00:11 Insurance Business TV recently attended in Scottsdale the 25th annual TMPAA
00:09 annual summit. Whilst there, we caught up with leading insurance professionals to address some of the top challenges
00:17 the industry is facing today. Hello, I’m here with Raymond Hannan, EVP and chief of corporate underwriting at Westfield
00:26 Specialty. Raymond, we’re here at the target market conference talking about a specialty insurance and now everything is getting more complex and more niche.
00:35 I wondered if you could talk about that in your organization.
00:38 Absolutely. Um, Target Markets has been a great uh conference for us so far. Uh,
00:44 it’s a it’s a place where we can really uh kind of meet with a lot of different programs all at once. Um,
00:51 I definitely agree that the the underwriting process is getting more and more niche and uh programs is a great opportunity for a carrier to kind of
00:58 take advantage of that expertise. You know, at Westfield Specialty, we uh use programs when uh there’s an underwriting
01:06 expertise we don’t have or a distribution source that we don’t have or maybe even a technology that we don’t have in house. And when we think about
01:13 that underwriting underwriting specialization, um that’s definitely where that play comes in.
01:18 Right. Thank you. So I wondered if we could talk about um uh the insurance of partnerships and infrastructure investments are are carriers
01:25 prioritizing to support these leash programs particularly when it comes to data sharing, claims handling or compliance in unique verticals.
01:36 Yeah, that’s a that’s a big question. uh when it comes to the carrier side, it’s really important that we can uh work
01:43 very effectively with that MGA partner who’s then working with a broker to to produce that business to us. Um we use a pretty complex model when it comes to
01:52 evaluating um you know our program opportunities and one of those evaluations is the tech piece, the technology piece. So, uh, at Westfield
02:01 Specialty, we have a whole onboarding process and we bring our IT team in very early, uh, to assess our potential MGA
02:08 partners. Um, I do think, uh, our mission has been to try to just make it better. So, uh, better for the MGA,
02:17 better for us, better for the broker producing the business, and better for the insurers. Uh, so we’re spending a lot of money currently on upgrading our
02:25 ability to connect directly through APIs and other technologies. And I think that um you know overall I I think what we’re
02:33 going to see in five years is very different than the market looks today.
02:36 Right. Thank you. And as things are getting more complex arguably it is more of a need for broker industry of that people relationship of really
02:44 understanding complexity and the amo and how technology is helping that it’s really just leveling the playing field of the complexity we’re now seeing.
02:53 Yeah. Yeah, and hopefully we’re becoming more efficient, right? Uh the the the whole process, you know, bringing AI into into the mix, we’re seeing that
03:01 happen at the at the underwriting level through various MGA efforts. Uh you know, particularly on the triaging and submission process. Uh the ability to
03:09 take unstructured data and turn it into structured data really has been the game changer in the AI market.
03:15 Thank you, Raymond. Thank you for speaking with me. Thank you.
