Undercurrents

How to build an insurance brand? Stop talking about insurance

Sixteen years ago, the Italian insurance giant Unipol embarked on a journey. Entitled “Beyond Insurance”, its aim, in the words of Giacomo Lovati, the appropriately named chief beyond insurance officer, was to “create a cocoon" around the company’s customers, expanding touchpoints and enhancing loyalty.

How efficient is capital allocation in insurance?

An encouraging picture of an ever-more varied and specialised market is undercut by market-wide inefficiencies that impede the flow of capital to risk, writes William Pitt.

Patient capital: how should tomorrow’s insurers be funded?

Speaking at the UK’s Managing General Agents Association annual meeting last month, Brown & Brown CEO Powell Brown identified a deep-pocketed funding source that has, to date, done little more than dip a toe into the global P&C insurance market: Family offices.

Drowning in data: The high costs of poor data management

Underwriting data has proliferated far faster than the insurance market’s ability to manage it, and capital is flowing less freely as a result, writes William Pitt.

Baked in: how a computer scientist anticipated the MGA boom

Deep structural differences between insurance companies and MGAs account for much of the attraction of the MGA model for talent and investors in the current market, writes William Pitt.

Balancing act: MGAs and the search for durable capacity

MGA capacity options are multiplying, but durable capacity remains elusive

Fronting market keeps the faith

Reliable data on the business transacted through MGAs is scarce. But fronting companies offer a window into this highly dynamic market, writes William Pitt.

New fronts in the war for insurance talent

Managing general agents are luring top-flight talent from both (re)insurance carriers and technology circles. For carriers that have long prided themselves on their underwriting performance, this presents a quandary, writes William Pitt.