Ep163 Richard Clapham & Luis Muñoz-Rojas of DUAL Group: Get the ham, not just the bone

Welcome to a very special episode because today’s guests are MGA
royalty. Luis Muñoz-Rojas (pictured left) is the founder and
Richard Clapham (right) is the CEO of the global MGA DUAL Group,
which is part of the Howden Group. DUAL is now a business that
writes more than $3bn in premium and employs 1,300 people in 19
countries. And the firm is celebrating its 25th anniversary this
year. Luis and I have a bit of history – in the 1990s we both
worked for the biggest broker in Spain, Gil y Carvajal. Aon took
over Gil y Carvajal in 1998. For me that was the cue to change
career and go off and become a journalist, but for Luis it fired
the starting pistol on an incredible entrepreneurial journey with
a friendly London wholesale broker called David Howden. I’ll let
Luis tell the full story later on. But I don’t want you to think
that this is a backward-looking podcast, celebrating the
achievements of the past quarter century. There’s a bit of the
origin story, because it’s a remarkable one. But this is just as
much about the here and now of the reality of today’s market and
the direction that DUAL and the MGA sector will head in in the
next 25 years. Nothing is off the agenda. 25 years ago MGAs were
absolutely not in fashion. But today we seem to be on the third
or fourth wave of a revolution in how commercial insurance is
underwritten and distributed where MGAs always seem to be at the
cutting edge. Who better to be our guides than today’s guests?
They have built a global insurance underwriting and distribution
machine that can bring geographical and product diversification
to even some of the largest carriers, and from the tone of this
talk, it feels like they have only just got started. You be the
judge, but because I’ve known one of the subjects so long I also
think it allows us to have a much more open, candid and fun
conversation that we might otherwise have had. NOTES: Luis
mentions the DGS. The DGS is the Dirección General de Seguros,
the Spanish insurance regulator. LINKS We thank our naming
sponsor AdvantageGo: https://www.advantagego.com/