Ep312 Clyde Bernstein, Placement Tech Leader Aon: Get the plumbing right

**Mark Geoghegan** (0:03)
I'm Mark Geoghegan and you're listening to the Voice of Insurance podcast, produced in association with AdvantageGo, now part of Sapiens.
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Most episodes of this podcast deal with the here and now, the day-to-day cut and thrust of what's going on in the market. This podcast is completely different because it gives us a view into the future of broking. Clyde Bernstein is the placement technology and trading analytics leader at Aon. And in the first half of this podcast, we examine the global brokers new Digital Placement Exchange, DPX, placing system, designed to automate the placing of following lines. Once that essential building block of the conversation is out of the way, the interview really begins to take off. What Aon is in the middle of doing is removing friction and costs from the placing process. While fully connecting all its brokers with the whole global market and all the insights the vast amount of risk and market data it has at its disposal can afford. Exploring the logical medium and long-term consequences for the market is the really interesting part of our discussion. The transformation is profound. A market with far greater liquidity, access to deeper pools of capital, and an ability to trade risk much faster and more efficiently as what emerges. Productivity, customer service and product innovation should also surge. The role of the broker could also change fundamentally. But the best thing about this conversation is not the clarity of the blue sky thinking on display, but rather the fact that the person shaping the vision is resolutely a broker and not a technologist. In his long career, Clyde has brokered claims, reinsurance and specialty risks. He's one of us, a lifelong broker who has learnt to engage with cutting-edge technology and not the other way around. This means that our discussion is always grounded from the perspective of the real life of a broker solving client problems and not the utopian vision of a technologist who has never placed a risk or paid a claim. It's mind-expanding stuff and one of the best discussions on the future of broking I've ever recorded. I highly recommend a listen.
Enjoy the podcast.
Clyde, welcome back to The Voice of Insurance. It's really great to see you again.

**Clyde Bernstein** (2:21)
Thanks, Mark. Lovely to be with you.

**Mark Geoghegan** (2:23)
For anybody out there who's listening, who doesn't know you, you've been in the London market for a very long time and I think anyone who's walked down Lime Street would have seen you once or twice, I'm sure. I always had that feeling. When I met you, you're someone whose face you already recognise, which is a funny thing. So why don't you just quickly run us through your career to date and how you got to where you are?

**Clyde Bernstein** (2:41)
Well, Mark, I've been in the industry for 35 years. I joined straight from school. Didn't really enjoy school very much. I was going to become a chef, but I managed to get into Willis in Hipswich. So I started to do some extracurricular activity. And I moved from Hipswich to London, and I started placing claims in the London market. A little bit later, I went to Secondment in Madrid. I wanted to learn Spanish, and our chief broking officer at the time said to me, he should go over there and learn that skill. So I spent four months overseas, came back. That was the catalyst to placement. And I became a placing broker on the international property stage. Did that for many, many years, but lost a bit of my mojo. Wanted to learn again. And I joined our reinsurance colleagues on the treaty side. And I looked after one of our major treaty clients in Willis on the reinsurance side of the business. And I wasn't prepared to give whatever 10 years of my life to earn the stripes on the sleeve for the Japanese. But it was an incredibly good experience because I learned the importance of client service, responsiveness and execution quality. It just happened at the time that our deputy CEO, Steve Hearn, had a crisis in the business, which was about, we just lost 30 people, 35 people from our fine art, jewelry and species business.
It's quite an elegant way of getting out of re-insurance and coming to help the firm rebuild that capability.
Again, it's unusual in an organization where you typically inherit when you take on a job somebody else's work, and you put your own spin and slant on things, but largely the fabric is already tailored. But that was quite an experience because you could think about your go-to-market strategy, what your broken execution role was, and also very much about how you're going to serve clients. Did that for a little while, and then ultimately, I got to become the Chief Broking Officer at the UK. Specialty and Retail Business in the UK. It's probably the second biggest territory outside of North America. And I made a big part of my role, how are we going to compete in the market of the future? And that was very much about starting to think about an industry that will at some point go through change and ensure that we are ready and not a statistics of people that didn't see the writing on the wall when that digitization arrived.