Making the most of any market conditions in insurance

Insurance Business TV was recently in San Diego, attending the WSIA Annual Marketplace Conference. Whilst there, we caught up with leading insurance professionals who addressed some of the top challenges the industry is facing today. Yeah, I think actually we should maybe rephrase the question about how do we demonstrate our value in any market? Obviously, there's some challenges in the hard market to demonstrating value, but what we should do really should be the same no matter what. And I really think what it comes down to is being transparent about what we do and why we're doing it. Too often, I think as an industry, we talk among ourselves and we speak to each other about what the challenges are and why we're doing what we're doing, but we don't necessarily tell our insurance and the general population about why maybe we don't cover something or why we've added something that exclusion that we haven't added in the past or why pricing has gone up. And the result of that is not a lot of trust that happens. Yeah, we should do great things like going out and we should do charity and we should sponsor things. Those are absolutely vital. But the thing that we should do more than anything is stop being behind a magic curtain and really talk to our insureds and not just among ourselves in the insurance industry. Yeah, I mean, I think if you're genuine about it and you're open about it, people will receive it fairly well. And you should tie it to, because we're excluding this, you should make sure that you're addressing that other ways because a lot of these risks, they still need to address. And if we tell them that we're not covering it, it gives them the opportunity to find other ways to transfer that risk or handle that risk. And sometimes the retail agents can actually partner with them to find other opportunities to cover risks that they are not covering in their insurance policy. Yeah, so whether or not we can sustain the trajectory that we have now against where we've been, where we're going, it really comes down to, are we willing to make the investment as an E&S industry? There's a lot of things that we need to do. And if we continue to say, this is how we've always done it and how we're gonna continue to do it, I don't think that we can continue at the pace that we're going. But if we're willing to invest in our people and we're willing to invest in technology, I think when you put those two things together and we're willing to say, let's try something new, I think absolutely that we can continue with the trajectory that we're on right now. Yeah, I think the reason is pretty simple, which is the world's changing very quickly and typical insurance industry can't change as fast as the world is changing. So when you take out some of that regulatory issues that are keeping the industry from keeping up with all the changes in the world, all of a sudden E&S becomes a pretty valuable tool out there. So the reality is the world's changing fast, E&S can keep up with it much better than the traditional insurance environment. Yeah, so I think historically E&S has been reactive to what's happened and we allow the standard market to be the proactive ones. And we took whatever they didn't want and we wrote coverage for it or tried to find solutions for it. But the reality is a lot of businesses is flowing directly into E&S as new risks come online. And so we need to really become the proactive part. We should be talking about what risks are there, what the challenges are for the E&S environment, because the reality is we're on the front lines in ways that we never were before. We're not just there to pick up what the standard market isn't able to write or isn't willing to write. We're really writing for new risks, for new exposures, for the new world. So we should be driving a lot of that conversation rather than waiting for the conversation to come to us.