The Voice of Insurance

Today’s guest is Richard Milner, CEO of Chaucer Group. Chaucer is a global specialty insurance and reinsurance institution with a great pedigree and significant scale, both inside and outside the Lloyd’s market. Richard is coming up for two years in post as CEO and is beginning to make his mark on the business’s long-term strategy. Richard has had the sort of underwriting career that makes him a very relatable guest. He worked his way up from photocopying slips at a Lloyd’s box to travelling the insurance world. Now he’s in senior management he’s easy to talk to because he’s still unambiguously an underwriter to his core. As a result this interview is really down-to-earth and practical in focus. In it Richard lays out his five-year plan for Chaucer and we dissect the issues of the day in great detail and variety, ranging from how rates and business flows are holding up in a more competitive market, to an assessment of AI as a new emerging peril and potential new line of business.Richard is great company and I can highly recommend a listen. LINKS:We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:https://www.advantagego.com

Today’s guest is one of the best qualified people in the London Market. In a thirty-year career he has been a senior executive right at the top of Lloyd’s and has either chaired or sat on the board of almost all the institutions that underpin the market and represent it to the outside world. Today Sean McGovern is the CEO of UK & Lloyd’s at AXA XL and has just taken over the Chairmanship of the Lloyd’s Market Association (LMA), the trade body that represents corporate capital in Lloyd’s. Sean will speak for both organisations at varying times in our chat today. The timing couldn’t be better.In recent years the LMA has really set the agenda on some of the most strategic developments in the way that underwriting takes place in the subscription market and this discussion goes right to heart of how a future Lloyd’s will underwrite, how business will be brokered and how capital and new talent will access the market. I have been interviewing Sean for twenty years and he has a great skill in communicating in a really eloquent, but also very direct and concise way. He is very good at speaking plainly and making complicated ideas easy to understand. Today’s podcast is no different and this is one of the most broad-reaching and enlightened conversations I have had with anyone since founding the podcast over six years ago. As Lloyd’s embarks on a fresh five-year strategic plan this is a great primer on what all the issues are, where the opportunities lie, and what strategic decisions have to be taken for the market to continue to prosper.NOTES: The latest LMA report is on Lead and Follow. I can highly recommend a read: https://lmalloyds.com/campaigns/lead-and-follow-in-the-lloyds-and-london-market-beyond-the-binary/And if you haven’t already read the LMA’s seminal publication on Enhanced Underwriting you can access it hereLINKS: We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:https://www.advantagego.com

As regular listeners will know, the Voice of Insurance usually interviews people from the global wholesale, speciality insurance and reinsurance end of the market, insuring the type of risks that tend to have to cross borders to find the right type of coverage. Today’s podcast is a slight departure from the norm because I am talking to someone who is working in the general insurance space in the UK. But they are doing so from a wholly original wholesale and tech-enabled angle that also incorporates one of the hot trends of the past few years – embedded insurance.Mark Christer is CEO of Wakam UK, a firm that uses the business-to-business-to-consumer (B2B2C) and MGA models to go to market in niche lines of business where it can stay under the radar of the volume and scale players in the UK’s hyper-competitive market. Wakam UK is the UK subsidiary of the rebranded French insurance group which can boast an illustrious 200-year history as France’s oldest private insurer, La Parisienne.Mark came into insurance because of his work in IT and has enormous experience in the UK market He is the former managing director of personal lines for RSA in the UK, where he looked after the high-profile digital brand More Than.Given Mark’s background it is perhaps unsurprising that Wakam UK is aiming to bring technology, including AI, to speed up the insurance process and go live with new prospects within weeks rather than months. Wakam UK already had reasonable scale in its legacy form, but in its new tech-first guise seems likely to achieve substantial growth. I think regular listeners will learn a lot from Mark and find a lot in common with him. In a world of hype, here is someone with all the experience and knowledge to make the promise become reality.His enthusiasm and positive energy is infectious, so I can highly recommend a listen.LINKSWe thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:https://www.advantagego.com

Today’s podcast is with the CEO of a reinsurer that wrote just under $8 billion dollars of Gross premiums in 2025. Miguel Rosa runs Mapfre Re, a Global Top-20 reinsurer with a reputation for long-term strategic thinking and consistency in an often unstable market. As the reinsurance market softens, at a significantly faster rate than many reinsurers were expecting, it is fascinating to hear Miguel’s view on the prospects for profitable growth in 2026 and beyond. With 2 decades of reinsurance experience, topped off with three years in motor insurance Miguel brings an exceptionally well-rounded perspective to his role. In this podcast we look at the dynamics affecting the reinsurance market and the growth opportunities remaining within it, but we also broaden the discussion out to include more specific themes such as the opportunity in MGAs and AI, both as an aide to operational efficiency and more skilful underwriting, but also as an emerging peril in and of itself. Miguel is great company and the time will pass extremely quickly. I learned a lot and I think you will too. LINKSWe thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:https://www.advantagego.com

I really enjoyed today’s interview because it outlines what is quite an original proposition in a very competitive marketplace. Jonathan Tritton is the Managing Director of Burns & Wilcox Global Solutions, which is the London and International wholesale broking arm of the US-headquartered Kaufman Group. The group has been formed via the coming together of the Chesterfield and Lochain Patrick broking businesses.So far, so familiar, you might say – a US-led broking group with London operations is hardly a big deal. But Jonathan is a recent joiner and the pitch he makes for his new employer is compelling. As the insurance value chain becomes more technologically advanced and much more efficient at allocating the right risks to the right distribution channels and the right forms of underwriting capital, despite the headwinds of the softening market, Jonathan is very optimistic about the growth prospects for his business unit.With a good combination of, sufficient scale and resources to be in the game and an enormous amount of room to grow, Jonathan’s optimism has an authentic ring to it.In this podcast specific growth plans, the digitisation and facilitisation of the market and Jonathan’s ambitions for a Lloyd’s syndicate as well as his thoughts on AI all get a full airing.Jonathan has been on the podcast before and is a very relaxed, eloquent and energetic interviewee, so this is an episode that will fly by. LINKSWe thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:https://www.advantagego.com