Ep319 Richard Brindle & Richard Coulson The Fidelis Partnership: Darwinian Division

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, enabling an enterprise view of exposure. Today's podcast was recorded down at the Monte Carlo Rendez-Vous at the beginning of September. This extraordinary gathering of global insurance leadership is a great place to secure time with senior executives from all around the world. I'm really glad and feel very lucky that Richard Brindle, group CEO and chairman of The Fidelis Partnership, has managed to find time for The Voice of Insurance in each of the last five consecutive years. This year, Richard was joined by another Richard, Richard Coulson, group president of Strategic Partnerships, who was last on the show in 2024 In Richard Brindle's own words, since it bifurcated from its insurance balance sheet three years ago, The Fidelis Partnership has been moving as if it were on rocket fuel.

It was therefore great to catch up again, even if it were only a couple of months since his last appearance on the show with Clive Washbourn of Navium. A couple of years ago, the headline of this podcast was taken from a direct quote of Richard Brindle's. If you're good enough, you're old enough. My view on podcast guests is that if they're interesting enough, they can come on the show as often as they like. While we were gathered to talk about re-insurance, in typical fashion, the re-insurance items on the agenda were dealt with very swiftly, and we were soon opening up topics that I had never broached with either guest before. Two themes that we really dealt into were TFP's strategic decision not to write broker facilities and the firm's high-growth market strategy and how this really works in practice. If you don't write the big brokers' facilities, how do you make sure they keep showing you business? And if you do a lot of business in fast-developing jurisdictions, how much more likely are you to encounter dilemmas such as those relating to ESG?

All the answers and a typically robust and uncompromising discussion are coming right up.

Enjoy the podcast. We're here down at Monte Carlo talking about re-insurance again. How would you characterise the market of today?

Richard Brindle (2:01)

The re-insurance market or the insurance market?

Mark Geoghegan (2:03)

The re-insurance market. And then obviously they're all connected.

Richard Brindle (2:06)

I think you're seeing similar themes emerging in all sectors which is quite a Darwinian division into key lead markets and follows and this is informs the whole debate around facilities which I'm sure we'll get into.

We work very, very hard to be a lead market in everything we do. I always say to my guys, we've got to be a top three market in everything that we do. And that means you got to work hard. You've got to be available 24-7 when necessary. You've got to travel in the post-COVID environment. Hardly anybody travels. We go to country after country after country where they'll say some variation of, we actually haven't seen an underwriter from London since COVID. So we're proud to be different and we do work harder and we are available all the time. We don't have work phones that get switched off on a Friday evening and switch back on on a Monday, which if you think about it, is preposterous in an events-driven business. So we are firmly in that lead category and I think we're very useful to clients and brokers. But yeah, it is quite Darwinian these days.

Mark Geoghegan (3:03)

And by Darwinian, you mean this is a market where clients really can choose much more than they've been able to, let's say, at 1.123. They necessarily couldn't choose because there was less choice. And now they can.

Richard Brindle (3:16)

Yeah, there's certainly clients have the luxury of more choice. No, no question about it. And you've got to be relevant and available and useful. I think we took all of those boxes. And you have to be sizable too. You know, size does matter in a market like this. By the way, these soft market conditions only apply to some of the stuff we do. There's a lot of stuff it doesn't apply to. But if we're talking property cat, yes, it is softening. Of course, it is, there's no point in lying about it. And it's more important than ever that you're sizable, relevant, responsive, providing leadership, price making, thought leading, and we do all of those things.

Mark Geoghegan (3:48)

Yes. You're a hard worker. Do you feel you have to work even harder?

Richard Brindle (3:51)

Yeah.

Mark Geoghegan (3:52)

Do you feel under any pressure to do more than you've done before? And not just being more available, but then when you are available to give more concessions?