Special Ep David Cabral: Thinking beyond ESG

Today’s guest is one of the best qualified senior insurance and reinsurance executives I have ever had on the show. That’s because in a forty-plus year career David Cabral has been in both claims and underwriting, crossed the divide between Life and Health and P&C and worked at brokers, both in good times and in very bad times.He’s also been in charge of a company in run-off and he has overseen debt and equity capital raisings on the private and public markets. He’s built and run operations, done M&A and has worked at the biggest incumbents as well as the smallest start-ups.His resumé includes amongst many other names: Starr Excess, Marsh, Endurance, Frank B Hall, Lloyd’s and latterly sustainable finance-focused start-up Parhelion Capital.He’s also been a longstanding advocate of business and cultural change and the adoption and application of the best technology in our sector. I don’t know anyone with a more 360-degree understanding of our business than David.That long preamble is important because it means that what he has to say about the fundamental issue of ESG should carry an enormous amount of weight. This is someone with the right combination of intellectual heft and real-world experience to see exactly where we are going wrong as an industry on the biggest challenge our sector has ever faced. To his brains and experience I should also add a fearlessness in telling things exactly as he sees them. If ESG represents the greatest re-set of risk since the industrial revolution, here is someone who has thought things right though to their logical conclusions and wants to help build an insurance sector that is fit for purpose in a world of ever more dynamic risk and exponentially-growing real-time data.David is an outspoken communicator and a great advocate for our sector and the transformative power it wields across the global economy and wider society. I have rarely interviewed someone able to express themselves so freely and this is what I think makes this Episode something a little specialNOTESAbbreviations. ESG stands for Environmental Social and GovernanceIoT is Internet of Things. A Julian is referred to. That is Julian Richardson, CEO of Parhelion Underwriting.LINKSWe thank our Special Episode sponsor Stephens Rickard:https://www.stephensrickard.com/David Cabral: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-v-cabral/