Ep163 Richard Clapham & Luis Muñoz-Rojas of DUAL Group: Get the ham, not just the bone

Welcome to a very special episode because today’s guests are MGA royalty. Luis Muñoz-Rojas (pictured left) is the founder and Richard Clapham (right) is the CEO of the global MGA DUAL Group, which is part of the Howden Group.DUAL is now a business that writes more than $3bn in premium and employs 1,300 people in 19 countries.And the firm is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. Luis and I have a bit of history – in the 1990s we both worked for the biggest broker in Spain, Gil y Carvajal. Aon took over Gil y Carvajal in 1998. For me that was the cue to change career and go off and become a journalist, but for Luis it fired the starting pistol on an incredible entrepreneurial journey with a friendly London wholesale broker called David Howden. I’ll let Luis tell the full story later on. But I don’t want you to think that this is a backward-looking podcast, celebrating the achievements of the past quarter century.There’s a bit of the origin story, because it’s a remarkable one. But this is just as much about the here and now of the reality of today’s market and the direction that DUAL and the MGA sector will head in in the next 25 years. Nothing is off the agenda.25 years ago MGAs were absolutely not in fashion. But today we seem to be on the third or fourth wave of a revolution in how commercial insurance is underwritten and distributed where MGAs always seem to be at the cutting edge.Who better to be our guides than today’s guests? They have built a global insurance underwriting and distribution machine that can bring geographical and product diversification to even some of the largest carriers, and from the tone of this talk, it feels like they have only just got started.You be the judge, but because I’ve known one of the subjects so long I also think it allows us to have a much more open, candid and fun conversation that we might otherwise have had.NOTES: Luis mentions the DGS. The DGS is the Dirección General de Seguros, the Spanish insurance regulator.LINKSWe thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:https://www.advantagego.com/