Richard Foster, the former lead underwriter and head of global market property at re/insurer Brit is launching a new direct & facultative focused start-up alongside former broker James Poole.
Foster and Poole have launched Agile Risk Partners Limited, our sister site Artemis was first to report today, a company that will operate as an MGA, but dealing with both inwards and outwards business.
The new firm will establish a specialism in underwriting direct & facultative (D&F) property risks across the globe, targeting the world’s top two thousand globally active companies as a client base.
Foster’s underwriting career and pedigree is strong in the D&F property and energy space and he has experience underwriting insurance business for some of the world’s largest companies.
Prior to becoming Head of Global Property at Brit, Foster worked for SCOR’s Channel Syndicate as a senior underwriter, at Zurich as Head of Transactional Property, at Allied World as an AVP of Property, and he began his career at Catlin as an Assistant Underwriter.
Poole is an experienced ex-broker with a focus on structuring complex insurance and reinsurance deals, broking and also technology including big data, having worked at Price Forbes and Arthur J Gallagher & Co.
Agile Risk Partners will underwrite large, risk-managed property risks for the world’s largest companies, with a goal of developing a book that is neither attritional or particularly natural catastrophe centric.
The resulting portfolio of risk is expected to be attractive to both traditional re/insurance and alternative capital counterparties and the firm will look for capacity support from both sides of the market.
The plan is to leverage big data and technology platforms in order to enhance the efficiency of their book, while creating additional value for customers.
Agile Risk Partners aims to work alongside a traditional carrier that can provide a guaranteed line, while utilising third-party capital and ILS market capacity sources to augment the offering, in order to meet the needs of the world’s largest D&F property insureds.
The aim is to be up and running for January 2019 and the company will either form as an MGA, or look to be incubated within an MGA platform. In future the start-up hopes to write as many as 200 D&F risks per year, which will be a meaningful book of global property risk.
