Executive Insights

Insurance Business TV recently attended in Scottsdale the 25th annual TMPAA Annual Summit. Whilst there we caught up with leading insurance professionals to address some of the top challenges the industry is facing today. I'm here with Fred Cooper, Corporate Development for Westfield Specialty. Fred, we're here at Target Markets talking about complex risk in the evolving market. Wonder if you could talk about how you're seeing that in your organization. Well, coming to Target Markets is a great opportunity for us to meet with different types of platforms, MGA platforms, hybrid platforms, capital providers, other carriers that we might compete with but become partners with at some point. So it's been a great conference for us so far. I would say what we're seeing driving the narrative today is everyone's looking for differentiated returns. And so you're starting to see a lot of different niche underwriting verticals appearing in the market. And to get those returns, you have to be very specialized. Right. Thank you. So I wonder if we can talk about MGAs and how increasingly act as innovation engineers for carriers. What are some of the biggest tension points or alignment challenges that you're seeing as they take on more underwriting and distribution authority? For us to be involved in MGA in particular, they need to have a certain amount of capability. A lot of that for an MGA these days is technological capability, but it has to go beyond just policy admin and policy issuance. It really needs to get to the point of how do we get at a targeted distribution and then how do we make that more profitable? And so, again, the niche approach, looking at different types of distribution and also using tools from an underwriting perspective to get those differentiated returns is really what we focus on. From a tension point perspective, I think there is a natural kind of misalignment between a capital provider like ourselves and an MGA. But I think we search for these long-term partners that understand that the cycle is very long and we want to maintain long relationships with our carrier partners and our MGA partners. Thank you. So are you seeing a fundamental shift on how carriers define scale and profitability in these niche programs, especially a portfolio to become more fragmented and long-term risks? I would say for a very long time my team has looked at how we become a profitable carrier over the long term with some concept called horizontal diversification. So we might be in a lot of different areas, not needing to run in great scale on any one of those, but the collection of really good underwriting. And it could be a smaller program, a $20 million program. It could be a $100 million program. But having that horizontal diversification where we're in lots of different lines of business but getting at the profitable pieces of those markets is where we want to be. Fred, thank you for speaking with me at Insurance Business. Thank you.