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QBE Europe has named Erik Keller as the head of liability, effective from Jan. 1, 2024. With an extensive background spanning 30 years in commercial insurance, Keller has predominantly been involved in multinational business affairs.

Having served as the regional underwriting manager for QBE Germany since 2017, Keller brings with him a wealth of experience in liability portfolio management. Prior to joining QBE in 2011, he served as liability portfolio manager at Chubb, RSA, and construction insurance specialist VHV. This experience, as detailed on his LinkedIn, also significantly contributed to his proficiency in casualty underwriting and portfolio development.

At QBE Germany, Keller’s focus primarily gravitated towards large corporate and global business clientele. He actively participated in various European projects, including pivotal roles in QBE’s casualty rulebook, multinational offering, and the development of corporate and specialty practices.

In his new role on a European scale, Keller aims to align QBE’s liability strategy across European countries, focusing on harmonising processes and streamlining operations to enhance efficiency.

Keller will report to Naintara Agarwal, director of underwriting and portfolio management for Europe.

“I am absolutely thrilled to have Erik join the team. He has shown not only how he can support cooperation across European offices but also a dedication to building strong relations with brokers and clients. This, I believe, is the right approach to develop our capability and our market position in Europe,” Agarwal said.

“Developing our local underwriting teams and our casualty product offering is crucial to the long-term success of liability at QBE,” Keller said.

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DUAL has announced the appointment of David Harries as group director of underwriting, effective from January 2024. In this new role, Harries will closely collaborate with Alan Telford, DUAL Group CUO.

Before joining DUAL, Harries was associated with Berkshire Hathaway Specialty Insurance, where he held the position of executive underwriter. With a career spanning over 30 years, he held various roles at QBE, including head of financial lines and active underwriter at Syndicate 386. Harries has also managed teams of underwriters in both Lloyd’s and Company Markets.

Richard Clapham, CEO of DUAL Group, also expressed the company’s appreciation for Telford’s significant contributions to the business and noted his planned departure in the summer of 2024. Telford’s intent to travel the world was disrupted by the global pandemic, making his continued presence within the leadership team since 2020 especially valuable. The handover to Harries in January 2024 is anticipated in this key role.

“We’re delighted to welcome David, whose experience makes him a fantastic addition to our Group. DUAL’s regional business model enables our local underwriting teams to respond in an agile way to an ever-evolving market. David will work collaboratively with each of our four regions, ensuring we have a global overview of underwriting trends and will help maximise cross-region partnerships with our carrier partners,” Clapham said.

“David’s proven track record in delivering growth, combined with a deep knowledge of the insurance sector gives him a great perspective on how we can best expand our product range to meet the needs of our brokers and their clients,” Clapham said.

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Insurance provider handl Group has formally agreed to acquire the entire share capital of auto locksmith firm We’ve Got The Key (WGTK), with the ambition of doubling the company’s size within 18 months. The move also comes after the appointment of Peter Crellen as the managing director.

Chris Chatterton, chief commercial officer for handl, emphasised the new management’s significant investment in “people plus technology,” aligning with handl’s core theme. With this, WGTK aims to achieve a 4-5% market share in the auto locksmith sector, with an additional goal of doubling callouts from 50,000 to 100,000 annually and expanding their services to assist motor insurers with key-related claims.

WGTK caters to insurers, breakdown and recovery services, fleet and rental sectors, and consumers in need of urgent assistance for lost car keys. The company also serves trade customers with significant fleets and plans to expand its reach to car dealerships, self-insured fleets, and secure more insurance contracts.

Headquartered in Norwich, WGTK will align its operations with Coplus, handl’s specialist ancillary insurer and claims handling business, also based in the city.

The specific financial details of the acquisition remain undisclosed, and the completion of the deal is anticipated later in the autumn.

“The auto locksmith market is hugely disaggregated, with literally thousands of sole traders, and a few small panels, but we believe WGTK has the potential to become a national brand for resolving auto lockouts in the same way that Home Serve did for home emergency cover,” Chatterton said.

“It’s a deal with massive potential, and we’re very excited by this opportunity. Investing in the management team is one of the first things we do when we make an acquisition, so we’re delighted to welcome Peter on board,” he said.

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Global reinsurance broker Gallagher Re has welcomed Jonathan Allard (pictured above) as the managing director and head of its newly established global credit and political risk team, based in London.

In this global role, Allard will amalgamate the specialist teams from the London market and internationally, overseeing and advancing Gallagher Re’s global product offering in the domains of credit and political risk. This initiative aims to grant clients access to both treaty and facultative solutions. He will also collaborate with Jim Latorre, who leads the distinct North American surety team, to broaden the reach of the surety sector worldwide.

With vast experience in the reinsurance market, Allard has been a specialist in credit, surety, and political risk from the onset of his broking career. He arrives from Renaissance Re, where he served as vice president of underwriting, overseeing the management and underwriting of credit, surety, and political risk reinsurance, along with structured credit portfolio accounts on European and Lloyd’s balance sheets. Prior to this role, Jonathan spent a decade broking credit, surety, and political risk at Willis Re.

“The creation of a new global leadership role in such a specialised line of business is testament to our continued focus on harnessing the power of Gallagher Re for the benefit of clients, wherever they are in the world. Jonathan’s breadth of experience combining both broker and reinsurer perspectives equips him brilliantly to lead our global product proposition in this area of ever-changing risk,” Gallagher Re international CEO Tony Melia said.

Concurrently with this announcement, Mark Jenkins has also taken up the position of chairman of the global credit and political risk team.

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A pressing issue across the industry comes under the spotlight in a new whitepaper released by reinsurtech Supercede: the silent crisis of unreliable reinsurance data and its costly implications for cedents.

The firm delved into this challenge by conducting interviews with over 30 senior global reinsurers, brokers, and cedents. The findings revealed that subpar data is more than a mere inconvenience; it is a substantial financial burden on results. Cedents are directly bearing the cost through escalated reinsurance expenses, reduced capacity, and missed opportunities for innovation.

Rewards and punishments

Across the industry, Supercede revealed unity across reinsurers in what to expect from their cedents: improvements in the standard of submission data. Those which do so stand to be rewarded, provided they continue to provide better data, while those who do not will continue to be punished.

Research cited by the whitepaper unveiled that the quality of submission data varies heavily across the market, with most of the respondents noting substantial variation even in the same regions and business lines. With poor-quality data comes consequences, which affect not only cedents but brokers and reinsurers as well.

The foremost of these is price increases, with “pricing load” becoming standard as reinsurers face more uncertainty that comes from substandard information. Brokers and underwriters, on the other hand, will see postponements for value-adding analytical activities to allow time for manual data manipulation, with this inconvenience ultimately ending in lower goodwill.

With these challenges becoming prevalent, reinsurers are looking for a rise in the bar for quality, with most keen to invest in modernised portfolio management tools that depend on accurate data to operate. Cedents and brokers are doing their parts as well, with entities using new technologies to drive a rise in submission quality.

“We want to be in a position to reward cedents for providing us with good data in our pricing; unfortunately, at the moment, we often have to include uncertainty loads for poor or incomplete data,” said Jonathan Gale, reinsurance chief underwriting officer at AXA XL.

Data distrust tax

Another standout revelation in the report is the weighty “data distrust tax” that reinsurers impose due to vague or inconsistent data. This often results in a significant 10% surge in reinsurance rates, impacting both loss and combined ratios.

That said, reinsurance protection is not better when cedents pay out more for the same coverage. Supercede noted that CEOs who are unsuccessful at equipping their ceded reinsurance teams with budgets for building better submission packs should reconsider, especially if outwards spend goes to tens or hundreds of millions a year.

“’Pricing loads’ are often implicit: actuaries and underwriters will make conservative assumptions to allow for uncertainty in the data and risk,” Liberty Mutual Re chief actuary Hetul Patel said. “This will be built into the technical price.”

Incomplete data sets

Adding complexity to the landscape, cedents providing incomplete data sets often find themselves excluded from tailored evaluations. Instead, they are grouped into broad-stroke portfolio generalisations, missing out on bespoke, more favourable terms.

In general, those easiest to work with are prioritised, while more cumbersome ones might not get the best underwriting options. Supercede said that underwriters are right to walk away from cedents who are harder to work with, as reinsurers need to build their portfolios more efficiently, even if it means that some will get left out.

“We believe high-quality data is essential for a well-functioning reinsurance market, but our research shows current practices fall far short,” Supercede president Ben Rose (pictured above) said. “By shining a light on the issue, we hope to motivate positive change across the industry.”

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Renko Dirksen (pictured above) enjoys his global responsibilities.

“I have the privilege to not only work in Germany but to work in so many different countries and experience so many different cultures and ways of doing the insurance business,” he said.  “That’s really exciting.”

Dirksen is on the board of directors for ARAG, a firm specialising in legal expense insurance (LEI). ARAG has a presence in 19 countries around the world, including the UK. ARAG regards itself as “the leading legal insurer worldwide” and is the largest privately owned insurance company in Germany.

Insurance Business met with Dirksen on his recent visit to ARAG’s Australia business. The operation Down Under was launched a few years ago and Dirksen said he was there to get a feeling for the local challenges and opportunities.

From law school to ARAG

IB asked the board member from Düsseldorf how his insurance career started?

“I remember when I graduated from law school, I found that I did not want to practice as a lawyer or work as a judge or prosecutor, but I did want to get into management and business which was everything I found interesting,” he said.

Dirksen came across a job offering from the ARAG Group – and the rest is history. He became the assistant to the CEO.

Part of the reason for his longevity with the firm, he said, is his confidence in the product which he thinks has “a lot of value.”

“Having a legal expenses insurance policy in your pocket really helps,” said Dirksen. “Then you can pursue your case at every level and go to the highest court to pursue your rights.”

The other reason is, he said, is how an insurance career involves working collaboratively to solve problems.

“At the same time, people energise,” he said. “I really like to work with people to solve problems, to interact with people and my colleagues.”

Dirksen said this makes the insurance business “very exciting because there are so many different people from so many different backgrounds.”

Medical negligence, unpaid bills and corporate scandals

He told IB about some of the ways ARAG’s LEI has helped people pursue their legal rights. The examples included labour disputes, cases of medical negligence and small businesses chasing up unpaid bills.

“We do a lot of clinical negligence cases, especially in the UK,” Dirksen said. “They are very often heartbreaking to be honest.”

However, he said people with ARAG’s LEI insurance have been able to achieve better outcomes and rebuild some sort of quality of life.

“When you see the initial offering from the other side and you see the outcome, then our customers know that it’s really worthwhile to have this policy,” said Dirksen.

One case in which ARAG’s customers were able to pursue their rights made worldwide headlines.

“The diesel scandal, for example with Volkswagen (VW),” he said. “With us the average consumer can say, ‘I’m going to take up the fight and go against Volkswagen’.”

Dirksen said LEI provided individual VW owners with a way to pursue justice against a huge corporate firm.

“In most situations, consumers wouldn’t meet them at eye level – Volkswagen would just outspend them,” he said. “In some ways we are like David´s slingshot against Goliath.”

According to information from ARAG, the firm made payments of approximately €70 million for 36,000 cases in connection with the diesel scandal. The ARAG customers had purchased vehicles from VW and other manufacturers that used the same emissions-cheating device and were able to use their LEI policies to pursue compensation.

More on the VW diesel emissions scandal

In 2016, car maker Volkswagen was forced to recall millions of cars – about 8.5 million across Europe and half million in the US according to a BBC News report – after a car emissions scandal.

VW admitted it was cheating emissions tests and has paid out billions of dollars in costs and penalties. In Australia, the company received a fine from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) of $125 million, the highest ever imposed by the Federal Court for breaches of consumer laws.

However, years later, VW continues to fight court battles.

In June, a former Audi CEO (VW owns Audi) was handed a suspended sentence of nearly two years for his role in the diesel scandal. According to Reuters, former and current VW managers are still on trial in Germany and there are more than 100,000 diesel emission scandal cases still pending at the highest court alone.

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Allianz and Intact are considering their options where it comes to an Aviva takeover, The Times has reported.

An American insurer is also in the frame, The Times reported, citing City sources.

At least one of Allianz and Intact is said to be mulling a £6 per share proposal for Aviva, according to the report.

Shares in UK-headquartered Aviva jumped on the news, rising upwards of 10% on Friday from the market’s open. However, this dampened somewhat as analysts queried the veracity of market chatter.

Speculation also boosted other FTSE100 insurers, The Times reported, with Phoenix up 2.27%, Prudential up 2.85% and Legal & General gaining 4.11%.

Aviva, which reported rising operating profit of £715 million for the first half of 2023, has trimmed down its operations under Aviva CEO Amanda Blanc to focus on its UK, Ireland and Canada businesses.

Cogent Hire, the specialist in credit hire and mobility, has appointed Luke LeSauteur to the newly established role of commercial director.

Joining the expanding handl-owned business based in Lancashire, LeSauteur is tasked with constructing and launching propositions for insurance clients, particularly in the burgeoning mobility sectors like electric vehicles (EVs).

He has previously held high-ranking positions in credit hire businesses like Enterprise and Auxilis. Before his tenure at Cogent Hire, he founded ChargedRV (CRV) to explore mobility solutions involving EVs in the motor claims sector.

LeSauteur commenced his new position at the start of October, reporting to Kirsty McKno, CEO of Cogent Hire.

“Bringing Luke on board puts us in a good position to take the initiative and move the motor claims needle, particularly with regard to EV,” McKno said. “He has great integrity in our sector and shares our Cogent Hire values of honesty, accountability, transparency, trust, and partnership. I am confident he will apply those values to our EV claims proposition, as we do with all other aspects of our business.”

LeSauteur said that the industry needs to better manage EV from the point of collision and recovery up to repair and total loss.

“Managing EV safely is also crucial, as this will give underwriters more confidence when they price these types of risk,” he said. “Cogent Hire has a genuine commitment to understanding customers’ needs and improving processes in mobility, and this struck a chord with me right away. The team’s passion for raising the bar, combined with its growth potential in the sector, made it a place I wanted to join and contribute to.”

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DUAL Europe has expanded its reach in vital sectors by establishing a new marine team, headquartered in Rotterdam, where DUAL Benelux was founded earlier this year.

Aram Stoop (pictured left) and Pim de Pooter (pictured right) have been tapped to lead DUAL Europe’s marine hub. Initially, the hub will offer coverage for ocean and inland hull, builders risks, cargo, and land equipment. The focus will be on delivering underwriting and claims handling services to the broker community, emphasising technical expertise and efficiency.

Stoop, with over two decades of experience in the insurance industry as a marine surveyor and head of loss prevention engineering, will serve as the head of marine. De Pooter, joining as the lead underwriter for marine hull, brings more than 13 years of experience as a hull underwriter across various products, and was most recently a lead class underwriter for a market-leading portfolio of ocean and inland hull.

“This is a significant step for DUAL Europe. We have always been a natural home for underwriting talent, and we’re delighted that Aram and Pim have chosen to bring their considerable expertise to DUAL. Marine adds a new business line to our European offering and locating our Marine Hub in Rotterdam puts us strategically in the centre of this historically important region, and well positioned to service our extensive broker network,” DUAL Europe CEO Olaf Jonda said.

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The CII and PFS have revealed the winners of their inaugural apprenticeship awards, celebrating outstanding apprentices from various regions in the UK across seven distinct categories. The winners received cash prizes of up to £1000, sponsored by the Education and Training Trust.

The awards tasked nominees to elucidate how they had positively influenced their profession and broader society, citing quantifiable accomplishments, creativity, innovation, and adherence to the high standards of professionalism and trust — aligning with the ethos of both professional membership bodies.

The awards also welcomed participation from apprentices across England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, provided their apprenticeship standards and frameworks included completed CII qualifications. Nominations were encouraged from employers, training providers, and the apprentices themselves.

Winners of the respective categories are as follows:

• Insurance Practitioner Apprentice of the Year Winner: George Worby, Daines Kapp Insurance Broker
• Insurance Practitioner Apprentice of the Year Highly Commended: Katie Kent, AXA Health & Rosie Gospage, Brit Insurance
• Insurance Professional Apprentice of the Year Winner: Ryan McAllister, esure Insurance
• Insurance Professional Apprentice of the Year Highly Commended: Dave Hamer, Willis Towers Watson & Chris Allatt, Gallagher Re
• Senior Insurance Professional Apprentice of the Year Winner: Joseph Bryant, Marsh Mclennan
• Financial Services Administrator Apprentice of the Year Winner: Roxanne Hill, Jane Smith Financial Planning Limited
• Financial Services Administrator Apprentice of the Year Highly Commended: Bill Boote, St James’s Place
• Financial Advisor Apprentice of the Year Winner: Emmelia Powell, Premier Wealth Solutions
• Mortgage Advisor Apprentice of the Year: Daniel Jones, Hayden Kilkelly IFA Ltd
• Paraplanner Apprentice of the Year: Heidi Wozniak, Wise Investment

The CII and PFS also underscored their support and the significance of apprenticeships in the insurance and personal finance sectors, exemplified by their Aspire Apprenticeship program, aimed at encouraging employers to embrace these opportunities.

“I would like to congratulate this year’s Apprenticeship Award winners, who should all be very proud of what they have achieved. All the entrants have demonstrated the value they can bring to the insurance and personal finance professions, and I know the CII and PFS are looking forward to assisting in their further development over coming years,” CII president Russell Higginbotham said.

“The entries we received for these inaugural CII and PFS awards have been phenomenal. It is hugely encouraging to see the depth of talent coming into our professions. I’m delighted that we are able to recognise all their hard work and achievements through these awards,” PFS president Anthony Ward said.

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