Ep152 Phil Hobbs President & Managing Director at Liberty Specialty Markets: Meeet the $24bn (re)insurer

Today’s guest is Phil Hobbs President & Managing Director at
Liberty Specialty Markets. In the past Liberty Mutual businesses
used to be run allowing a lot of autonomy and sometimes
geographical and operational overlap. But these days Liberty is a
business that has undergone a huge amount of work to unify in
structure and present much more of a united front globally. And
when you hear that Specialty Markets now produces 24 billion
dollars of gross written premium, making it one of the largest
commercial P&C insurers in the world, you can see why it
makes an awful lot of sense to project and leverage that sort of
scale out in the marketplace. That’s what makes this such an
interesting discussion. When Phil joined Liberty 15 years ago he
had a role in the group’s Lloyd’s Syndicate. Now he has a
completely global view and only half of the premium he overseas
is written in London. And because the business is a buyer and
seller of reinsurance and retro, very few other organisations
have such a joined up view of the insurance value chain in its
entirety and with such breadth and depth. Given the turbulent
state of the market Phil’s view is extraordinarily valuable. Here
we talk in depth about how the recent reinsurance reset might
affect market dynamics in insurance, as well as grappling with
the state of play in core London specialty political risk and
violence classes, Cyber, resurgent inflation, ESG and the
post-pandemic work environment. Phil is very articulate and his
calm and easygoing demeanour permeates our exchanges. He is also
very good at making very complicated processes and dynamics much
easier to understand and that is why I think a listen today will
be very well rewarded. LINKS We thank our naming sponsor
AdvantageGo: https://www.advantagego.com/ And our advertiser
Bolton Associates: https://www.bolton-associates.co.uk/