The Voice of Insurance

Listening back this is an almost breathless podcast. But what’s remarkable is that it should be breathless for just under an hour. Markel Insurance has been through enormous strategic changes in 2025 and its CEO Simon Wilson has been at the heart of them. The reinsurance business has been exited and management structures streamlined. Now that the heavy lifting has been done this podcast outlines the type of company Simon wants the new, revamped Markel to become. This Episode is a great advert for the podcasting medium because no amount of words or investor presentations can be anywhere near as expressive and vivid as an executive with a clear vision and the passion and drive to get on and execute. You can hear it in every sentence.Simon also attacks all our conversation topics with equal vigour and gusto, so AI, digitisation and facilitisation and the rise of portfolio underwriting, the fast growth of MGAs and fronting carriers as well as the prospects for the US casualty market are all analysed with great rigour in the coming hour. It’s all candid and transparent. Everything is out on the open and nothing is off limits. It’s genuinely refreshing to hear the CEO of a multi-billion-dollar premium unit of a public company talk in no-nonsense terms about their business and the market it operates in. I really enjoyed this one and I think you will too.LINKS:We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:https://www.advantagego.com

Today’s guest is a living example of the London Market being a place where global talent can come and enjoy a varied and fulfilling career that doesn’t have a glass ceiling.He arrived in London over thirty years ago as a risk engineer and now oversees insurance businesses writing over $2.5 billion in premiums and employing around 400 people. Luis Prato is President of Liberty Specialty Markets in the UK & the Middle East and North Africa as well as being CEO of Liberty Managing Agency at Lloyd’s. Because he is an engineer by training he is exceptional in his grasp of the technical side of underwriting and insurance operations. But he is extremely well rounded and has absorbed and internalised the culture of personal relationships and mutual trust that underpins the London subscription market and allows it to keep reinventing itself. Luis instinctively knows that outperformance in underwriting is a combination of both science and art. He has the engineer’s analytical mindset to bring rigour and structure to his methods, but also knows that if change comes at the expense of the people who make the market what it is, it won’t succeed.So, as the market simultaneously softens, digitises, and adopts AI and varying degrees of automation, this is a compelling and highly relevant conversation that brings us right up to date.Luis is optimistic about the immediate, medium- and long-term prospects for the London Market and after listening to someone as technically gifted, credible and down-to-earth as he is talking in these terms, I think you will be too. NOTESI made a mistake when I mentioned Luis’s colleague Matthew Moore. Matthew last appeared on the show in his capacity as Chair of the London Market Group, that is the LMG, not the Lloyd’s Market Association - the LMA, which is what I said.LINKS:We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:https://www.advantagego.com

It’s great to have a guest of the calibre of Greg Hendrick CEO of Vantage back on the show, not least because his relatively new and young businesses is still growing fast and there is a lot to catch up on.Now five years old Vantage is set to write around $1.6bn in gross insurance and specialty reinsurance premiums and is managing $1.5bn in ILS funds. But listening back it’s the quality and breadth of the discussion we have that I am really pleased with. Greg is hugely experienced and once he updates me on where Vantage is and how he sees the market and the firm’s strategy within it, the conversation quickly moves on and probably goes deeper into the art of underwriting and portfolio construction than I have with anyone on the podcast so far.We also dissect the best applications of AI and other major trends, such as the flow of business into Excess and Surplus lines, the boom in MGA and fronting and hybrid carrier formation and the phenomenon of algorithmic underwriting and facilitisation.Finally, as this is a business set up with a likely 5-7 or 8-year initial investor timeframe and the five-year threshold has now been crossed, we round off on where Vantage is in its development journey and the prospects for M&A to complete its platform as well as the chances of a possible future IPO for the business in the medium term. Greg doesn’t hold back on any of this. He’s a great communicator and knows exactly what he is doing. He speaks with the absolute confidence of someone completely on top of his brief.And I think you will be able to sense the big smile on his face coming through the audio recording. It’s rare to get an opportunity to put everything you have learned in a successful career into practice and Greg’s clearly been enjoying his time building Vantage. I really enjoyed talking to him and got a lot of this conversation. Listen on and I think you will too.LINKS:We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:https://www.advantagego.com

Today’s guest is someone who is running a business that is moving so fast that every time he comes back on the show we have an enormous amount to talk about and this time it is no different.Today Jeff Radke CEO of Accelerant is talking to me after a transformational 12 months that has seen his young business continue its heightened growth and IPO on the New York Stock Exchange.At the Voice of Insurance we have been lucky enough to follow Accelerant’s story at first hand since Jeff’s first appearance four years ago. The proposition is as tantalising as it has always been. Good MGAs need stable capital, strong underwriting insights and ultra-efficient processes, while insurers, reinsurers and other capital providers want access to stable, diversified portfolios of profitable insurance risk on a meaningful scale. Accelerant’s job is to connect everything and everyone up and make sure everybody in the chain can make money and be happy.It sounds simple but in a highly-competitive regulated industry this can be anything but simple in practice.As Accelerant’s platform grows and becomes the conduit for low single digit billions in premium volume via over 250 member MGAs, it’s more mature state is coming into view. The business is evolving to become something far more like a genuine intelligent insurance exchange and underwriting management platform than a mere fronting or hybrid carrier. This conversation is the best and most transparent I have had with Jeff so far. Talking to Jeff, it’s easy to see why so much business has flowed in Accelerant’s direction. Jeff has had huge tech-enabled trends on his side, but he also has charisma in abundance, but then so do many in our business. It’s only when that charisma is combined with the deep knowledge of someone who has sat at almost all points of the insurance and capital value chain in his career that it becomes such a powerful combination. Listen on – this is a very rich conversation that I can highly recommend to anyone interested in what large swathes of insurance market are going to look like over the next decade and beyondLINKS:We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:https://www.advantagego.com

Welcome to a really exciting re-encounter with someone who has been out of our industry for some years but is now back with a highly original new proposition. In my line of work I get to see an awful lot of new insurance ideas and so it takes a lot to fire up my imagination.And when I talk to people on this podcast about those new ideas – often the new product niche or service they are looking at might have a total addressable market of a few billion dollars. But today our guest has something that is applicable to the entire multi-trillion dollar capital base of the global P&C insurance industry. Andre Finn is the Chief Strategy Officer of Intellegri, a business looking to apply advanced mathematical and computational techniques to capital modelling.Now if that sounds a bit dry at first, please bear with me. At present our industry holds large amounts of excess capital to cover possible adverse development in reserves, based around wide probability ranges around what our tail risk is. If we could narrow that range down, even a tiny amount, we could release large amounts of capital, which would improve our returns and make our sector much more attractive to investors. But since this technology can also model scenarios to high new levels of detail and accuracy, it could also be applied to creating entirely new insurance products to cover perils that are currently uninsurable.Any surplus capital could then be applied to these new products and we could expand the insurance market, again making our sector far more attractive overall.The possibilities are genuinely exciting.I promise you that this is not going to be a maths podcast.Andre is authentic and incredibly down to earth and focused on the practical delivery of something new and genuinely revolutionary.Andre was also the founder and CEO of another advanced modelling and analytics firm called Sciemus for almost 15 years from 2001 and so has long industry experience, and possibly a few scars and lessons learned to show for it.Back then the insurtech phenomenon hadn’t yet come into being, so sitting here in 2025 the timing would appear to be far better than it was back after the turn of the millennium.NOTES: Highly recommended further reading on Intellegri is to be found here: https://www.intellegri.com/Andre rightly thanked Howden for the use of their London office for this recording. He also mentioned former collaborator Henry Sopher LINKS:We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:https://www.advantagego.com