Ep320 Mark Groenheide LIRG: Facts, Not Feelings

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. Pick and choose your own best of breed InsureTech and data providers with the Sapiens AdvantageGo ecosystem. Today's podcast is one of the most fast moving and broad ranging I've recorded in seven years of The Voice of Insurance. For instance, today's guest links running an insurer on a native AI infrastructure, Takaful Insurance and the application of parametric insurance to almost every peril with ambitions to grow his own re-insurance balance sheet and a medium term goal to return to the Lloyd's market with what he's built. As you will gather, Mark Groenheide, the CEO and president of LIRG, isn't built exactly like all the rest of us. Following a classical insurance upbringing with underwriting stints at the sorts of blue chip carriers one might expect to see on a standard resume, Mark's career has since blossomed to embrace imaginative thinking, change and insurance and reinsurance innovation in myriad forms. Mark's enthusiasm is infectious and at points, I'm sure he'll have you nodding in agreement with his views about making insurance better as a product and far more relevant to the world and more effective at solving its problems than it is today. This is a fascinating discussion with an insurance renaissance man that might inspire you to try something new in your own career.

So if you're feeling a bit jaded, I challenge you to listen to this and not feel reenergized and refreshed. My only caveat is to make sure you've had your coffee because this is at times a breathless conversation. Listen on and you'll definitely hear me trying to keep up with Mark as he puts me through my paces. I had a lot of fun and you definitely will too.

Enjoy the podcast. Mark, welcome to The Voice of Insurance.

Mark Groenheide (1:49)

Pleasure to be here. I've been a long time fan.

Mark Geoghegan (1:52)

Thank you very much.

This is for the benefit of anyone out there who doesn't know you. What I've come to do is with all my guests now is to get you to introduce yourself to the audience and run us through your career to date and start with that question that we all ask each other as our way of industry icebreaker is to ask each other how we got into insurance.

Mark Groenheide (2:09)

Sure. My story really began during the time where the.com crash had happened. So I was in school and not knowing really what I would do, but at the time, it was not great for someone who had a degree in computer science. It was not a wonderful job market and a lot of things look bleak, but I knew someone who was very important in the insurance industry and admired him very much. And he was able to connect me into an industry that I never would have thought of. My father was a school teacher and my mother worked in banking, but my experience, like many others, was very biased towards the insurance industry. And I am so incredibly thankful I took that journey into this industry because it's taken me all around the globe. I've worked on interesting things and it's been one of the defining characteristics of my life. I'm very passionate about risk transfer. I've been fortunate that in my career early on, I worked for some amazing organizations. I was an engineering lines underwriter at ACE in New York City, as well as Boston, and was able to work for some really fantastic underwriters. Mark Gidear, and under his tutelage, we worked on some of the most important projects in the United States and also elsewhere. That really instilled in me, number one, a lot of underwriting discipline. There was just fantastic underwriters at the time, John Tutera, who I got to work with, and Mark Gidear, and many others, and really saw those practitioners in their prime, do some amazing things. And then that led me to a lot of curiosity about our industry. I initially became exposed then at that time to Lloyd's, for reinsurance and many other things.

From there, I worked at WR. Berkeley, their flagship carrier, Acadia, up in the northeastern United States, for which I ran inland marine and ocean marine. It was really amazing to work for WR. Berkeley, the company that I admire very much, both Rob and his recently deceased father. They were incredible people who made themselves available, even though they were in the stratosphere of folks in our industry and took the time to bring people to Greenwich, and I was able to meet with them. And it really was one of the defining characteristics of learning how to operate organizations and mimic a lot of what they did because they knew a couple of things, and one of which was get really good operators and have them operate businesses independently in local markets, in markets for which you can have a durable competitive advantage, but you need to be close to the customer and distribution and relationships and reputation are paramount. And then from there, I was able to work at Zurich and then HDI, and was one of the people originally bringing on the E&S carrier in the United States. Jim Clark and Lothar Becker were my bosses. Amazing people. Jim went on to be the CEO later on for North America. I was able to go to Hanover, Germany, and for the first time worked in Europe from time to time. Amazing, again, experience. I was very fortunate to work at Great Carriers. Then went on my own and did an MGU, which was successful.