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.LINKSWe thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:https://www.advantagego.com/And our advertiser Bolton Associates:https://www.bolton-associates.co.uk/