Beazley’s global head of broker relations and marketing Lou Ann Layton has spoken of the opportunities inherent to an “undeniable” trend of consolidation currently sweeping the brokerage community.
“While some people look at broker consolidation as a threat to the industry, or the underwriting community, Beazley sees it as an opportunity,” Layton stated.
“What we see when firms merge we generally benefit from the fact that we get new relationships.”
Layton added that, on the client side, the process of consolidation is exposing the company to new clients who didn’t know of Beazley before because “their broker didn’t have a relationship with us or they didn’t have access.”
However the firm’s combined ratio weakened year-on-year from 95% to 100%, which was helped by recorded net investment income of $170.3 million, compared with just $8 million a year earlier.
Layton also noted on the impact of new technology on the wider industry, describing insurtech firms as playing a “very important role in insurance.”
“I think what they’re doing in providing solutions for various parts of the insurance value chain is important,” she explained.
“We also find technology is helping us reduce the duplicity that we have in tasks and reducing human error. If you look at what we’re doing here at Beazley we’re trying to put more and more products on our tech platform so brokers can trade with us on our electronic platform MyBeazley.”
“So you will continually see digitalisation both in that syndicate as well as our e-trading platform,” Layton concluded.
