloyds to deliver benefits as other players build up their domestic E&S platforms.
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The personal lines strategy mirrors the buy, build and sell playbook you would see from a sponsor.
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This CVC investment has come hot on the heels of an H1 result which showed performance plus growth, and should be interpreted as vindication of the work done at Lloyd’s.
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The psychological wounds of the past were serious, and the sector’s redemption arc with capital will take time to play out.
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The paradox of “the best reinsurance market in years” is that there are still question marks over who wants a piece of it.
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However minor an irritant these losses are for global carriers, their impact is likely to have an outsized influence on the narrative heading into the 1 January renewals.
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Prior-year legacy deals and higher reinsurance costs are just some of the issues that brokers, MGAs and other cedants are confronting in clearing up after the debacle over allegations regarding faked letters of credit.
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Beazley and Lancashire’s plans to launch US units exemplify wider competitive challenges that the market must overcome to thrive.
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WTW exploring reinsurance exec recruitment comes at a time of competitive tension in the market.
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Areas of focus should include hiring external talent, securing capital for M&A, speeding up US growth, and answering the reinsurance question.
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The fallout from Coutts’ cancellation of Nigel Farage as a client provides useful lessons as companies adopt bolder stances around issues such as social justice and climate change.
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The issues have put a spotlight on partial collateralisation, the leverage of the fronts, and the challenges of assigning responsibility.
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The Corporation has had to navigate challenging trade-offs around its succession planning.
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It didn’t take long after the Validus-RenRe deal for the next possible reinsurance consolidation target to emerge.
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Cancellations of music events due to performers’ mental health conditions is one of the issues, alongside strikes and the energy crisis, which are challenging contingency underwriters.
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The reaction to capital raising this year signals that investor belief in risk-takers is reinvigorated.
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Contrasting views have been shared on the feasibility of carriers deploying risk capital, at scale, for a proposed war insurance pool to support Ukraine's rebuilding projects.
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The market has suffered from a glut of capital, and a number of structural features that make winning hard.
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The Big Three reinsurance brokers face a number of factors that could challenge their supremacy.
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After founder members Axa and Allianz dealt a potentially terminal blow to the Net-Zero Insurance Alliance by withdrawing, the NZIA is exploring limited options to continue.
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The ongoing debate raging in London on the nuances of cyber war wordings threatens to wreak more reputational damage on the industry if a consensus is not found.
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Blenheim’s withdrawal from property treaty highlights questions around London’s role as a reinsurance centre of excellence.
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Both oil and gas and renewables insurers are at the sharp end of the insurance industry’s ESG journey.
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Reforms to the UK listing regime may enhance prospects of an insurance firm opting to IPO in London in future, but several broader problems, including liquidity issues, will also affect such a decision, according to industry sources.
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At Insurance Insider’s latest Progress event, we discussed various tactics for the London market to change recruitment strategies in order to attract entrants from broader socio-economic groupings.
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A prolonged soft market spell up to 2018 has created a ‘generation gap’ in the class, sparking competition for top practitioners.
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The cross-line facility launch – in a generally firm market – suggests that the tech-driven era of facilitisation is continuing to gain pace.
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Details on Beazley’s cyber war product are yet to come to light, but there are questions outstanding on event definition, wordings and whether the market will follow.
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Insurers have been hoping that higher interest rates would signal a new era, but not all commentators agree there has been a paradigm shift.
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The split of the program and legacy businesses is the most obviously compelling path for R&Q shareholder value creation.
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The fast-growing group – which did not exist when the UK voted to leave the EU – is now close to $500mn of adjusted Ebitda.
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With chairman Bruce Carnegie-Brown’s third term expiring in June 2025, the organisation needs to start laying the ground for broader changes.
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The market has undergone substantial multi-year hardening after a surge of painful loss activity.
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Large visiting contingents from Florida to the Bermuda Risk Summit highlighted ongoing concerns around cat capacity availability.
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Reclassifying expenses as underwriting or corporate costs for different reporting metrics is set to get more complex under IFRS17.
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As Adidas terminated its partnership with Kanye West following his antisemitic tweets, it projected a loss that signalled why insurers should be pushing the need for brand reputation insurance.
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New supply is entering the market after a remediation phase, but waning demand for London capacity is set to create pressure on pricing.
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Misalignment in T&Cs means the London market is now running far more PV risk net.
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The in-coming CEO must ensure a smooth transition, land the “London-out strategy” started by Brooks, and handle CPPIB’s exit.
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The French carrier has replaced Laurent Rousseau with Swiss Re’s Thierry Léger - midway through a remedial journey. Can a third CEO in two years resolve the carrier’s issues?
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Exclusions and coverage changes absolutely make sense as a goal, but some wordings have thrown up additional risks.
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The association showed strong leadership and innovative thinking to increase the number of women on its panel without sacrificing fairness.
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A harder reinsurance market will make its impacts felt throughout 2023.
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While BMS has achieved a solid price and a favourable investor structure, there are signs of a cooler M&A market ahead.
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The outcome over the debate on narrowing cat reinsurance coverage will not be an all-or-nothing bet, with all perils deals with exclusions not a polar opposite of named perils coverage.
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The London market proved resilient in the face of twin shocks from geopolitical and natural disaster.
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The Corporation is signalling that it wants to be as responsive as possible to allow syndicates to manoeuvre – but will it merely float with the tide of inflation or can growth take off?
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Several structural factors, including the pricing cycle, make insurers more insulated from US activist states.
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London carriers were bullish on the opportunity ahead and suggested new ways of working will continue to evolve.
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Announcements and interviews at the UN conference have shed light on the tools emerging to help carriers decarbonise their underwriting portfolios.
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Even without the uncertainty of an imminent takeover, the path ahead will not be easy for Ascot.
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The Treasury is yet to clarify its plans to introduce ‘call in’ powers against regulators, or detail how regulators will be held accountable over a new growth duty.
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PE funds considering a play in the catastrophe space are far more likely to be looking for an alpha play.
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Acrisure’s Flux syndicate will be a test case for a broker’s presence at Lloyd’s, one which rivals will watch closely.
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The opportunity to set in statute meaningful powers and metrics to hold financial regulators accountable will reach a tipping point in the coming weeks, as the Financial Services and Markets Bill progresses through the next parliamentary stages.
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Overcapacity in upstream energy means the immediate impact of the move will be limited.
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As reinsurers have walked away from certain risks in Florida, the state will need to keep some parts of its insurance infrastructure healthy – but without making the public markets too attractive.
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Several studies have shown how the industry might tackle its poor D&I record. Business leaders must now take up the baton.
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Rising reinsurance rates provide both an opportunity and a challenge for the Lloyd’s market.
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Financial Secretary Andrew Griffith will have oversight of reforms to FCA and PRA operations, but how far he’ll take that mandate is an open question.
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Ratings agencies suggest that carriers must do better on controlling volatility – but diverging risk appetites give the lie to the idea that the industry is walking away from risk.
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A signed deal would end a roughly three-year hiatus for significant strategic balance sheet M&A at Lloyd’s.
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Insurance Insider explores the themes around growth in London and a contraction of cat limits on the horizon, in the months before an intensive 1.1 period.
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Meaningful capacity is returning to the marine market, increasingly via delegated authority underwriting.
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After PPL announced a second delay to the NextGen platform in May, Insurance Insider examines lingering questions over a beleaguered modernisation project.
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The latest financial condition report for Darag Bermuda shows a $69.0mn loss after tax for 2021.
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A very public shareholder dispute is taking centre stage at a firm in transition.
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The former reinsurance leader’s exit from treaty highlights wider pressures on the market.
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The prospect of a $1bn new cyber reinsurer is a huge development for the market. It is also a brave move.
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Faced with an overstretched and uniform talent pool, firms must seek candidates from a broader and more diverse base.
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In the absence of a major tactical shift from Demotech, will the reinsurers become the de facto selection party determining which domestics survive?
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The industry deserves praise for facilitating trade out of Ukraine, but the future is highly uncertain.
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The Corporation’s latest market survey on D&I shows key metrics moving in the right direction but persistent fears remain from individuals around speaking out.
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The reorganisation has cleared the first hurdle where many expected it to fall, but the balance sheet IPO was always going to be the harder exercise.
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The regulator has released data that shows it is failing to meet certain voluntary and statutory operational targets.
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A long-awaited bill to reform regulatory oversight and impose a new growth duty on the watchdogs may fall short of the accountability measures hoped for.
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Market orthodoxy suggests cross-class reinsurers secure more leverage – but are there too many implicit offsets in this game?
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The market is taking its first proactive steps to resolve issues posed by the massive systemic exposures it is running.
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RenaissanceRe has always been a business with strong convictions and an assured management team, willing to carve out a path distinct from competitors.
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PE firms still hungry for insurance investment are looking further afield than the UK and the US – but international aggregation is a different game.
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After a half-year update on the Blueprint Two programme, Insurance Insider explores what has been delivered, but also the questions on how adoption will play out.
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As the Treasury falls under pressure to ramp up oversight of the FCA and PRA, Insurance Insider explores what this should mean in practice.
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A long-awaited return to international travel lies ahead, but do executives – and their expense accounts – still have the stamina for it?
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The biggest challenge with reporting on the legacy market is the lack of publicly available information to track the sector’s performance.
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Arguably the Corporation could find more creative ways to promote its ESG targets, but the reality is that the showy protests are of less relevance than winning boardroom votes.
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If you believe that the Lloyd's market has turned around its fortunes, it’s a buyers’ market on Lime Street.
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There is much to like in the transaction, but a strategy based on serial mega deals elevates the group’s risk profile.
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The carrier’s move to cement its identity as a specialty (re)insurer could put it at a competitive disadvantage.
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Reinsurers are still limiting exposure to the market despite securing major concessions, and Citizens’ buying tactics highlight the gulf between buyers and sellers.
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The tacit tying of inwards business flows to shares of outwards programmes creates real exposure to a crusading Attorney General looking for a target.
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The company must launch a $100mn placement against the backdrop of a failed takeover deal and a 40% share price collapse.
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A number of carriers are looking to offload their volatile reinsurance units. Could an ambitious investor knit them together?
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The potential deal has major advantages for both Howden and its target – and would remove a major consolidation opportunity from the market.
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More scrutiny on the remuneration of delegated authority business is well overdue.
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(Re)insurers are steadfast on the need for underlying tort and roofing reform – but failures might mean emergency measures are also on the table.
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The Ukraine-Russia crisis has thrown both the science and the art of reserving into light.
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The Bermudian has painted its reinsurance unit in an unfavourable light – and that will be hard to counter.
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The deal provides Tysers with much needed stability and a firmer footing from which to tackle its challenges.
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There are still some hurdles preventing widespread ILS adoption of cyber risk, but momentum should increase.
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The Bermudian is trying to cement its pivot into specialty insurance – but selling the reinsurance unit may prove tricky.
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The conflict is a live cat that could last months and crucially, has straddled a significant reinsurance renewal date.
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London market businesses must increase supply if they can’t keep up with demand for talent.
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A $90mn capital charge relating to the former Ace run-off asbestos book is a bear signal for the wider legacy market.
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The London market wholesaler stands to gain a variety of benefits from a possible Australian owner.
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The unlimited sideways exposure in the all-risks market has the potential to make the Ukraine-Russia situation even graver for the aviation market.
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Unlike deals like Axa-XL or Catlin-XL before it, this transaction is expected to be much more neutral in its impact on reinsurers.
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Following the last two “black swan” events, there is a very real question around market portfolio resilience.
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Combined ratio aside, detail on growth, rates and reserves will give some indicator of how well the market is preparing for what lies ahead.
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The findings of the Corbin & King case could have both widened coverage and increased the aggregate businesses can claim.
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There are early signs of bifurcation between rates on cat-exposed or loss affected business, and clean accounts.
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The flight from volatility could have the industry poised to enter another phase of structural change.
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Who will lead Italy’s 191-year-old insurer over the next three years? Analysts have their say.
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Amid pressure to adopt a remit to promote growth, the UK’s financial regulators may be forced out of their comfort zone.
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The forthcoming sale of GRP highlights key questions about this stage of the UK broking consolidation play.
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The latest attempt to sell Tysers comes with an injection of competitive tension and an improved set of numbers for the 200-year-old broker.
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After a second guide from Lloyd’s on Blueprint Two finally provided timescales for delivery, some firms remain uncertain on the details needed for preparation.
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At root, London and Lloyd’s needs to strengthen its value proposition for four distinct groups: capital providers, multi-platform carriers, brokers and cedants.
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Absent more significant reform, any changes this year look set to simply shift the timing of burdens falling on the public purse.
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With an abundance of detail on delivery, the Corporation can now be held to account.
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There is a nervousness among both brokers and underwriters around what compounding rate rise may mean for appetite for the product.
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Digitisation and a possible lesser future for the underwriting room add pressure for a stratum of the market already facing headwinds.
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Greater participation of cat bond investors in the retro market has some advantages alongside the risks.
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Over the cycle, the MGA model has proved to be more resilient than initially expected by the market and its observers.
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Lloyd’s will have no further wiggle room to delay the delivery of Blueprint Two elements this year, but it will depend largely on technology partners.
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Sources have told Insurance Insider that the majority of Beazley’s planned income is driven by rate increase, with limited new business.
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The “squeezed middle” of the reinsurance sector is under pressure, but attritional risk aversion could drive ongoing changes.
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Syndicates will sometimes baulk at the degree of oversight in Lloyd’s, but it remains a poor signal that a niche player like 1975 would walk away.
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The broker’s $7.5bn refinance highlights the growing strength of challenger broker firms.
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Panel turnover could be on the rise, as retro change may have a knock-on impact
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Private equity and trade sales look challenging, which could point to an IPO if CPPIB heads for the door.
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The Corporation is granting more flexibility but will keep a closer eye on cat, cyber and delegated authority next year.
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After the HCI-owned InsurTech TypTap filed for an IPO in the US, Insurance Insider looks at other carriers that could unlock sky-high value from their tech-led subsidiaries.
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The interconnected challenges of performance and the collateralized structure make it tough to land a strategic pivot.
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In the Corporation’s ambition to bring new capital and new businesses to Lloyd’s, the look and feel of the marketplace is slowly changing.
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To walk away from One Lime Street at this juncture would certainly be a very bold statement on how Lloyd’s is embracing modernisation and its future.
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The surprise union could ramp up PartnerRe’s growth, but signals the winding down of this phase of reinsurance M&A.
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Primary rates move before reinsurance, cedes fall in a hard market and cat is subsidised by casualty.
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If the deal does complete this time, the partnership will face a range of pitfalls and challenges.
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The CEO is signalling to the market, investors and the rating agencies that Lloyd’s has turned a corner.
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Engaging with the French mutual as an M&A counterparty represents a high-risk strategy for Exor.
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The record-breaking deal valued CFC at more than £2.5bn, equivalent to in excess of 40x Ebitda.
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S&P suggested that an “abrupt rethinking” was a more likely outcome than gradual pricing increases – but a third way is possible if ratings agencies set a glidepath to change.
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Figures from the International Underwriting Association’s most recent report shed some light on the movement.
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Should Howden be successful in sealing the deal, it will be its third piece of major M&A in just over 12 months for a combined sum of approximately £2.5bn.
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The competition regulator’s investigation looks to be a procedural matter that will allow the Willis Re saga to conclude.
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The lower-than-expected losses so far from Ida do not stack up against what is thought to be a $30bn+ cat event.
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The inability to strike a deal sends both buyer and seller back to square one.
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If PPL and Deloitte cannot execute this time round, serious questions need to be asked around whether London is approaching its vital modernisation work in the right way.
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The reputation of the insurance industry has taken a battering after sexual misconduct stories and pandemic disputes.
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This publication has reported extensively on the ups and downs of the PPL saga, as the company seeks to push ahead on the development of its NextGen platform – a major component of the market-wide push on modernisation.
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The planned disposal of the syndicate underlines the challenges the cohort of Bermudian entries has faced.
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Recently one of my colleagues argued that it was time for a “bonfire of PMLs”, as the past five years have shown that the industry has seriously underpriced the kind of $10bn-$20bn loss events that have been happening since Harvey, Irma and Maria landed in 2017.
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Certainty of coverage and the market’s sensitivity around claims aggregation were key discussion points on the first day of the four-day virtual event.
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There is no such thing as an average loss year, but investors will still be looking for benchmarks.
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This current hard cycle in cyber is potentially a once-in-a-generation opportunity to engineer the product as fit for purpose.
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The ability to meet in person will be a major competitive advantage as the world recovers from Covid-19.
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The business is working with Fenchurch on what is likely to be a secondary offering that sees HPS and MDP re-invest.
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Willis’s sale of its reinsurance arm was the best option it had left – but the loss will have implications for the wider business.
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Limited coverage and potential high costs mean events organisers are still plagued by long-term uncertainty.
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With execution risk higher than ever on delivering the NextGen platform, PPL now finds itself at a crucial fork in the road.
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Apart from a liberal dose of abstract terminology and climate-change jargon, the Corporation’s action plan is suffused with the rhetoric of “support”.
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The firm should trade off maximum possible value for near-term certainty in crystallising shareholder value.
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The firm has lost some of its sheen, and its CEO-elect has key challenges to address, including how to balance its twin-engine retail and big-ticket businesses.
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The company finds itself at a crossroads as it considers its choice of new leadership.
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With a strategic and a sovereign wealth fund on the register, the (re)insurer has options to find liquidity for its PE backers.
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Ongoing Covid-19 restrictions make adopting concrete working expectations more necessary.
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With individuals soon to be held accountable for D&I success, real change could finally be on the horizon.
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A rampaging cat bond market should lead more cedants to consider its long-term advantages.
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The market must raise its game quickly to deliver on the reboot of PPL 2.0 after it severed ties with tech provider CGI.
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Last week, a Royal visit to 1 Lime Street heralded a fresh commitment from the (re)insurance industry to building a more sustainable future.
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Although superficially a good match, Axa would run significant risks in pursuing a sale of its reinsurance arm to the French mutual.
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The mid-year renewals are seeing a continued slowdown in rate rises for the property D&F market.
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With ILS and pension fund money now confirmed for Syndicate 1988, there are further observations for the vehicle launch.
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The parties will likely look to deliver a carve-out of large P&C and health benefits broking in the US to target a DoJ settlement.
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The new chief of markets was articulate and clear in his first market message since taking up the position.
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Kessler and Derez will each get something they want from the deal, which will also clean the slate for incoming CEO Rousseau.
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Many of the individual causes championed by CEOs are positive, but there are good reasons to separate the political and business spheres.
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After a period of sluggish premium rate growth, the market appears to now be firing on all cylinders.
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Proposals for a secondee system using a UK branch look unwieldy.
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The experience of the past few years has made cedants much more concerned about managing tail risk than they are credit risk.
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Tysers is gearing up for a sale, with bankers talking up the likelihood a London peer will take it out.
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The French carrier’s newly announced successor to Denis Kessler will be charged with taking growth to the next phase.
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The business looks well placed to succeed if it can keep retention in check and reinvest to build broader capabilities.
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The new Lloyd’s chief of markets has some key strategic decisions on market oversight, growth and distribution to take.
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Whatever their eventual impact on runaway loss inflation the fact reforms were enacted at all is a happy surprise for the industry.
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There is increasing optimism about rating adequacy, but sustained underwriting discipline is essential.
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With a sale of the remedy assets to AJG not yet agreed, the firms will have to choose their words carefully this week.
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Underwriters voiced a cautious optimism about the outlook for 2020, but warned that the class was moving from a low point.
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London has a chance to build back better with broker facilities assembled on a sustainable basis. Adam McNestrie
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The work from home model has proved the sector’s resilience, but there are opportunities to flourish for companies that return to the office.
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Both parties continue to look determined to take the steps needed to get the deal to the line.
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The potential sale of Willis Re to AJG would push Gallagher Re into the big leagues – but make little impact on the wider market.
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The creation of a single Bermuda reinsurance company removes a key structural impediment to a sale.
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Brokers, underwriters and industry figures are at odds over the sector’s role but small steps make sense.
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The potential for a wave of class actions as a result of biometric data privacy laws has the cyber market on alert.
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US carriers lag European peers, but the country is rising from its slumber under Biden.
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Rate rises on wind covers are broadly in the 5%-10% range, running somewhat ahead of quake increases.
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In securing the Enstar ADC, Axa XL has drawn a line in the sand and signalled a fresh start to investors.
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Reinsurance underwriters and brokers anticipate a Japanese renewal largely unaffected by Covid-19 as negotiations continue to focus on payback for 2018 and 2019 typhoon losses.
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As Adrian Cox prepares to take the helm at Beazley, what challenges does the CEO-in-waiting face?
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Whether the Texas Deep Freeze ends as a $12.5bn, $15bn or $20bn insured loss, it will be a medium-sized cat event that will deal an earnings hit to carriers with exposure to the affected states.
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The 2020 Lloyd’s culture survey showed improvements, but serious questions remain on whether London is striding towards an inclusive culture.
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The move from Fidelis to hand back $275mn of capital is rare in a "use it or lose it" world, but what does this say about the direction of the retro market?
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The withdrawal of governmental support could be costly for (re)insurers on multiple fronts.
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Entering reinsurance will be tough, but Ardonagh’s latest project is no surprise
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The search for yield is back on, raising questions over how long the market uptick will last.
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But getting loss ratios under control will require more than just pushing prices higher.
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By setting up an asset manager, the reinsurer is competing with ILS firms on their turf.
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Disagreement over cyber wordings in named-perils cover joins the list of issues creating friction ahead of 1.1.
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As the transition clock ticks new problems are emerging and foreseeable issues are becoming harder to ignore.
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Lloyd’s still has questions to answer on growth, remediation and Blueprint Two.
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At a Reuters event, Willis’ Aubert agrees that assuming older employees would find the transition hardest was a mistake.
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The insurance regulator suggests Solvency II reforms should include a provision to ban shareholder handouts in times of crisis.
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The polarisation of views on Covid losses is so wide, and the sums at stake so large, that it is inevitable some reinsurance claims will end up in arbitration processes.
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What really moves the needle at Lloyd’s is when the biggest beasts start to draw in their horns.
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Perhaps the biggest question about the facility is why Swiss Re and PartnerRe are backing such a deal now.
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The capital raise underscores Catlin and Brand's ambition to build the leading London specialty franchise.
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If a different business model is required for 2020 start-ups to achieve traction in the longer term, then arguably it’s one we haven’t yet seen.
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The mooted changes would impact entrepreneurs and private equity business models.
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With rate increases potentially falling short of rising loss costs, who will drive the changes needed in cyber?
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Direct investment has propped up the reinsurer ILS platforms, but further evolution will be needed.
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It is not clear why the 12th floor thought this syndicate was accretive to the broader market.
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Investors from the ILS boom era are also those who've had the least luck, so fundraising remains a slog.
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Rate acceleration, frequency benefits and less-than-feared top line pressure were among the takeaways from US disclosures.
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A recent Clyde & Co survey shows carriers are more bearish than MGAs on capital provision, and their demands are changing.
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With its plans for ERS, Aquiline is looking to attack the hardening phase with the assets it has to hand.
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The market expects a deal with Tysers, but there are three reasons why it may be wrong.
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Albert Benchimol, Michael Watson, Karen Green and Dominick Hoare throw their hats into the ring.
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The work always faced obstacles to rapid progression, with the second wave insurmountable.
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Public commitments to D&I are welcomed but there is a wider question on who is holding firms to their word.
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Since Covid-19 began to spread in areas with high insurance penetration, the situation has been in constant evolution.
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The carrier probably won’t be the last to flag additional losses from events cancellation.
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The likelihood of a heavy loss rises, but some elements including requirements around mandatory shutdowns are a silver lining.
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Praise should be given where it’s due on Lloyd’s huge underlying underwriting improvement.
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Delegated authority brokers are braced for the 1 January property binders renewal.
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The appointments follow an expansion in the carrier’s European casualty offering earlier in the year.
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The establishment of “shared resilience solutions” to BI losses would require unprecedented policy coordination.
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Socially distanced golf course meetings show that the "old ways" are still going strong.
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The broker M&A juggernaut is powering up again after a slowdown during the height of the Covid crisis.
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Lloyd’s brush with aviation asphyxia highlights how its elaborate ecosystem, including an extensive use of outsourced suppliers, can make it vulnerable to sanctions clampdowns.
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If none of the major post-Covid start-ups sets up at Lloyd’s, it will have lost ground to Bermuda.
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Insurers for BW Offshore’s Sendje Berge FPSO may have dodged a bullet following a pirate attack on the vessel, but the ordeal may only be beginning for the nine crew members kidnapped in the raid.
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(Re)Connect is a chance to reimagine the old Monte Carlo format in a digital way.
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In so many ways, Covid-19 has scope to manifest as an asymmetric loss, and inadvertently having to run the property loss net may be yet another.
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Curtailed insurance spend and a more cautious tone from underwriters will put bullish cyber growth targets out of reach.
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Behavioural risks associated with working from home are on the regulatory radar and can’t be ignoredBehavioural risks associated with working from home are on the regulatory radar and can’t be ignored.
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The wheels have been set in motion for a discussion on working practices and corporate expense in insurance which is well overdue.
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In the post-Covid market, it looks likely that MGAs with scale, expertise and access to capital will win.
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There are whole groups of people for whom working from home is narrowing rather than expanding the scope of their professional lives.
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With Brit’s new follow-only syndicate, the push for a revolutionised follow market is very much still on.
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Private equity is looking for opportunities to capitalise on the Covid-19 dislocation.
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The pandemic era of working from home is prompting companies to review their real estate requirements.
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The Financial Ombudsman works within parameters that pay limited heed to legal contracts. ‘Fairness’ versus the law in Covid-19 BI disputes
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The Carbon and Brit syndicate approvals are big test cases in two major Future at Lloyd’s initiatives.
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Efforts to explain the role the industry is playing now and the role it can play after the pandemic passes are not cutting through.
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Early assessments of the impact of Covid-19 on the insurance sector focused on the asset-side shock and the implications for demand resulting from the severe depression.
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Covid-19 could provide a tailwind in a pivotal year for Lloyd’s future profitability.
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With the news deteriorating day on day, (re)insurers face an unprecedented multi-focal challenge that will leave them fighting on all fronts.
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The commercial aviation market is extraordinary and unusual. Airlines have close-knit relationships and collaborate to ferry millions of people across continents each day.
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Greenlight Re was assaulted on all fronts on its earnings call – and a run-off sale now looks likelyGreenlight Re was assaulted on all fronts on its earnings call – and a run-off sale now looks likely.
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Aon could secure major value via synergies if it can avoid the pitfalls of regulatory approvals and integration.
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Doubling up also creates bandwidth issues for the Corporation's chief.
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The appointment of Scott Gunter as Axa XL CEO has surprised the market.
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As with K&R risks in the 1960s, it has taken time for this type of loss to become quantifiable.
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The broker will draw PE interest but has to prove it is more than a Rod Fox vehicle.
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New ownership could clear channel conflict, end internal competition and allow Willis to book a gain on disposal.
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The supervisor’s comments underscore the need for a “competitiveness” focus.
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Failure to deliver on the three priority areas would call the whole project into question.
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Reinsurers have been keen to paint a picture of gains on the horizon in their analyst calls after their January renewals reports.
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Covea now looks favourite to seal a deal to acquire PartnerRe for more than $9bn, after the giant French mutual insurer was foiled in its attempts to acquire Scor in 2018/19.
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Any deal would likely see a valuation of more than $8bn placed on PartnerRe.
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Pioneer's troubles will have made it even tougher for the harder-pressed MGAs to prove their worth
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Lloyd's looks like an attractive opportunity for private equity (PE) right now in three obvious ways.
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At 11pm local time the UK will leave the EU.
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When looking at rate trends for large directors’ and officers’ (D&O) accounts, one could call the situation a tale of two markets.
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If early reporters Travelers and RLI are reliable cross-industry bellwethers, it looks like significantly lower overall catastrophe losses last year will flatter carriers’ Q4 and 2019 results and offset much of the damage from spiralling casualty claims.
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Large limits, multi-year exposures and huge volatility evoke the company Duperreault inherited.
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The legal battle between MMC and Hyperion over two mass team lifts ended quietly last week, heralded only by a joint statement disclosing a confidential settlement.
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In the Florida market there is clearly a close relationship, albeit a financial disjuncture, between the thinly capitalised private players and the reinsurers that assume their cat risk. As such it will nigh on impossible for watchdogs to achieve fundamental change without considering the whole system.
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Who remembers the Equifax breach?
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Only a matter of months ago “social inflation” sounded slightly arcane. It has since become the industry’s main preoccupation.
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Since December we have been stressing that the major fourth-quarter results story is likely to be reserve charges taken by carriers that write US casualty books.
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Can entrepreneurial start-up brokers ever win when they go up against the biggest brokers? Or are they always doomed to be crushed under the wheels of these juggernauts?
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The self-insured sector looks set to boom but the segment – and the intermediaries that serve it – are coming under increased scrutiny.
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The surprise exit highlights the challenges the Corporation faces in retaining and keeping the best talent.
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As much of the western business world last week battled post-Christmas inertia, regulators at the UK’s FCA were already hard at it.
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With a powerful new parent, the reinsurance broker could fill the slot vacated by JLT Re, but it may prefer to remain a boutique.
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Early in the new year, Boris Johnson’s chief special adviser Dominic Cummings published an unorthodox call for applicants to join the civil service.
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The sudden move points the way to a Lloyd's consolidation war and Q4 reserve charges.
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The retreat of Argo and peers belies a continued interest in the Latin American specialty market.
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I think the last year at Lloyd’s has been about the new leadership inspiring confidence and demonstrating vision.
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An oil rig off the coast of Norway may seem an unlikely victim of social inflation. But the phenomenon that has created misery for USA Inc and shaped the outcome of the casualty reinsurance renewals is being felt far from the pharmaceuticals companies, the hospitals, the religious institutions – and insurers thereof – perceived to stand well ahead in the firing line.
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Yesterday, Neon was placed into run-off by parent AFG – on just the third business day of the year.
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A striking feature of this year’s 1 January renewal has been the changing approach to aggregate retrocession covers.
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The UK election has resolved months of uncertainty about whether Brexit will even happen.
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Pressure on Greenlight Re's board continues to ramp up.
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Christmas brings out the child in everyone.
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There has been plenty of bad news as we approach the end of the year.
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Like it or not, the new lead-follow model at Lloyd’s is coming.
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Yesterday we broke the news that Liberty Specialty Markets had pulled out of UK motor treaty, as signs gather that 1 January will reveal this to be a hard pocket of the market.
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Hardly a month goes by these days without a legal brawl breaking out between rival insurance brokers over employees decamping from one to another.
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For major continental European (re)insurers the three-year strategic plan, preferably with an aspirational moniker and definitely all capped up, has become a key benchmark of performance.
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The US casualty market looks to have a major reserving problem as claims inflation picks up.
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For the most part, aggregate retro covers got hammered in 2017-2018 – but what isn’t as often discussed as these headline losses is the fact that one pocket of such capacity actually got away largely intact.
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Three Lloyd’s syndicates have indicated they will close in the last month. They wrote $670mn combined in the last year disclosed.
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A protest movement started by Chilean schoolgirls has taken the market by surprise.
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I am certain that many in the marketplace will have seen the news yesterday that Lloyd’s is raising £300mn ($394.9mn) to fund the Blueprint One programme and been shocked by the size of the number.
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Just as the major UK political parties brawling to form the next government have decided voters are unmoved by the boring business of debt- and deficit-to-GDP ratios, Swiss Re CEO Christian Mumenthaler has concluded that capital concerns no longer hold that much sway.
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It’s the countdown to Christmas and for the many in the (re)insurance market, that means the focus is on the January renewals.
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In the first half of this decade, a new breed of eye-catchingly large facilities such as Aon and Berkshire Hathaway’s “sidecar” and Willis’ 360 were dominating headlines.
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The number of Lloyd’s underwriting entities is steadily falling.
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Headline numbers aside, the Lloyd’s market presentation paints a telling picture on market expectations, execution and reserving.
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If the #MeToo movement has done nothing else, it’s revealed that culture problems in the workplace know no bounds.
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A-grade students lose momentum, world-class soccer teams have bad runs and every ship must occasionally navigate through stormy weather.
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The reinsurance market is something of a conundrum as we begin the run-in to 1 January.
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At this week’s UN climate change meeting in Madrid delegate countries will discuss how to meet their Paris Agreement commitments. Next year they will be required to stump up specific plans at a crunch summit in Glasgow.
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Will InsurTech eat itself?
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Yesterday, MS Amlin announced that CEO Simon Beale and CUO James Illingworth would be stepping down from their roles as part of a reorganisation of the carrier.
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At the end of this week, my daughter will turn 20.
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One phenomenon we are hearing more about in recent weeks is the trend for carriers to push back on claims.
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Is light finally at the end of the tunnel for Swiss Re Corporate Solutions?
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There was a lot to unpack in Swiss Re’s investor day update, which focused on its plans to continue recapturing market share in the natural catastrophe business.
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After the closure of three Lloyd’s syndicates since the start of the month – Vibe 5678, Pioneer 1980, and Acappella 2014 – there are plenty of reasons to feel bearish about smaller Lloyd’s players.
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Standard Club, Securis, Skuld, Vibe, Pioneer, Acappella.
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UK insurance brokers have less than a month before they are caught by the SM&CR conduct and governance rules, and despite the long lead-in they look certain to catch some intermediaries unawares.
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Who could have guessed that the antics of a high-flying real estate CEO would become a stumbling block for the InsurTech space?
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Any carrier troubled in recent months by large losses, be they property or casualty, will have noted Zurich CEO Mario Greco’s claim last week that his company has neutralised the threat.
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“Trapital” is once again throwing out renewal schedules in the ILS market after recent typhoon losses have complicated the run-up to 1 January.
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The appointment comes just days after the lawyer stood down from his post as corporate insurance head.
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On Friday this publication revealed that the board of Argo would seek to make insider Kevin Rehnberg the permanent CEO, having earlier appointed him interim chief.
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Ten days ago, I said that Pioneer CEO Andrew McMellin would need to pull a Houdini act to find the capital to keep Syndicate 1980 going.
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It has been action-packed year for brokers.
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What drives the value in an insurance business?
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Executives who have been upfront about the need to batten down the hatches ahead of the impending casualty storm must be feeling a little put upon.
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The pending sale of Asia Capital Re (ACR) to a run-off acquirer – revealed yesterday by this publication – is a painful blow to the Asian reinsurance market.
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I don’t enjoy sitting through speaker events
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Hurricane season is drawing to a close and wildfires in California are dwindling. But now another “storm” with massive potential impact is gaining strength, and starting to wreak havoc on insurers’ bottom lines.
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“The hard market is coming!” one cyber underwriter enthused to me last week.
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Five days ago, I asked here if Argo and Mark Watson III had pulled defeat from the jaws of victory after a series of missteps followed their ostensible triumph in the proxy fight with Voce Capital.
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Travelers chairman and CEO Alan Schnitzer is a vocal critic of a US litigation culture he claims imposes a “tax across society”. A worsening tort environment was the driving factor in the carrier’s own quarterly earnings shortfall, and has also emerged as key theme of the third quarter reporting period.
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Since we broke the news in August that Liberty was set to pull all of its capacity from Pioneer’s Lloyd’s syndicate, there have been question marks around what the MGA-cum-syndicate would look like in 2020 – and even over whether it would be able to trade forward.
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The autumn season of reinsurance industry conferences usually runs like a well-oiled machine.
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It is a testing time for the Argo management team.
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It’s Halloween and the (re)insurance industry is running scared. But the ghastly sounds are not the groans of ghouls or the shrieks of spectres. Instead, it is the moaning and wailing of underwriters astonished at the latest vast liability award.
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It was one of those announcements which left the Insider team scratching their heads at first.
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The finale of the US managing general agency (MGA) conference was a casino night, put on by the claims giant Sedgwick.
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How was your company’s cloud “journey”? Was it redemptive, like the path from convicted criminal to TV talent show winner? Did you learn a lot about yourself in the process, and more importantly do you love the destination?
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Yesterday, we broke the news that Greenlight Re’s board had rejected a bid from Catalina to acquire the business at a circa 25 percent premium to the share price.
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Trapped capital – or “trapital” as we dubbed it in the newsroom one day – remains a key theme in discussions in the run-up to 1 January renewals.
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On Wednesday, sister publication Inside P&C called Travelers the “dead canary” in the coalmine on social inflation trends in the US P&C sector.
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There’s a familiar feeling of Groundhog Day to the annual reinsurance gathering at Baden-Baden.
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Politics is dominating much of the news agenda on both sides of the Atlantic. In the UK, it is the continuing issues arising out of Brexit, while in the US, we are now some 13 months from a presidential election and the debates are heating up.
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Retro pricing rose at 1 January 2018. And it rose substantially on those levels 12 months later as the Great Reload gave way to the Great Lockup.
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The demise of Neil Woodford and his funds empire will have wide reverberations for many months.
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From around 2012 to 2015, the prevailing orthodoxy at the big global cedants was that they had been buying too much reinsurance.
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It's no surprise to see how cautiously the (re)insurance industry is approaching the task of estimating losses from typhoons Faxai and Hagibis.
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What would you do if you were a Lloyd’s Name?
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The end is in sight. After six weeks of back-to-back-to-back-to-back conferences, there is a light at the end of the tunnel.
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Geography matters in reinsurance. Bermuda's isolation means that every carrier knows its neighbour's business.
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The ideologues of Extinction Rebellion yesterday took their war on 21st-century life right to the heart of our industry, shutting down the EC3 skyscraper known as the Walkie Talkie, home to insurers including Liberty Specialty Markets, Tokio Marine Kiln, CNA, Lancashire and RSA.
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Typhoon Hagibis looks bad, although whether it is bad enough remains to be seen.
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In insurance, even the smallest of adaptations can make the biggest impact.
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InsureTech Connect in Las Vegas felt frothy.
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Discussions over the apparent dearth of talent making its way into the (re)insurance industry are nothing new, and yet the situation is one that does not seem to be improving.
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Lloyd’s 2020 business planning season has begun and already we seem to have an answer to one of the market’s key questions as it looks to the year ahead.
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“Six million loyal customers being ‘ripped off’,” wrote Sky News.
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The annual Dive In festival drew to a close late last month.
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Who would be the first syndicate in a box (SIAB) candidate has been one of the most hotly debated topics (and one of the best kept secrets) on Lime Street in recent months.
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On Monday, MS Amlin announced that it was pulling out of nine business classes as part of a new wave of remediation work.
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One of my major take-aways from last week’s Wholesale and Specialty Insurance Association (WSIA) conference in San Diego was that there is a sense Lloyd’s has missed an opportunity in the US.
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Lloyd’s should be applauded for the blueprint it released to the market yesterday.
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I think it’s fair to say it’s been an interesting few weeks at Greenlight Re.
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There is a great deal that is illuminating and more that is just plain impressive in the Lloyd’s blueprint published yesterday.
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Later today, Lloyd’s will publish its highly anticipated blueprint for change.
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Writing about London market reform reminds me of the famous sketch in the Monty Python film The Life of Brian in which the revolutionaries of the Judean People’s Front (or was it the People’s Front of Judea?) plot the overthrow of the imperial Roman oppressor and the foundation of an independent Israeli state in a radical, subversive meeting.
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Few market participants would argue against the statement that commercial (re)insurance in many of the major established markets is in a state of flux at present.
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Lloyd’s has a sexual harassment problem.
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Brokers are lazy.
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As school children the world over were gripped by acute eco-anxiety last week, it was encouraging to learn that chief risk officers (CROs) are sanguine about another existential issue that is similarly playing out way above their heads: Brexit.
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Talent and capital. Capital and talent. In the insurance game you can’t have one without the other.
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The concept of emerging risk continues to dominate insurance boardrooms, with subjects such as opioids, cyber and climate change all topics that are frequently raised.
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The Lloyd’s financial results are always keenly anticipated and well scrutinised.
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Insured loss estimates given in the fortnight following Typhoon Jebi last year were low. AIR gave a range of $2.3bn-$4.5bn and RMS predicted $5.5bn.
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How dare politicians lecture our industry on what constitutes good conduct?
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Three months ago, I said here that the increasing weight of negative stories around Tokio Marine Kiln (TMK) should prompt questions around the leadership and direction of the business.
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As any representative of the market will proudly tell you, (re)insurance is a relationships business.
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Lloyd’s chairman Bruce Carnegie-Brown was probably playing to the gallery at Monte Carlo when he threatened to “hang” those guilty of #MeToo-type misconduct.
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Realtors always have one bit of sales patter that never fails to get a buyer’s blood racing:
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It felt a lot more restful heading off to Nice Airport this year than the last two, didn’t it?
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One of the privileges of being a journalist is being able to float ideas.
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Can you imagine a loss so catastrophic that it wiped out 58 percent of a nation’s GDP in one fell swoop?
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Since Marsh & McLennan Companies’ takeover of JLT was announced around a year ago, broker disruption has been firmly on the (re)insurance market news agenda.
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The Monte Carlo Rendez-Vous undoubtedly grabs the bulk of the industry’s attention in September (and will do even more so this year in light of Hurricane Dorian), but for those active in some of the niche areas of the markets we cover, there are events that are far more relevant.
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The world in which we live is increasingly measurable, and will only become more so over time.
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Conference season is upon us, and with it the marketing medley of glossy publications, dinners, drinks parties, award ceremonies and roundtables.
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All through last week the news became progressively worse.
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Whoever thought it was a good idea to taunt the weather gods in this way?
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It may have passed our readers by in the mid-August break, but last week this publication revealed another difficult twist in the tale of Dale Underwriting Partners.
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The rise of technology has made our lives exponentially easier. The iPhone I carry around with me means I can be contacted at any time of day on all manner of platforms – calls, text, emails, WhatsApp, Slack, WeChat and more.
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In insurance we always think our worst clients are the ones who don’t really need us.
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An important distinction is emerging in the broker and MGA world that is driving a two-tier system of valuations.
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Symbols count in business.
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Since when did business leaders become our rulers and masters?
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The ears of private equity (PE) houses will have likely pricked up at the news of Pioneer looking for a buyer.
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US trade body Business Roundtable has expanded its definition of a corporation to one that benefits all stakeholders – customers, employees, suppliers, communities and shareholders, rather than just the latter.
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Is there anything more primal and satisfying than growing your own food?
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One way to think about the ambitious build-out of start-up (re)insurer Convex is an interesting test of the franchise values of specialty (re)insurers.
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One of the long-term, fundamental questions in reinsurance has been the degree to which pricing in one region can affect another.
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We have seen lots of different tactics from competitors looking to profit from Marsh & McLennan Companies (MMC)’s £4.9bn acquisition of JLT in the almost year since the deal was announced.
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The walls are closing in on the total return reinsurers.
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Here are three facts that made me sit up and think this week:
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We all have different faces we present to the world.
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I recently promised I would report back to you on a book I was looking forward to reading on holiday.
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Financial services companies and their advisers have little over two months to relay their thoughts to the UK government about regulatory coordination in the first phase of an ambitious review of how the sector is policed.
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Philosophers have long contemplated what is known as the problem of personal identity.
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In the hot summer of 1954, on the Cote d’Azur, Picasso created more than 60 portraits of his teen artist neighbour Sylvette David.
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Now that so many ILS platforms are owned by reinsurers, you might think that the debate over whether third-party investors are better served by reinsurer-affiliated ventures or independent platforms has been decisively settled.
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Cyber losses are always among the most-read stories on our site. Capital One is no exception.
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With honourable exceptions, big generalist businesses with highly corporate cultures are bad acquirers of smaller, more specialised outfits with entrepreneurial mindsets.
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Following the pricing story told by the results season – not to mention recent source conversations – has at times produced whiplash.
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In June, I wrote a piece reflecting on the strategic choice faced by businesses like Arch to either double down on Lloyd’s or walk away.
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Monday’s edition of the Los Angeles Times contained an op-ed co-written by Ricardo Lara and Tim Edwards highlighting the need for California to push ahead with plans to purchase a disaster insurance programme.
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The mood in London is becoming increasingly bullish on the upwards pricing momentum in insurance lines.
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MMC’s performance is under heightened scrutiny as the company completes its first quarter since the £4.9bn ($6.0bn) acquisition of JLT.
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The ILS market is passing through a period of real change as the landscape is reshaped following a highly challenging 18 months.
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Hiscox CEO Bronek Masojada has highlighted the importance of taking one for the team if John Neal’s Future at Lloyd’s six-point action plan is to succeed.
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Last week, Markel said it was placing its retro fund manager Markel Catco into run-off, as part of a restructure that will see a fresh retro play brought to market for 1 January 2020.
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There’s a really simple reason us Brits are famous for talking about the weather so much.
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I’ve been writing about (re)insurance for almost a decade now, initially for another London-based industry title, my memories of which are increasingly patchy.
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The Beazley results released yesterday represent the broader market picture in microcosm, and most of the key themes of earnings season were legible there.
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Our director of research Gavin Davis and his team have been on tremendous form of late.
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Eiopa chairman Gabriel Bernardino last week reprised the unresolved theme of a state backstop for cyber (re)insurers.
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It’s no surprise that the topic of bonuses and remuneration gets people talking. Recently my colleague Gavin Davis hit a nerve among our readers over an editorial he wrote essentially arguing that the reinsurance industry did not make anywhere near enough use of properly designed performance-based remuneration structures. Underwriting executives had insufficient skin in the game, he argued.
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Earlier this week, The Insurance Insider reported that reinsurance market sentiment has “hit its highest level in years, with mounting confidence that gathering pricing momentum can be sustained beyond 2019”.
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How do you build an ecosystem?
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News last week that cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase was working with Aon to establish a captive insurance vehicle prompted some questions among The Insurance Insider’s US news desk.
-
A Financial Times interview with Pat Gallagher made me long for the summer break and the chance to read and digest a book I have been recommended.
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If knowledge is power, motor insurers and their reinsurers should theoretically be feeling a little mightier after UK Justice Secretary David Gauke ended months of uncertainty by pegging the Ogden discount rate at -0.25 percent.
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Right now, carrier M&A is dead.
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We all know insurance is a great product, but sometimes it is completely magical.
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What will become of the cyber market?
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Southern California was rocked by two earthquakes last weekend and while the (re)insurance industry’s exposure to the events is expected to be minimal, they again served as a reminder of what’s at stake should the so-called “big one” that scientists are expecting actually occur.
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The trouble with regulation is that its three main pillars – conduct, prudence and competition – are in a rock, paper, scissors relationship with each other.
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If you don’t fancy hurriedly retraining as a techie to ensure you are gainfully employed in the (re)insurance sector 10, 20 or 30 years from now, consider becoming a climate change specialist.
-
ProSight will be a revealing test case for how investors in the insurance sector value businesses.
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Something I saw after hours in the office before heading home last night brought me right back to my youth.
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Earlier this week, Lloyd’s CEO John Neal told delegates at the Managing General Agents’ Association’s 2019 conference why his new Lloyd’s vision would benefit the MGA community.
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The British contingent in The Insurance Insider’s New York-based editorial team grew this week, with one of our reporters making the move across the North Atlantic and setting out their stall in our office on Sixth Avenue.
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Should insurers make moral judgements?
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Lloyd’s CEO John Neal is refreshingly out of step with the socio-political zeitgeist in his consensus-building, “big tent” approach to the transformation of the 330-year-old market.
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If the insurance market could be imagined as a fairground, cyber risk would be the frantic Whack-a-Mole game.
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The sun is shining and Western Europe is baking in uncommon North African heat.
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Lemonade co-founder and CEO Daniel Schreiber has warned that for insurers “longevity isn’t the same as immortality”.
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At the top of the Freedom Tower in New York last week, Lloyd’s chairman Bruce Carnegie-Brown told those assembled that the market is “open for business”.
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It is easy for senior management to get so caught up in the minutiae of managing their businesses that they forget the importance of their company having a strong narrative.
-
On Friday news of the first mid-year entrant into Lloyd’s hit the wires.
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The weight of negative stories about TMK should prompt questions around its leadership and directionHiscox, Beazley, Amlin, Kiln…
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Remember the attempt to re-convene the New York Insurance Exchange (NYIE) back in 2010/11?
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I was once asked in a previous job to sit in with a senior manager on an interview for an entry-level position with the company.
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Unless you are a consultant, or an InsurTech peddling a cure-all piece of software, AM Best’s plan to introduce an innovation scorecard into its rating process may sound alarming.
-
Markets behave in brutal and slightly crazy ways that don’t always best serve the end consumer. They always undershoot on the downside and then overshoot on the upside – sometimes hugely and irrationally so.
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Reinsurers are now in a competitive position in the ILS market, having narrowed a major market share deficit in the past five years through some large M&A deals and a few instances of significant organic growth.
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They say good things come to those who wait.
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There are many in this market who would argue that big is beautiful in underwriting.
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The takeover talks between Arch Capital and Barbican offer insight into a strategic choice that all carriers with small-to-mid-sized Lloyd’s operations face right now.
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Ten years ago I dropped off my eldest child at a Saturday morning class with a group of other kids in our neighbourhood.
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In elite sport the top coaches ration their finite resources to give their best athletes the greatest chance of success.
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There are a few people in Bermuda scratching their heads at some of the loss numbers being discussedI spent the early part of last week in Bermuda and, in between running for cover whenever it rained, my days saw me visiting contacts and hearing their thoughts on the current major market talking points.
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Last week, AIG CEO Brian Duperreault mused that between efforts to right its own underwriting ship and the actions of Lloyd’s to similarly clean up, the two insurance giants had moved the market.
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If a trophy buyer existed – someone easy on the eye, with plenty of cash and infinite patience – a Canadian fund manager would surely fit the bill.
-
A changing market brings a new dimension for underwriters.
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It wasn’t the huge fund management acquisition that Allianz executives had been doing their level best to downplay in recent weeks.
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You will doubtless have seen the amazing but terrifying picture of a throng of climbers lining up patiently to make their ascent of the peak of Mount Everest doing the rounds of social media over the past few weeks.
-
Over the weekend, a law banning letting agencies from charging tenancy fees came into effect in the UK.
-
Now that InsurTech funding seems to be on a distinctly downward trajectory, where will the backing for innovation come from in the future?
-
A London market broker made a very interesting point to me the other day.
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If I told you that it was possible to underwrite a cyber policy with one single piece of data, I’d wager that you’d either laugh in my face or tell me I was mad.
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For all the issues that dog the insurance industry, the perception among customers or the wider public that carriers are out to deny valid claims is the most damaging and, sadly, the one that most persistently raises its head.
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We journalists are always being told we are too subjective and prone to bias.
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Peddler of death sticks boil and bake, fossil-fuelled power group in the cake; fast-fashion firm with supply chain woes, arms maker in the cauldron goes.
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Lloyd’s needs speed and efficiency in its decision-making more than ever right now as it grapples with a set of existential challenges.
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The finance chief, who joined Lancashire in 2006, says it's time for a change.
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Silos are the egg mornay of the corporate cook book. Deeply unfashionable, untouched by any retro-chic revival and not what you’d wheel out to make an impression.
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There is no reward in predicting the blindingly obvious.
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Before rock survivor Ozzy Osbourne was fully rehabilitated and had his star re-cast via reality TV – that is to say at the end of the decade he had spent as a genuine has-been – he featured in a low-budget UK documentary looking at his extraordinary career.
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Is the easy money phase of InsurTech over?
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Last week, this title reported that private equity house Madison Dearborn is nearing the acquisition of Lloyd’s business Neon.
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One theme arising from the British Insurance Brokers’ Association (Biba) conference last week was how the company market might benefit from business dropped by Lloyd’s syndicates in recent months.
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Often we like it when other people take responsibility for our decisions.
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The Future of Skills in the London Market report this week depicted a sector facing a huge task to quickly procure the expertise it needs for the rapid evolution it is undergoing.
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We always hear that insurance is, at its core, a people business.
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After the KRW storms of 2005, I remember interviewing a top reinsurance broker and making the casual remark that the major spike in property cat pricing must be making his bosses very happy. I envisioned bulging brokerage accounts and big bonuses all round at year end.
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Loss adjusters and financial advisers achieve larger decreases in the size of the median gap than the 0.8-point sector-wide decline.
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Sometimes, something sounds like such a simple idea that you write it off as unimportant.
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One little secret of the insurance sector is that whoever controls the inwards holds moral influence on what happens to the outwards.
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What was the best time to be an underwriter this millennium?
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Where does the true value in a business lie?
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How many times has the Lloyd’s market stood on the cusp of adopting some form of dynamic, modern risk trading platform only to lose its nerve?
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My first experience of the gravitational pull of AIG came in the tight market of 1993.
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‘It’s a feeding frenzy right now’.
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Allianz, Swiss Re or, let’s be honest – Convex – would have been better for John Neal. But Samsung Fire & Marine’s decision to buy into Lloyd’s business Canopius represents a highly positive codicil to last week’s strategy announcement.
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Communication remains key to managing clients’ expectations in the current firming market, I was told earlier this week up in Boston during the 2019 RIMS conference.
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Be in no doubt, the Lloyd’s presentation to the market yesterday was a call to arms.
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Here’s a quiz to get your grey cells working this morning.
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After Aon’s abruptly curtailed pursuit of Willis Towers Watson, CEO Greg Case is not letting the grass grow under his feet.
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Catlin, Brand, McGill and Neal are still faced with one immovable reality: a strong and willing labour pool is key
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Tomorrow, John Neal will present his prospectus for the future of Lloyd’s.
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Tech is coming for insurance – just not in the way we thought.
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Sometimes start-up carriers are formed when it is an obviously good time to do so.
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What’s a $29.45bn drop amongst friends?
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In its 333-year history there is only one thing certain about Lloyd’s: about once a generation people make the mistake of writing it off.
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It was almost a year ago to the day that Chubb CEO Evan Greenberg compared the London market to “a bar room with a bunch of drunks”.
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The PRA is right to act on climate change risk, but devising the correct response will test carriers’ prophetic powers.
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In a highly regulated industry such as (re)insurance, it’s easy to take pot shots at those whose role it is to police the market.
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Smaller wholesale brokers serving the US have had a tough time of it in the last few years.
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The pressures on – and risks facing – recruitment professionals in the (re)insurance market are on the rise.
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Just outside the gothic towers of Notre Dame cathedral is the point from which all trunk roads in France are measured. It is known as kilometre zero and marks the centre of the country’s political geography.
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ERS offered about 4 points of underwriting margin on £323mn ($422mn) of net earned premiums and was acquirable at roughly 1.1x book value of something like £150mn.
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There was so much packed into John Neal’s future vision for the Lloyd’s market that it has kept The Insurance Insider journalists opining for days on end about its significance.
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Universal released pricing for its cat programme last week, and the Floridian cedant conceded a 30 percent rate rise with a view to getting the deal home.
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One commonly held view in this market is that P&C company valuations are largely driven by the pricing cycle, and that positive and accelerating pricing should be considered a universal positive for the group.
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Axa UK & Ireland CEO Claudio Gienal has identified the company’s IT estate as the single biggest obstacle to corporate simplification.
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Our analysis of the gender pay gap showed some encouraging signs.
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The broker will always be with us
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There is no doubt that some serious work needs to be done to change the way flood insurance is charged by Fema.
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European insurance CFOs are planning to hug capital close and shun M&A fripperies, according to an annual Moody’s survey.
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Drawing distinctions between types of risk is at the core of the value (re)insurance provides.
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I think it’s fair to say it hasn’t been a great decade (or two) for AIG. Though it is still talked about with something approaching reverence as a career maker for many senior folks in the industry, the last twenty years or so could fill several text books with case studies on different aspects of corporate failure.
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It’s not a stretch to say the Lloyd’s performance drive was one of the major catalysts driving market dynamics over the past 12 months.
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AIG is adhering to the “give them an inch and they will take a mile” school of shareholder engagement with its recommendation to vote down an AGM resolution that would vastly increase the power of disgruntled stock owners to requisition one-off investor gatherings.
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They say there is no such thing as bad publicity. Though perhaps this isn’t how the cyber market feels at the moment.
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The CEO has provided answers to the central questions of distribution, cost and capital.
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The incoming Hannover Re CEO must retain the reinsurer’s competitive advantages as he makes his markThe incoming CEO faces short-term challenges as well as existential questions for the reinsurer.
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Last week, amid the flurry of statements about the future of Lloyd’s and where the market needs to go from here, I came across some interesting footage of the Corporation from all the way back in 1961.
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It probably did not come as a huge surprise to most observers that Watford Re’s stock market debut came at a discount to book value.
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A slew of reports in the national press that Lloyd’s is suffering from a sexual harassment crisis have carved the notion in stone and now threaten long-term damage to the market.
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Yesterday, Lloyd’s published its aggregate results.
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After Hurricane Katrina, a slew of big composite insurers including Axa and Chubb spun off their reinsurance arms, citing their excessive volatility.
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At today’s pricing, most property cat is still a good write for a vast pool of non-insurance capital.
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In two major growth areas the reinsurer is avoiding huge corporate clients
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Last week, I hosted my first conference as a member of The Insurance Insider team. It was a great opportunity to meet and greet, as well as get in front of, some of our audience.
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It’s always healthy when a new innovation comes into the market and shakes things up.
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Florida: Pay as you go cat reserves
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Do the quirks of the Lloyd’s market make it a breeding ground for sexual discrimination?
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Sometimes we are so busy and have our heads down in the detail of what we are doing day to day that we fail to see the big picture.
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Buried within UK Chancellor of the Exchequer’s spring statement last week was a tantalising tidbit to nourish all those hungry for regulatory reprieve.
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We are currently selling pea shooters when the client needs a bazooka.
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With two consecutive years of heavy catastrophe losses, it’s clear why Swiss Re won’t throw caution to the wind – even though the days when it went cap in hand to Warren Buffett are long gone.
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Ahead of the 1 January renewals, the mood music on sidecar renewals sounded fraught: thrums of anxiety from brokers and querulous undercurrents from investors.
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Finding new markets is an important, and tricky, part of (re)insurance.
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In every discipline in finance, an income producing asset is thought to be worth the net present value of its expected future cash flows. Outside of periods of manias and bubbles where the greater fool theory predominates, this is about as uncontroversial and as canonical as you can get.
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Innovation. Possibly the most ubiquitous (re)insurance buzzword of the past few years and yet many observers complain this industry isn’t doing it enough.
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There is a very good reason why business people rarely go to trial on matters involving staff.
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In a comparison that you should only attempt if you have a French accent, Scor chairman and CEO Denis Kessler once quipped that traditional reinsurance was the wife of the insurance world, while ILS was the mistress.
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Forging CTMA and the Standard Syndicate into a dedicated Lloyd's run-off player would add useful new capacity.
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Aviva’s Tulloch confronts existential questions amid Brexit fears.
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Further significant deals will likely follow AJG's planned purchase of JLT Aerospace.
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The myriad Brexit flowcharts now appearing in UK dailies are beginning to look as complicated as a Heath Robinson or Rube Goldberg invention but without the humour.
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I always feel a twinge of sympathy whenever I see yet another executive team such as Argo’s put in the crosshairs of activist investors.
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The market won't let you consolidate to infinity.
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The vibrancy of the cheerleading world isn’t currently mirrored in insurance, but imagine if it was?Not many of our readers will know this about me, but I used to be a competitive cheerleader.
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Sometimes you can’t help but get yourself in hot water despite your best intentions.
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Yesterday, my colleagues Mark Geoghegan and Bernard Goyder outlined the current state of play in the InsurTech space. It’s an excellent read, and I encourage you to make time if you haven’t yet read it.
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I think several events this week provided perfect reminder of why the next 10-years may be less forgiving than the last decade.
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When I am interviewing prospective new reporters, I always make sure I counter any lingering impression they may have that a career in insurance journalism is going to be in any way boring.
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Discussions ahead of the midyear renewals are now beginning in earnest.
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Does size matter? RSA CEO Stephen Hester thinks it doesn’t.
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People keep asking me how I think Steve McGill and John Lloyd’s start-up will do.
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As an industry, financial services is fairly tolerant of experimentation.
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With US activist investors now settled in Europe and native species such as Scor nemesis CIAM also flourishing, what should the (re)insurer CEO or chair do when that unsolicited phone call comes?
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We would all agree that you can’t hold a pre-schooler to the same standards of behaviour as their parents.
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Next week, on Tuesday, we will be holding the second Insider Progress event, following a soft launch late last year.
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Leave clients to decide how they want to pay – it’s their money after all.
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A creeping sense of optimism stems from specialty lines
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One tempting way to think about the sensational letter sent to Argo’s investors by activist investor Voce Capital is to dismiss it as an amusing but inconsequential sideshow from an external investor that doesn’t get the uniqueness of our market.
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There are a few critical elements that any burgeoning market needs to acquire before it becomes a truly viable part of the economy.
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After Hurricane Maria, it became clear that some insurers did not have sufficient financial protection in place.
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California has a wildfire problem. That much is abundantly clear after two consecutive years of record wildfire losses in 2017 and 2018.
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It was shaping up to be a weapons-of-mass-destruction kind of inquiry.
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Eiopa’s long-awaited pronouncement on matters Brexit yesterday falls short of erasing all the question marks for the insurance industry.
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Sir David Rowland’s death is a reminder of Lloyd’s capacity for adaptation and renewal.
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Turning round MS Amlin, the former shining star of the Lloyd’s market, was never going to happen overnight.
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Last week, this publication opined on a potentially straightforward solution to London’s operating expense problem.
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Any successful industry leans on a few core, tried-and-tested concepts which sustain reliable enough returns over time to build a lasting business.
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I’m not entirely sure Mr Market is right to bet against AIG this time.
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Now here’s a recipe for you.
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(Re)insurance is so complex that installing an industry outsider in a top job is probably a bad ideaTalk that Aviva may turn to UK hotels operator Whitbread for its new CEO raises the question of whether carriers and intermediaries should reach more readily across sectoral boundaries for top talent.
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Axa XL was in the headlines yesterday for making up to 7.5 percent of its workforce redundant.
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A highlight of last week’s packed Insider London conference came when former Catlin COO Paul Jardine was asked a question from the floor about whether he felt his erstwhile colleagues (taken to mean Stephen Catlin and Paul Brand) were “crazy” to be capital-raising for a major new (re)insurance venture in today’s market.
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Is it absolutely imperative to run everything out of EC3?
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After listening to the Markel earnings call, I feel prompted to again ask the question: is this the end for Markel Catco?
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On their way to medals, knighthoods, eternal Olympic glory etc, British cycling giants such as Sir Bradley Wiggins, Victoria Pendleton CBE and Sir Chris Hoy were imbued with a singular driving philosophy which underwrote their path to success.
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After an initial honeymoon period, Duperreault is facing the first real test of his tenure.
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Normally we ration ourselves to one conference a year where London (re)insurance market folk talk about parochial London problems. Once a year feels about right to bring out some of the old chestnuts of Lime Street politics and give them a good roasting. We usually do this at our November London Market conference.
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The supplier contract announcement is the ugly duckling of the corporate communications aviary.
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The history of Lloyd’s is deeply interwoven with that of London’s maritime trade. Founded in order to insure ships and their precious contents, the market owes its syndicated nature and worldwide reputation to marine insurance and broking.
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Why should Leadenhall be hived off into the Mitsui’s asset management division?
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As always at Lloyd’s, the Corporation is attempting to walk a thin line between delivering robust regulation and micro-managing market constituents.
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Last week I had the pleasure of interviewing Sir Ken Olisa, prominent IT industry executive and philanthropist, for our parent company Euromoney’s diversity week.
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The globalised economy of the 21st century has thrown up a few changes to the way the world works, to say the least.
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The timing of the AmTrust-Maiden reinsurance termination could not be worse for Watford Re as it seeks an IPO.
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People say there is no smoke without fire, but we journalists know that it is a lot more complicated than that.
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Is it ethical to get someone sacked for being seedy? For a misdemeanour – albeit a wildly inappropriate one – that doesn’t directly harm anyone, using evidence gathered covertly? Does it make it better or worse that the informant doesn’t even work for the same firm?
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I think the smart money coming into this year was on Covea to grind down Scor and buy the company.
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Excess rarely leads to good decision-making.
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A further delay to the already postponed insurance accounting standard is inadvisable.
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With the adoption of electronic placement and utilisation of PPL in Lloyd’s, there is considerable cause for the industry to celebrate the innovation currently within the sector.
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The news of the latest Brazilian mining dam disaster is devastating, and unfortunately not without a sense of déjà vu.
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We all screw up sometimes.
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The impact of AIG and Lloyd's pulling back means there will likely be a lot of opportunity this yearDo problems at AIG and Lloyd’s create a big opportunity for the market?
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Will “payback” be in vogue in the mid-year renewals?
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Earlier this week we published a lead article on how the Lloyd’s performance drive has resulted in a flight to quality in the MGA market.
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Lloyd’s management has joined the long list of absentees from the annual Alpine talking shop at Davos.
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The dash for the Lloyd’s business feels wide open as we enter the home straight.
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It is tempting to assume that all the syndicate shrinkage at Lloyd’s is a direct consequence of Jon Hancock’s clampdown on weak underwriting.
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This may be the year investors call pricing models for alternative capital into question.
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The Russians have a governance problem.
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It’s easy sometimes to dismiss the growing relevance of emerging economies for the (re)insurance market.
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The new-look that the enlarged Marsh & McLennan Companies business will have post the JLT merger is beginning to become clearer.
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Arguably the defining feature of the last seven years of the reinsurance market has been the inexorable increase in the amount of ILS capital in the system, from roughly $40bn in 2012 to $90bn in H1 2018.
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Tuesday’s House of Commons vote on Prime Minister Theresa May’s EU withdrawal agreement was both utterly predictable and surprisingly unsettling.
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Some insurers in the Golden State may have been happy to see the back of the vocal and strong-willed Dave Jones, but the jury is still out on his replacement in the role of California insurance commissioner.
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This week the team brings you its analysis of trends and some predictions from across the global insurance and reinsurance value chain.
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A global entity as old as the Corporation has to have one eye on its strategic position in the growth markets of the future.
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The (re)insurance world is rarely described as dramatically appealing.
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After over a decade, it ends as it was always going to for Maiden. Left holding the bag for AmTrust.
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If you have to turn to me for your dose of optimism, then things have probably taken a slightly strange turn.
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Sometimes corporate announcements look so futuristic that one suspects the planned move is never going to happen.
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Like UK bakery chain Greggs’ feted vegan sausage roll, Swiss Re’s European parametric water-level cover helps plug a gaping market chasm.
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When industry leaders talk openly of the need for consolidation, it rightly tends to get people’s attention.
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ILS showed reinsurers the New World, but reinsurers have now learned to live in it.
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Many would argue that 2018 was a pivotal year for gender equality.
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The ILS market is in a bit of a pickle as it heads into the New Year.
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I’m sure you’ve heard the classic apocryphal comic tale of the building worker’s sick note, long since immortalised into Irish folk music by The Dubliners as ‘The Reason Why Paddy’s Not at Work Today’.
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Aon has handed promotions to Marcelo Munerato and Marcelo Homburger with its Latin American commercial risk business.
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That’s settled it then. JLT Re and Willis Re’s 1 January renewal reports have finally put one of the oldest insurance myths to bed.
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Working in and around the commercial (re)insurance industry during the festive period is a little different to how things go in other sectors, even within financial services.
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I can’t help but think that when it comes to the Next Big Thing in technology, in (re)insurance the old aphorism that “a fool and his money are easily parted” holds true.
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Settle in for The Insurance Insider’s 12 days of Insurancemas.
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Perhaps it’s time for the London Market Group to weed out the dinosaurs in EC3.
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Be warned brokers, if you’re not already electronically placing business in London, you’ll have to be by next summer – or face having your Lloyd’s licence taken away.
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Munich Re has been a long way ahead of its competitors in this game.
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The speedy outcome of bilateral negotiations leading to the US/UK covered agreement is an encouraging sign for the UK (re)insurance sector.
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What makes a good (re)insurance counterparty?
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If you are reading this from the UK or Europe, it is likely that your political attention the last few weeks has homed-in on certain rumblings in that peculiar part of central London where reality recently seems to have become a relative concept.
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Throughout AmTrust and Maiden’s histories, both rating agencies and regulators have constantly turned a blind eye, looked for ways to kick the can down the road, or passed the buck.
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Could 1.1 be a flat cat reinsurance renewal in the US?
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And so, the Lloyd’s market can finally draw a line under what has been a gruelling few months of performance review and forward planning.
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Parades of partners filing out of the Big Four accountancy firms after inappropriate behaviour, a visionary retailer whose signature greeting is a hug if you’re lucky – or a gentle nibble on the ear lobe if you’re not, an even bigger rag-trade titan named in the UK parliament.
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In the journey to create a new asset class, there are many staging posts that have to be passed.
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With (re)insurers once again facing record California wildfire claims, the question now is this: what is the balance between recouping their losses and ensuring they don't jeopardise their clients' futures?
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Often, when I discuss the industry that I work in with friends who have limited exposure to insurance, I receive one of two responses.
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Here is an opinion that is likely to be popular with many readers but I think is nonetheless true. Many insurance companies in the US are not buying enough catastrophe reinsurance for the risks they are taking.
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The asset manager retains powerful advocates but fundraising is likely to prove challenging.
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Just how important is Markel Catco to the catastrophe reinsurance market?
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Will underwriting as we know it survive the digital industrial revolution that the world is currently undergoing?
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It’s clear why Whac-a-Mole is both an arcade classic and the go-to metaphor for a situation where a thorny problem is displaced rather than solved.
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Even the best-laid plans rarely survive the briefest of exposures to harsh reality. Insurance is a case in point.
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The industry's demonstrable vulnerability to phishing attacks gives us a serious credibility problemAre we as an industry any good at practicing what we preach?
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A lot has changed since InsurTech first barged into the collective (re)insurance vocabulary back in the heady days of 2016.
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It is likely that the multiple potential issues stemming from California will remain a key wildcard for the industry for the foreseeable future.
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PR is a tough old game, you know. It’s not all booze, canapés and strategy days.
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In the weeks running up to our wedding, my wife and I took ballroom lessons to prepare for the first dance.
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2018 has been a pretty challenging year to be a crypto advocate in the (re)insurance world.
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Is additional capital load something that syndicates can also expect year after year?
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The remedial actions of Lloyd’s, AIG and many others this year have done wonders for re-anchoring expectations upwards after years of declines.
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The current state of the aviation market brings to mind that oft-cited line from Charles Dickens’ novel David Copperfield.
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There has been an outbreak of common sense in mainland Europe.
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If there was one takeaway to be had from the panel of speakers at CFC’s annual cyber symposium on Thursday, it was that a cyber attack is an inevitability for each and every one of us.
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Silent escalators at 1 Lime Street, the soft hum of a barman chatting quietly to a lone suited customer at the Grapes, tumbleweed whirling through the windy lanes linking Fenchurch Street to Eastcheap.
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Our smart friends at Litmus Analysis recently wrote a blog that got us thinking.
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The London Market Group (LMG) has used a tried-and-tested tool to expose syndicates dragging their feet on electronic placing: the dreaded league table.
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This ain’t nothing like a hard market, but that is very much a good thing for everyone.
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Syndicates were given a hard ride in the planning process, but innovative ones are being allowed to grow.
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No-one will miss London's huge process expense, but traditional placing has always had a romantic attraction for brokers and underwriters.
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In London last week, I heard Lloyd’s chairman Bruce Carnegie-Brown give a talk detailing some of the challenges facing the Lime Street market – a particularly pertinent topic given the trials and tribulations experienced by some syndicates in recent months in getting their 2019 business plans signed off.
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The devastating impact of the California wildfires this autumn has made for some horrific reading.
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Reasonable people can disagree about analytical issues. But my personal view is that AM Best’s trigger-shy approach is starting to look dangerously like a habit.
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Just a few months ago, senior Lloyd’s executives including chief commercial officer Vincent Vandendael and general counsel Peter Spires were racing round Brussels in a van scouting out locations for their Brexit hub. There was no radio blaring nor snacking on junk food behind the wheel.
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The broker will try to win hearts and minds at JLT, rather than simply swallowing it whole.
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The market is also suffering from a concentration in some lines that are severely under-priced.
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What do wildfires and the Maiden-AmTrust saga have in common?
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New SPA targets gig economy risks, such as ride sharing.
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Within our sector, the Chartered Insurance Institute is working hard to push mental health further up the agenda.
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Growing up, we are constantly encouraged to build good habits into our daily routines to ensure that we get into the right way of doing things early on.
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The 2018 conference season has finally come to a close in North America, with the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America’s event in Miami last week bringing the curtain down on this year’s major industry gatherings.
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Most of the time The Insurance Insider tries to avoid being in any way London-centric.
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Hiscox's share-price slide brought into focus the bereft feeling of below-forecast top-line growth.
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Amazon's AI recruiting tool has been binned after it turned out the machine itself was inherently misogynist.
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Reputation can still be an underrated commodity in insurance.
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Property direct and facultative (D&F) players are showing real patience in waiting for the market to turn.
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There are two schools of thought when it comes to distribution.
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I remember having a conversation with a (re)insurance executive when they had hired a team to enter a horribly priced line of business.
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The announcement last week that Singapore has created a $1bn commercial cyber insurance pool to offer bespoke covers using both ILS and traditional channels gives the burgeoning cyber market yet more reason for cheer.
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Throughout the year underwriters have complained that losses from Hurricane Irma have been creeping meaningfully.
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As the ramifications of Lloyd’s crackdown on profitability becomes clear, the sad reality is that many people are losing their jobs.
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Why would a patient Japanese owner spend 18 years building a diversified reinsurer from scratch then discard it for a bargain price?
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The TMR deal will act as an effective poison pill to any would-be acquirer.
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BGC’s investment in Ed proves that many still have faith in the long-term value and growth prospects of wholesale specialty and reinsurance broking.
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The cyber insurance market seems in rude health, according to a new report from PartnerRe and Advisen.
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The mood music around EC3 has been pretty gloomy of late, as the market awaits the conclusion of the syndicate business forecast (SBF) planning process.
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Evidence is mounting that European carriers are being hurt more than expected by third-quarter losses.
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Industry observers always eagerly seize on the full proxy documents relating to public company deals.
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Climate change is climbing up the (re)insurance agenda.
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No one now can doubt the mettle of this Lloyd’s leadership team and, above all, performance management director Jon Hancock.
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The line between legacy carrier and live carrier is blurred.
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When reinsurers are too big it is their cedants that can suffer, but when the buyers are too big it is the reinsurers that are squeezed by the asymmetrical relationship.
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Once your environment starts looking like a casino, you know you should leave.
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Around two years ago, I was a co-author of a report that argued AIG should have been broken up and sold in pieces, written with my friend and former colleague Josh Stirling during our time at Bernstein.
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Public company management is forced to spend a disproportionately large time working on regulation, compliance and communicating to investors.
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What would have happened if Hurricane Irma hadn’t swerved off its course towards Miami?
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A progressive martyr? Or a despot who trampled on dissenting viewpoints and sound business practices to promote goals that have little place in a for-profit, privately owned entity?
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In Lloyd’s performance drive, it may not be as simple as just dropping business because it’s unprofitable.
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The additional $700mn in equity committed by Apollo is a huge vote of confidence in Catalina and the legacy market.
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There are few working in the business of (re)insurance who would turn down an opportunity to have just a little more time on their hands.
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Somehow the appeal of the Lloyd’s market remains even as it bears less and less relation to the underlying reality of the numbers.
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Guys, we need to talk. And I do mean guys. Let’s face it, we work in a male-dominated industry. Most of you reading are probably men.
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As Hurricane Michael moves off the east coast of the US, it seems that (re)insurers have collectively shrugged off concerns about it being a material insured event.
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As Hurricane Michael hurtled towards the Florida Panhandle yesterday, The Insurance Insider editorial team hit the phones to work out how big a deal this event is for this industry.
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Imagine you are the financial regulator of an EU27 country.
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Beale's weekend commentary has prompted a discussion around gender diversity in the C-suite.
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As one of the founding partners of Lloyd Thompson Group prepares his departure, who else might walk out of the door?
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Those who shout loudest might get heard first, but they shouldn’t necessarily have the last word.
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Lancashire will lose money in the third quarter.
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Is the death of big data nigh?
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With Aspen sold, the departure of CEO Chris O’Kane was inevitable.
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Holding an asset because you think someone else will ultimately buy it from you at a higher price is called a “greater fool” thesis.
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InsurTech is still making waves as the industry gathering draws to a close in Las Vegas.
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As the global market landscape shifts investors should ready the aspirin for when the occasional lumpy quarter means results miss expectations.
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Over-zealous regulation raises the risk that companies will simply withdraw, reducing customer choice and the provision of vital services.
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The gamble for carriers is which InsurTechs to work with and how much skin to put into the game.
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The Aspen story is a microcosm of what has happened to the global wholesale, specialty and reinsurance world of the past pricing cycle.
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After staying quiet since it made news of its rejected bid for Scor public early this month, Covea broke its silence yesterday to make two concessions to the French reinsurer.
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AIR’s Mangkhut loss forecast had more exclusions than the liability cover of an ageing US sitcom star.
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In theory doing insurance for big business should be very similar to selling reinsurance.
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Although the underlying loss ratio remains stubbornly high, there are green shoots to be seen in Lloyd’s H1 results
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Appointments such as Swiss Re Corporate Solutions’ hire of an Allianz Global & Corporate Specialty executive point to a changing culture in the European (re)insurance workplace.
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The addition of Whitespace to the list of Lloyd’s-approved e-placing software is a big step forward for the modernisation of the London market.
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It’s a nice idea to savour, what to do with a second chance.
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The MMC-JLT deal shows brokers will fight hard to preserve their power to shape the market structureIn most financial markets, intermediation has seen a secular trend of margin compression, driven largely by technology reducing both search and transaction costs. But not so in insurance brokerage.
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Nothing is ever as short-tail as it seems.
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Activist investors can seem a bit like particularly rude gate-crashers, who roll up at midnight, without a gift, unwashed and probably with a bloodied nose from a fight.
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JLT is an expensive buy for Marsh & McLennan Companies (MMC) at a valuation of 25x earnings. But you have to pay for quality, and – perhaps above all else – for scarcity.
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Hiscox is likely to be the first of many syndicates to shrink their 2019 capacity.
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The path to launching a balance sheet reinsurer rarely runs smoothly – especially when Chinese money is involved.
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Whatever the details of the loss or the quantum, Florence is not going to be a market-changing eventAs the dust settles on what at one stage seemed to be the big hurricane of this season, (re)insurers can reflect on what Florence might have brought had it maintained its wind speeds as it made its way towards the Carolinas.
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While the TPA sector is contracting, it is far from disappearing; Sedgwick is the leading TPA, handling more than 3.6 million claims annually.
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Market observers may well look back on the China Re-Chaucer acquisition as a turning point for the involvement of Asian money in Lloyd’s.
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If one thing was apparent this week in the French-speaking principality of Monte Carlo it was the collective “bof” that delegates emitted about the imminent arrival in the US of Hurricane Florence.
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Don’t take anything for granted.
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Are you an economist or an anthropologist? Or to put it another way, what wins out in the end: money or culture?
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It’s apparent that the insurance industry is really worried about cyber coverage gaps.
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Another Monte Carlo with hurricanes attached.
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A veteran returning to Monte Carlo is swiftly reminded of his own mortality.
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With the recent push from Lloyd’s to remediate the market’s ailing profitability, it’s widely expected that the legacy market will see greater reinsurance-to-close (RITC) deal flow in the months to come.
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Ten years ago, I walked into The Insurance Insider office for the first time, flagrantly breaking the first commandment of insurance journalism: never start a new job the week before Monte Carlo.
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Workplace harassment took center stage last year with the outcry over celebrities such as movie producer Harvey Weinstein and the number of people ousted from positions of power seems only to grow amid the continuing fallout.
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Neal will take the helm during an existential crisis for Lloyd’s.
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The passage of five wildfire-related bills in California has introduced sorely needed reforms regarding consumer protection.
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Covea CEO Derez has the money to prevail, but does he have the will to do everything he needs to in order to do so?
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Sometimes in insurance it ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it that really gets results.
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The wheel of reinvention turns again
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Dual’s planned syndicate start-up and Beat Capital’s acquisition of Syndicate 4242 point to a Lloyd’s future where the underwriting is distanced from the capital it serves.
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As much as Brussels lacks appeal, the Lloyd's Belgium job is fundamental to its post-Brexit strategyWatching the television over the weekend, I was horrified to see my first Christmas advert of the year.
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The deal, which will give Markel a 20 percent share of the ILS market, could be the industry's first true convergence play.
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A recommended 13.4 percent rate cut for workers’ compensation cover in Florida shouldn’t lead anyone to assume that an expected spike in carriers’ claims-related legal costs has failed to emerge.
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It’s funny how what is essentially a scrap of decorative material can cause such a fuss.
-
Anyone who read the Sunday Times magazine’s cover story earlier this month about working mothers may have found themselves reaching for a double whisky.
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Insurance industry chieftains over the past several months have been talking about how they need to go outside the sector to recruit talent as competitive and technological demands increase.
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As M&A deals go in the insurance industry this year, Allstate’s decision to buy InfoArmor for $525mn in cash won’t go down as a bellwether deal.
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The popular BBC motoring programme Top Gear’s special editions see a trio of presenters embark to often inhospitable parts of the globe to complete audacious competitive challenges in budget cars.
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The period of facsimile start-ups looks to be well and truly over.
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Beat Capital’s acquisition of Syndicate 4242 means the firm could link its MGAs to low-cost capital without too much effort
-
Californians have had a steady diet of wildfires this summer, but something else in the state is burning insurers up.
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If a German compound noun does not yet exist for a mixture of anxiety and regret sparked by the imminent departure of a long-standing and popular leader, it may be time to coin one.
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Attracting talent is something that is constantly front of mind for many in the (re)insurance industry.
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On the face of it the Hartford-Navigators deal is neat. There is no overlap to speak of.
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If you have a market full of horse-riders, you can’t just expect them all to get a driving licence and switch over to motor cars overnight.
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The theory goes that those Lloyd’s syndicates that can hold their nerve the longest will be rewardedIn a competitive market, no single participant wants its rivals to gain from its downfall.
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It remains the case that the structure of some developing world markets is stymieing progress to close the protection gap.
-
Who is willing to pay up when 2019 is widely expected to bring a return to pre-HIM conditions?
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This sector has produced some superb dynasties, but please let’s allow such phenomena to emerge organically.
-
Do you remember Google Compare?
-
Underwriting rules marked ‘confidential’ or ‘trade secret’ provided no exemption, CDI general counsel writes.
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The whole insurance sector is founded upon the principle of the promise to pay.
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As the 10-year anniversary of AIG’s bailout approaches, things at the carrier are a far cry from what they were in mid-September 2008.
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Know your counterparties well.
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Legacy deal talks with Maiden have stalled, leaving Catalina as a meaningful investor in a challenged business with a potentially highly volatile share price.
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The latest figures on PPL usage are encouraging, but more than a quarter of Lloyd’s syndicates are still not meeting their target.
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Last week, I posited that Maiden had a severe capital problem. National General has a capital problem too.
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The Aspen sale saga has run longer than expected, but it looks now as if it has entered its end gameHaving taken the call to run a sale process as early as March, the Aspen board would clearly have expected the company’s future ownership to be resolved by this point.
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All of us owe Jay Benet a debt of gratitude for the legacy he leaves behind.
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The drain of management time and energy carries a cost for a public company CEO.
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As the industry looks to shorten the value chain, could MGAs benefit from lower-cost capital providers?
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Men and women need to work together as allies if we are to close the gender gap within our lifetimesWe want to provide a clear view of how embracing and celebrating employees’ differences can bring new business opportunities in (re)insurance.
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Aspen CEO Chris O’Kane is performing a balancing act – and it is impacting the shares.
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JLT Specialty operations director Clare Lebecq will be the first LMG CEO to permanently commit to the role.
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What cyber insurance covers and does not cover is still up for interpretation.
-
The company appears to be facing numerous challenges linked to its eroded capital position.
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Coverage for litigation costs associated with intangible assets presents an opportunity for insurersCoverage has been available for 30 years or so, yet the market has been slow to develop.
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Despite the European Commission last month playing down concerns around contract continuity, it remains a key issue for the UK insurance industry.
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AIG’s move to manage its liabilities in-house means a potentially significant deal flow is now virtually off-limits for legacy acquirers.
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News that 2018 will likely be the fourth hottest year and that the only more oppressive ones have been 2015, 2016 and 2017 leads me to believe that the record heat and what it has helped create – more flooding, more hurricanes, more tornadoes – just may be saving the insurance industry.
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Carriers with a cornerstone position in one market have much to gain from operating on Lime Street.
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The world is full of people trying to be something they are not.
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AmTrust has huge outstanding underwriting liabilities, and by forming a partnership with Enstar it has brought the industry’s best manager of claims and commutations to the table.
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In a world full of ruthless, mechanical efficiency, there is little love left for the concept of redundancy.
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The Everglades National Park is an apt metaphor for the Florida insurance market.
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Given the buzz around InsurTech and the pending disintermediation of insurance distribution, an IPO from an established digital player nestled next to a summit of innovation in Cambridge, Massachusetts might have been expected to take off like a rocket.
-
In the London (re)insurance market, at the moment everyone is sweating it out.
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The noise around London’s expense base in particular has got louder in light of a Lloyd’s crackdown on syndicate profitability.
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Insurers that have started fixing what’s broken early and rethinking what it’s worthwhile writing and from where may be better placed than those watching and waiting.
-
Back in the second half of the 1970s English football clubs were dominant in UEFA, the world’s top regional footballing affiliation.
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The news that Colin Grint was to lead Charles Taylor Managing Agency, prompts the question of what happens to Capita’s managing agency.
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For now, motor insurers can sleep a little easier.
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The increase in securities class actions is not a fleeting thing because it is part of a larger shareholder activism movement that has loomed for several years now.
-
Reserve strengthening at early reporters suggests there is more pain to come for (re)insurers.
-
US cyber underwriters may want to borrow a page from their brethren in the health insurance game when it comes to preventative measures because the numbers are not in their favor.
-
A likely driver of increased demand for insurance is climate change and more economic losses simply provides more need for insurance protection.
-
Given some of the eye-watering multiples that have characterised recent carrier M&A deals, it seems like a good time to query whether some of these acquisitions are worth the price paid.
-
One could point to Solvency II as evidence that our part of the sector will take the incoming accounting standard standard in its stride.
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If every moving picture had induced panic in spectators during the fledgling years of cinematic technology, you probably wouldn’t be reading this on a screen right now.
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Families can drive you crazy.
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Is the London market MGA bubble about to burst?
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London (re)insurers have so far managed to avoid job cuts, but some tough decisions now lie ahead.
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Even with the most in-depth data, those attempting to estimate the insured or economic loss from a major hurricane are always bound to be off by some degree, especially when it comes to complex events such as hurricanes hitting densely populated areas.
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The prime minister has sacrificed the UK’s vibrant services sector, which accounts for 80% of the economy.
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That lawyers use the legal system to extract money from businesses is really nothing new – complaints about class-action lawsuits from business executives and bankers have cropped up off and on for many decades.
-
Is the P&C (re)insurance industry gradually losing its defensiveness? A defensive stock is one less correlated to the broader market due to lower macro-sensitivity, typically companies like consumer non-discretionary companies and utilities.
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For some time, there has been a need for capacity to come out of the Lloyd’s market and it seems like that is starting to happen.
-
As the England team prepares for the semi-final against Croatia, one man is inspiring the nation, having captured its heart to a degree not known since Paul Gascoigne wept hot tears of contrition at Italia 1990.
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In praise of Bermuda reinsurance as hub
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PE interest in brokers is currently intense, with multiples for insurance fee businesses now sky high.
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The insurer has also started to invest in new staff for its Lloyd’s business, which has an A rating from AM Best.
-
Market conditions act as the primary curb on fees and commissions.
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Any attempt to create a dividing line between the corporate world of financial concerns and the real world of moral issues will be thwarted by the smoggy reality that business is always personal to someone.
-
It is a very dangerous situation to have insurers ethically objecting to offering cover.
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The latest generation of hedge fund reinsurers has been less focused on exposure to superstar money managers.
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The noise around diversity and how to achieve it in the London market has been getting steadily louder in recent months.
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Asbestos remains the Next Big Thing for the insurance industry.
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Chairmen of Lloyd’s and Hispanic maidens have much in common.
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Reinsurance returns are pretty much at cyclical lows, with cat returns structurally squeezed and far less responsive to shocks than previously.
-
The Lloyd's CEO is set to leave next year after what will by then be a five-year tenure.
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The pricing mentality needs a rethink.
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Negative headlines around underperformance, underwhelming 1.6 renewals and unsustainable cost bases seem to have worked to cool interest in acquiring Lloyd’s and London-focused businesses.
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Can we have faith that the new generation of guardians are made of the right stuff, and have the strength, guile and integrity to lead London through this most testing of times?
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In our bid to stem insurance brain drain, one wonders if the industry isn’t in danger of pandering to new recruits’ inner Mariah Carey.
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No sooner do we start saying that the specialty P&C public company is a dying breed than Sirius decides to reverse itself into a US listing.
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The financial services company may look to gain a credit rating for the Bermuda-based vehicle.
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The direction and timing of the missive feels right - let's hope Lloyd's tackles syndicates' other issues with the same gusto.
-
Conservatism in The Hanover board could yet delay the outflow of Chinese money into the insurance sector.
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As a market watcher, attempting to determine which lines of business are underperforming syndicate by syndicate quickly proves itself to be a pretty meaningless exercise.
-
A KPMG poll finds four fifths of insurers plan M&A or partnerships in the next three years.
-
The easy wins are gone as there have already been several distribution plays and investors are doing more homework to find new usage opportunities.
-
Once upon a time insurance was a brilliant, original idea. Money was paid in return for the transfer of a risk, mainly between wealthy merchants who knew and trusted one another.
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Three unnamed mega-carriers will write $900mn of premiums to support the company’s underwriting teams.
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The joint venture doesn't exactly have a directly comparable peer in the public markets.
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Those who want the promotion of competition to become a primary objective of the Prudential Regulation Authority are whistling in the wind.
-
Nothing scary really exists ahead for the insurance industry, and that is the problem.
-
This publication has held these InsurTech-focused gatherings for three years, and each year the conversation inches along a bit further.
-
The decline and fall of AmTrust has not had a significant impact on the market’s perception of its sister company.
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Regulators risk stifling Part VII insurance portfolio transfers even as they seek to streamline the process to prevent a Brexit-related logjam.
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New is the most powerful word in the English language – just ask anyone in your marketing department.
-
There are times when it seems that filing an insurance claim must perforce involve hiring a lawyer to collect.
-
The old adage that "cash is king" may not necessarily ring true for the up-for-sale Bermudian.
-
Icahn's star turn has certainly paid off over AmTrust.
-
The share price trajectory of AmTrust since the original January proposal has hardly pointed to confidence that minority investors would exit with mega-bucks.
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Anna Sweeney of the Prudential Regulation Authority has warned that firms “may be taking false comfort” from losses that turned out to be largely manageable.
-
A recent study by a UK university says redrafting policies to assume a reading age of 13 would mean 89% of the population would understand them, versus the current 13%.
-
Changing business models may not always make life better for the insured.
-
The London and US market are finally coming into line on property insurance renewal rates.
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The insurance sector is making strides towards better D&I and that is to be applauded.
-
The activist investor and AmTrust have agreed to meet to discuss the proposed take-private deal.
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The 1.6 renewals have further highlighted the inelasticity of cat reinsurance pricing.
-
To foster industry innovation, state insurance regulators also need to innovate.
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We need to keep banging the drum on unconscious bias in business, not only on gender but on all parts of the diversity spectrum.
-
GDPR has brought the issue of data into focus, and with it regulators’ and policymakers’ slightly contradictory attitude to it.
-
Pseudo-parody Twitter account Lloyd’s Galleries has proclaimed it “tie-gate”.
-
Both with SoftBank and with Carl Icahn’s 9 percent stake-build in AmTrust, the potential for investors to be so much more than equity capital has been underlined.
-
Increased litigation and compensation claims from GDPR can also fall squarely onto the shoulders of the liability market
-
European regulators sustained a battery of criticism from banking executives last week about their favourable treatment of technology companies trespassing on their territory.
-
On the face of it, US P&C insurers have bounced back. The good times are rolling.
-
At the centre of the Icahn-AmTrust dispute there remains one fundamental point of agreement.
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Moody's annual CFO report finds European insurers are divided on their plans for excess capital.
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Challenging market conditions may push the island's carriers further towards the role of risk and capital matchmaker.
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The fight over global wholesale business intensifies.
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Heavy 2017 losses have pushed Lloyd's to take a harder line on business planning.
-
Belgium rolled out the red carpet for UK insurance brokers last week at the ambassador’s residence in Belgravia.
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Icahn's recent intervention in the AmTrust take-private deal could lead to further scrutiny of the carrier.
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Until New York or California creates a run-off law, legacy transactions commonly done like they are in the UK will never happen.
-
The mega-trend towards passive investing has been powerful and pervasive.
-
Over the past five years, vehicles that outsource underwriting to other companies have formed one of the fastest-growing segments of the ILS market, from a standing start.
-
A recent interview with Lloyd's chairman Bruce Carnegie-Brown highlights the importance of striking the right tone when discussing workplace diversity.
-
Global broking might not be a new idea, but Aon's latest evolution is undoubtedly a bold move.
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As two relative minnows see off legal threats from financial giants, it goes to show that, with a bit of ingenuity, there's plenty of room for underdogs as well as big dogs.
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Given how much of its asset base was locked up if not lost, the fact that it pulled off the feat of bringing in more than $2.3bn to enable it to renew its portfolio for 2018 was impressive.
-
At a minimum, the move will reduce costs and give the new entity a broader platform to pursue growth.
-
For brokers and others working closer to the client the situation regarding consent is murkier than for carriers.
-
Axa will have no problem funding its $15.3bn takeover of XL Group but the disappointing IPO of Axa's US life insurance business will make it harder to sell the acquisition.
-
Swiss Re's investors don't have time to read the tea leaves or the tarot cards.
-
National General advances its bid for independence as the Karfunkels' third attempt at a public insurance company.
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If something is hard-won it is more valuable.
-
Major insurers are difficult to break up, and the AIG group is no exception.
-
Turning around AIG was always going to be like turning around a battleship in a bathtub.
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Despite its many frustrations, the insurance industry has no choice but to embrace technology.
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It’s hard not to imagine the arbs lining up their bets as recent revelations have likely put FedNat in play.
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A host of companies are bearing the “for sale” sign and the drivers of deal-making remain intact.
-
Sometimes you just have to keep going and you eventually arrive somewhere better.
-
The start-up debate looks like just one of those frequent areas where Lloyd’s struggles to contain its own contradictions.
-
AIG's takeout of Validus remains a great deal for the target's shareholders. So why would they vote against an executive payout?
-
Alongside the champagne, yachts and canapes of Monte Carlo are some old-fashioned - and unpleasant - attitudes.
-
In the no-nonsense style for which he is well known, Evan Greenberg made short work of the argument for doing business at Lloyd’s.
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Lloyd’s CEO Inga Beale has spoken frequently about technology underpinning global expansion. And it always looked slightly abstract.
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I’m far too English to infiltrate your inbox with slick marketing copy about the way our new website will transform your life. But we hope you like it and that it improves your experience of reading The Insurance Insider.
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When regulators act, organisations under their purview pay attention. At least, that’s the general idea.
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One of the major post-HIM talking points in reinsurance circles was the question of whether there was a gap in loss estimates recognised by individual carriers and the overall anticipated industry burden.
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Innovation and the exhortation for organisations to change will never go out of style.
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Have you watched the TV series Billions yet? If not, I urge you in the strongest terms to do so.
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If the Axa-XL tie-up and AIG's acquisition of Validus have anything in common, they show that (re)insurer M&A deals are being struck quickly behind closed doors - with the protracted battles that emerged during the last round of consolidation not yet in sight.
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And it's off, sweeping past its rivals and getting into its stride. The ground is soft, the fences are steep but it's looking determined. Could it, possibly, win the day?
-
I was last at RIMS almost 20 years ago.
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Insurers and brokers have found a US Senate ally in their drive to keep federal regulators from encroaching on the state-based system that has guided the industry for more than a century.
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JD Wetherspoon chairman and founder Tim Martin is a career contrarian.
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The Axa CEO was already struggling to sell his $15.3bn takeover of XL and the publication of the target's proxy statement will add to his problems.
-
Albert Einstein is often said to have described compound interest as the greatest mathematical discovery of all time.
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Our London readers will have been pleasantly surprised by the spring-like start to this week.
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Albert Einstein is often said to have described compound interest as the greatest mathematical discovery of all time.
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If you were to throw a rock in the air on Lime Street and ask the person it hits to name two of the best CEOs of London market carriers, there is a high probability that Bronek Masojada and Andrew Horton would be very well represented.
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Ed Broking's Steve Hearn predicted the insurance industry would "disgrace itself" when it came to gender pay gap reporting, and now that the figures have been published, you can see why he chose to use such extreme language.
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It is not only the deals generating the biggest headlines that shed light on current M&A dynamics in the property and casualty sector.
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Sometimes if a job is difficult to do, then it is best to just get on and do it yourself.
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Public companies are like teenagers incessantly live-blogging on social media.
-
2005 and 2017 felt like very similar years, right down to the three-letter abbreviations that defined them.
-
Revolutionaries are idealists.
-
I read two great articles in the last week. Both were pieces of analysis.
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It's amazing how secular trends work their way back and forth across the corporate world down the generations. They ebb and flow like the tides.
-
Warren Buffett has it easier than me.
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Insurance is a really simple business. You take in premiums and you use them to pay out claims. Anything left over is profit.
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Are we in insurance going against the gods?
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On a wall of the Insider offices is a framed piece of original artwork that was published on the front cover of the fourth issue of the then London Insurance Insider.
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Are markets stupid?
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As anyone following Travelers in recent years will know, the US insurance giant's management are reluctant to accept the "bellwether" moniker bestowed upon them by many industry commentators
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The AIG-Validus deal puts an end to the Bermudian class of 2005.
-
In April 2014 when Endurance tried to buy Aspen, an investment banker told me that no Bermudian (re)insurers with a market cap of less than $10bn would remain in public hands in 18 months' time
-
AIG CEO Brian Duperreault has become the latest executive to warn of an insurance brain drain, noting last week that 400,000 people are slated to leave the industry in the next few years
-
Coping with the uncertainty of hurricane forecasts can be hard enough for (re)insurers looking ahead to the storm season, but leave it to Washington to make it even tougher to manage.
-
Just over a year ago, AmTrust was on a high. The firm was on track to reach over $8bn in premium, was the second largest workers' comp insurer and had seen its stock increase roughly 10x in value over the past decade
-
What does it mean to be a Bermudian (re)insurer?
-
For some, the move to launch Langhorne Re might seem like a stretch even further beyond the competencies of a one-time property cat specialist.
-
It always annoys me when people ask if I'm a glass-half-empty or glass-half-full type of person
-
Insurers embroiled in the collapse of Carillion are just one of many groups that will be hit by the infrastructure services company's demise
-
London has an unfair reputation for always being rainy, but it's true there's one form of precipitation it specialises in - the kind of misty drizzle in which millions of tiny droplets combine to become just unpleasant enough to make you get the umbrella out.
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Berkshire's Jain versus Abel rivalry masks bigger challenge.
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Can you be nice strategically?
-
Every year at the Monte Carlo Rendez-Vous The Insurance Insider gathers together a celestial roll call of global reinsurance leaders for a discussion that has evolved to become the definitive event of the gathering
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As AmTrust stumbled from one crisis to another last May there was much talk in industry circles about the long-term future of an insurer that had lost the confidence of its outside investors
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Last week, we revealed AIG had purchased a new $2bn aggregate catastrophe reinsurance cover as well as a new international cat treaty and made other notable structural changes - signalling a shift under new CEO Brian Duperreault towards laying off more risk to reinsurers.
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The rate increases in property direct and facultative business were one of the more headline-grabbing outcomes of what was perhaps a more muted 1.1 renewal season than anticipated.
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Reinsurers are weighing up a complex position with a lot of moving parts as they start trying to assess their prospects for 2018.
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"I've been down so goddamn long that it looks like up to me." So sang Jim Morrison on the Doors' last studio album LA Woman.
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Amazon.com, the internet giant that began by demolishing your favourite bookshop before turning American shopping malls into vacant hangars, may at last be poised to plunge into the property and casualty insurance business
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"Rates went up less than reinsurers were hoping at 1.1 because there was too much capital"
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Underwriting rooms at property cat reinsurers may have been best avoided this week as executives came to terms with a miserable 1 January renewal that fell well short of expectations
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After just shy of two decades at the top, Charles Philipps is bowing out of MS Amlin
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On Tuesday, in our weekly publication, Editor-in-Chief Adam McNestrie issued his prescription for success in the absence of hefty rate increases. He suggested carriers diversify, cut costs, engage in M&A and/or become quasi-fund managers - managing third-party capital in exchange for fee income
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In many sports, contestants feed off public displays of confidence
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The broad shape of the 1 January renewals is now clear. And although there is a bull case to be made around casualty and an uptick in elements of primary pricing, the outcome is broadly disappointing for a reinsurance market still disproportionately reliant on property to make money.
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We gave our early take on the renewals on Friday
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It is a universal rule of cinema that movie sequels are always worse than the original.
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Last week I was on the road chairing our second InsiderTech New York event. I then hopped over to Bermuda to chair a roundtable and attend the EY Global (Re)insurance Outlook.
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AJ Gallagher is attempting to cut out third party wholesalers in London. There are major rewards if AJ Gallagher can reduce the amount of brokerage that leaks from its retail network.
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Following any major loss event, the great debate always recurs: how interconnected is the global insurance industry?
-
David Davis might feel like he's spent the last five months locked in the European Commission's Berlaymont building expected to weave a model of Brussels' famous Atomium with his teeth
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What goes up must come down...
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The slow encroachment of the Canadian pension funds into (re)insurance is one of the phenomena of the prevailing low interest rate environment.
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For a medium supposed to set people free, it is amazing how the development of the worldwide web has corralled us into various silos.
-
With just over a month to go before the 1 January reinsurance renewals, speculation about the future direction of rates is becoming almost as feverish as guesswork about the next royal nuptials
-
Reports that Amazon is recruiting for a product manager to expand its insurance offering have triggered a number of scaremongering headlines in some corners of the press over the past few weeks
-
Another Budget, another admonishment for the UK's weak productivity from the Chancellor.
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Amid rapid moves from Republicans to advance the party's tax-reform agenda, lobbyists and industry advocates concerned with the proposals' handling of "base erosion" and cross-border transfers have redoubled efforts to argue their respective cases.
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In the aftermath of this year's devastating cat losses there has naturally been a lot of focus on what direct and indirect impact there will be on pricing in the property market.
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Insurance is going to have to get sexier because even our most undemanding customers will soon demand it.
-
Canopius' HIM numbers took us by surprise yesterday. Its (soon to be former) parent company Sompo revealed the Lloyd's managing agent would shoulder a burden of $190mn from the three hurricanes, along with a small loss relating to the Mexican earthquakes.
-
News last week that Mars has lodged a claim for $50mn-$60mn from its insurers after it recalled confectionary because of Salmonella worries is emblematic of the rising exposures insurers are taking on in product recall.
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Urged on by President Donald Trump, the US House of Representatives passed a corporate tax cut yesterday that would save businesses more than $1.45tn and could boost P&C insurers' earnings by an estimated 12 to 14 percent
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First came the fear, then the relief and then, arguably, a creeping complacency
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The multi-billion dollar US flood insurance market may yet be cracked open for private carriers after yesterday's passage in the House of Representatives of a reform measure that would do just that
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What an industry we have the privilege to write about!
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Allianz's new EUR2.0bn ($2.3bn) share buyback was one of the surprises of the European third quarter earnings season, announced just 10 months after the German insurer embarked upon its first ever stock repurchase, of EUR3bn
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With the Californian wildfires reported to now be almost entirely contained, a clearer picture of the impact on the industry is starting to emerge
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Is a day of reckoning coming for brokers?
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AmTrust has largely been a tale of woe for investors this year, despite multiple moves by management to burnish the insurer's image, boost its balance sheet and disentangle it from related entities
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It's not every day that I brush my teeth while listening to the premier of Bermuda getting a grilling from a hostile BBC journalist
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There will be significant volumes of ILS capital trapped at year-end, particularly in the retro segment, but out of this challenge the reinsurance market is looking for opportunities to spin out new products