Ep269 Richard Brindle & John-Paul O'Hare The Fidelis Partnership: A Multi-Platform Risk Allocator

I'm Mark Eagan and your listening to the Voice of Insurance podcast produced an association with Advantage Go. Pick and choose your own best of breed in short tech and data providers with Advantage Go's ecosystem. Every year for the past four years I've been lucky enough to be given time with Richard Brindle at the opening of the Monte Carlo rendezvous. And every year we've had the sort of conversation that helps set the tone for the rest of the gathering and indeed the rest of the calendar year and into the next. This year was no exception. As ever, Richard was forceful, unambiguous and direct on everything from the state of the market and the growth opportunities within it to what the Fidelis partnership has learned from its experience with the Russia-Ukrain Aviation War losses and the California wildfires. Richard was joined by John Paul O'Hare, the Fidelis partnership's group director of underwriting. Just the discussion took flight and encompassed subjects as diverse as the application of AI to the insurance work ethic, service levels and the return to the office. John Paul held his own. As a result, I can highly recommend this episode for an original and uncompromising view on the opportunities and threats facing the global specialty insurance and re-insurance markets into 2026 and beyond. Enjoy the podcast. Richard and John Paul, welcome to the Voice of Insurance. Thank you. We're down here at Monte Carlo. It's a good time to talk about setting the scene for those renewals becoming at the end of the year. The hardening phase of the market seems to run its course. At the same time, most people are still talking about being able to grow or want into grow. What's your perspective for one? Do you want to grow? And if you did, where do you think you could? And how would you do it? Okay, well, I think the first thing is just to reiterate that we are now a risk allocator. We've advocated the business at the beginning of 2023. The capital flowed to the Fidelis Insurance Group, quoted on the New York Stock Exchange. There are sibling company and there are best friends, but they're a different company. We originate business principally on their behalf, but we do also now have a low syndicate and we have plans for further capital partnerships in the medium and near future. So we look at things slightly differently from a balance sheet, obviously. Growth for us. Well, first, I'd like to just gently push back on the contention that everything's going down. Another really important point to get across is we are an incredibly diversified organisation now. We underwrite 148 lines of business, which is extraordinary, and we're very proud of it. And to be honest, city mark, a lot of those are, if you like, not headline grabbing lines of business, people tend to focus endlessly on big airplanes and big ships and property risks and earthquakes and hurricanes, because that's kind of the DNA of this industry. And it's also the most potential grabbing kind of sexy stuff in our industry. But there's lots of other business that doesn't necessarily hit the headlines, which is different pricing cycle. So our overall RPI, as we put it, our real price index for our portfolio year to date is 105. And there are many, many areas of our business bear in mind we're going to transact well over five and a half billion dollars a premium this year. A lot of that premium again doesn't hit the headlines, but it's up five is up 10 added to which, you know, because we are leading underwriters, we are thought leaders, we're price makers in everything we do. We lead over 95% of our business. Here we are, commanding a differential to, certainly to certain sections of the market, as rates often in certain areas, and we've seen this movie many times before, verticalization, i.e. different pricing for exactly the same risk tends to come roaring back, as it were. And we're seeing that now, and we're seeing on many places when it says a spread of maybe 40 points from the best price to the lowest price, which is remarkable when you think about it for the exact same percentage points, percentage points, that's enormous. And we've seen it before, this isn't anything new, and we like to think that we position ourselves at the very top of that. So those are some ways in which we mitigate price reductions in certain areas of the portfolio, but the other big engine of growth for us is pinewalks. So pinewalk, as you know, is our NGA division. We have doubled the number of cells in the last year in pinewalk to 16. When we first did the bifurcation, I confidently predicted, and I was a little bit optimistic about the amount of time it would take that we would act as a magnet for talent in the industry. Clive Washburn is a well-known exemplar of this. Clive, fantastic market figure. We had a conversation in 2021, I think, about him coming across. And what Clive wanted to do is get back to underwriting, to dealing with brokers, which he's past master out, and away from what you might call the more bureaucratic side of life, particularly in public companies. We did a deal, we welcomed him in. He's gone on to write, talking about $450 million of premium this year, sort of the biggest marine insurers in the world. And then when you add them to what we do at the Finaleist Partnership, we're right up there and they had a $700 million mark, which is huge in the marine world, possibly the biggest. And what was intoxicating to Clive was just not having to deal with what he would probably call admin, and just get on with deal-making and underwriting. And this is the pinewalk story. And as time has gone on, and we proved out the business model, we've had more and more people coming to us to set up their own sales. We're now up to 16, I think. And that offer, it's not just that you're part of the Finaleist Partnership, but you're only your own part of that partnership. You are, but you're also part of something much bigger. So JP Chair's a meeting we have on a Tuesday, I shouldn't give away all our seat consults here, but he chairs a meeting on a Tuesday, which is attended by me, by him, by all our senior underwriters at the Finaleist Partnership, but also by all our pinewalk sales. And I often describe my job as the joiner up in chief. It's such a big organisation now. We do so many things in so many countries through so many different platforms that you've got to be constantly thinking about joining up, about cross-selling, about cross-traveling. We've got people traveling at any one time to every quarter of the world. It's very important when they do that. They have fact sheets, which they can hand out, detailing what we do, where, when, who does it, and joining up the dots, and we do that, I think, uniquely well-marked. Indeed, a lot of people that join us say, oh my god, this is so refreshing. We actually get to talk to our colleagues and join up the offering, rather than being stuck in a silo. It's not for everybody because you've got to work bloody hard, and you've got to be an entrepreneur. It's your business. We own the majority of the equity, but it's your business. You do the work. You do the work. And if you can't be bothered, then it ain't going to be a success. So it's a high bar, but I think every cell we've got into Pine Walker has been a roaring success. So that's quite a long answer to your question. That's how we achieve that. That's good. Within that 105, obviously, there's going to be some that in the 90s or 80s, any that you can single out. So this is not as good as it used to be. I want to be lighting up on. I think for our portfolio, the way we look at it is some of the sub-components within those classes will be done. And then you have to think about the mix between what's new business that is loss impacted from those classes, which is positive. Those are the type of products in class of business that for Dallas, because they are first in the queue to come to because of the service levels that we offer and solutions that we're able to offer the clients that we're able to get positive reading on those. So between splitting out what's pure renewal, some of that, yes, definitely risk adjusted off, but then kind of balancing the new business plus the new growth due to the travel, due to the cross-selling, cross-collaboration with all of our business units and Pine Walker. It's how we're able to get that overall 105 that Richard has mentioned. The only other thing I just had to that mark is it's also about how you access a given peril. So for example, Cal Quake earlier on this year, some of the XOL renewals are pretty disappointing. So we pivoted to proportional writings where the original rates on home and his business in California are still roaring up because of the wildfires. So sometimes the matter of not just the peril, but how you access it in the supply chain. And in fact, we must have put the wildfires to bed. Obviously, when I'm a journalist, you know, every time there's a big loss, we always look and see how it's distributed, what happened, what we've learned from it. Was it what we expected? Was it priceful? Was it actually planned for? From an underwriting perspective, how did it pan out for you? What did you learn? From our perspective, that loss was four times greater than any wildfire before it was a huge market changing event in terms of its size and is something that we would expect it to be of that size. So that's what insurance is for. It's for when those big events happen that you pay those claims. The thing around the underwriting side, lessons learned, yes, we look at the underlying price and yes, we look at the underlying aggregations. We have further developed all that just like we would do post any major event. And then as the risk allocator model within TFP now, we get to look at that new risk. And then we make sure we are charging appropriately and can take advantage of some of the rich changes that have come through post last on those programs. Again, just add to that, we were going back to the sort of hard driving qualities we were so proud of at TFP. We were the first to get out and visit people like Mercury. Post last effect, we were the first and they were enormously appreciative. And we help guide their thoughts about how they go about reading their insurance programs. You look at the manufacturers results over those quarters and you see, well, this is a fantastic advertisement for the insurance industry. For the global insurance industry, you're talking about a very large gross loss and a manageable net loss. And it's exactly what they would want to happen. Indeed, and I should mention that the fluorescent insurance group were complemented by numerous partners on being one of the first markets to pay the claims. Sometimes claims can be a pay cannot business, but sometimes they're just absolutely bang on, pay them as quickly as you can, allow your clients to rebuild their capital and move on. The one thing about the wildfire loss, it was already on the map. It was absolutely on the map, but now it's going to be on every insurance regulator zone in all 50 states and everywhere else. If it wasn't on their map before, they didn't think it was a potential problem in their territory. Of course, we even had wildfires in Scotland this summer. Always, the unexpected seems to happen everywhere. Other losses talking about moral payquans, probably now, given court judgments, it's a time to put the aviation war losses to bed. Again, you'll be able to tell me whether it's completely put to bed or not. Any learnings from there? I think the question is about putting to bed for the fluorescent insurance group, but it's from an underwriting perspective. Yes, but lessons like short, I will commend them for dealing with it very proactively, reserving early, reserving at scale, and if you will, getting the bad knees behind them, and I think they serve a lot of credit for that. I think the major lessons to be learned here is all of us watch the build-up on the Ukrainian border and all told ourselves, there's no way the Russians are going to evade, and we lulled ourselves into a collective sense of false composure and comfort. We, at the photos departure, will not be doing that again. We have all sorts of intelligence feeds now, and they are not confined to the sort of dare, I say, fairly cliché sort of UK-based ex-Army officer type things. There's a place for those guys, but we have intelligence feeds from all over the world. We live in a multi-polar world, and we have live intel from places like Beijing, Taipei, and obviously Taiwan, China is on people's minds. We would be very alive to any significant build-up or preparations for any sort of hostilities on the Taiwan straight. We have also, on our aviation book, pretty much uniquely, gone on to 48 hours notice. It is pretty amazing to us to be on a city mark that the market as a whole is still on 7 days. 7 days can be eternity in a situation like that. It's a long time, so we're on 48 hours. We don't use those notices slightly. The airlines are our partners, and with Dare I say we've written a lot of very, very profitable, indeed clean premium on both marine and aviation war since the Russian invasion, but certainly we would not be caught in that thing like that again. Yes, so it's really about being more nimble, being more ready, and really trying to imagine what could go wrong. Where? Absolutely, and this is a theme I did want to explore at the appropriate points today, Mark, because there's a good saying, which I think is very applicable to our industry, success is 90% perspiration, 10% inspiration. Most of it is just showing up and working hard. The other saying I like is 90% of life is just showing up. We showed that post-COVID, and we were the first back into the office. We were the first company to be back to five days on the office. We were very proud of that. We're in a business where we have to service our clients, and sadly when the Sudanese civil war blew up, it started to unfold over a weekend, and our team was straight into the office on the Saturday to look at our exposures and take appropriate actions. That's what you have to do. We're in an events-driven business. The fact that our industry as a whole is operating Tuesday to Thursday in a bit on Monday and Friday if you're lucky, and forget about the weekend, this is not good enough. It is not good enough. We had an example just last Friday where a broker called us, and they had a shortfall on a construction risk in the Middle East, and they had to get cover by Saturday and breaking ground. It was an immediate need. They had a shortfall. We were able to price it at a differential, and I was personally involved, so I had a marine cell where our hatchery is on a Friday night and a Saturday morning, and the brokers couldn't get hold of anybody else, Mark. I don't think this is talked about enough. I think that's disgraceful. We should be available. We are on an events-driven business. My past battles were lawyers to get them to open up at the weekend and during the Gulf War are well known, but it carries on in many ways. I think it's well supposed COVID. People just aren't available, and I don't think that's good enough. We do things very differently. What about flows of business, obviously, spoken about the price of business, and the rate adequacy of that business, about the flows that were changing, and ebbing and flowing, operating mostly in the specialty in the excess and surplus world in London and Bermuda, how those flows holding up, obviously, as that cycle often changes, and we know that there is inflows and outflows between the admitted and the excess and surplus lines market. How's submission flow holding up? Our submission flow has been incredible. In 2024, it grew 23% to nearly 17,000 submissions, and obviously, at TFP, obviously, our ability to offer meaningful line-size-across placements means that we might typically have lower submission numbers than others, but here at 17,000, and as that September this year, we're already at that number, so being expected another 20, 25% this year. Whatever the market's doing, it's certainly not turning in on itself and still facing towards you and asking for your opinion. Exactly, and to the point Richard made earlier on, how we host these meetings, how we're all joined up across with different pay-mox sales, how we're now up to 16 different sales across over 140 classes of business, means that that's a real big driver for continued seeing everything and being in top three and everything that we do and really growing that submission volume. What about the insurance market? I don't know if that's more of a question I would ask to the other side of that, but as an underwrite of the insurance, what's the market like at the moment? Again, we're not a market tracker mark. We lead the vast majority of our business. We travel a lot. If only enough, we're just running through as a team last night, the number of meetings that we have at the rendezvous. We have 118 meetings. Of those, probably, no more than half a traditional category insurance meetings, probably more like a third. Most of them are multi-class meetings with carriers, who interestingly have gone from viewing us as competition to a source of business because we are that rather unique thing now on the insurance spectrum, the value chain, of being a risk allocator. So we are actually not competing with many of the big names who are down here in Monte Carlo. We are, in many cases, a prized source of distribution because we do originate business that others don't from parts of the world that others don't. And we have, again, that diversification across all those asset classes. So it's not just about reinsurance here, but I do think our reinsurance account is something we're very proud of and we think it's really quite differentiated. We'll write over a billion dollars this year for our various capital partners, mainly the insurance group. We have a shared concern about climate change and frequency. So we are positioning our exposures at a level where they're only going to be paying out if there's something big, which will mean we get a lot of recoveries, but also we'd expect to see meaningful market change. So I like where we're positioned and I don't regard us as being writing a kind of typical reinsurance account. In a sense, it's not right for me to be asking you as a buyer of reinsurance. That's not your job anymore, is it? What it is, actually, is one of our delegated functions under the agreement we have with the insurance group is to go out and buy reinsurance for them. I mean, it's a very collaborative process. Danny Barrett has obviously a lot of experience in that world and he's got some strong contacts and strong views, but we do lead that function for our various account. For our market traders, you really know. For our Lloyds partners, we buy all the reinsurance for Lloyds in close collaboration with the IG. Yeah, and as a buyer, how those conversations, particularly with alternative markets, those ILS markets, when we've had previous conversations down here at Monte Carlo maybe three or four years ago, you'd say that the market was shut then. What's it like now? I would say the ILS is much less of a force than they were in the past. I think they struggled to reload. I don't think many of them have anything convincing or plausible to say about climate change, and we still have the absurdity of these pricing models which are stuck in the 20th century. So nothing's changed. We see more historical pricing. We see you every year, Mark, and nothing seems to change. That does explain why there's just no new capital coming apart from retained earnings. There's no new capital. Yeah, that was going to say that growth that we'd seen, the nominal growth in the ILS seems to be mostly retained earnings. Exactly. You knew your money. Absolutely. Yeah. Actually, on the question of frequency, when you're talking to buyers, one of the talking points per redone at Monte Carlo is if the market has changed ever so slightly, we had the reset three years ago where all reinsurance was able to move away from a traditional loss completely in reset attachment points so that did not reoccur. Under what circumstances might you build, consider writing frequency only when it's incredibly rare amount of frequency. Say if we have an average of 10, if you wrote an excess of 15, then you'd say, maybe I don't know. I wouldn't want to put words in. For me, it's when you can comfortably price for it. So if you've got comfort in the underlying client, underlying portfolio, if you're comfortable with your overall exposure in a given region territory, and if you can't structure a deal that works for both of you on the class, then you can come to something that might work. Yes. So back to sort of, there is no such thing as a bad risk. It's a bad structure and bad premium. Yeah. I mean, there's a price for everything. I've always said that. But also bear in mind, now we represent multiple capital platforms. They have slightly different risk appetites and reporting cadences. So for example, Lloyd's reports annually, whereas the insurance group reports quarterly. I don't think Danny Burris wants to be talking about a cloud burst in Copenhagen or a snow storm in Slovenia in his quarterly earnings calls. And I don't blame him because it just attracts a ridiculous amount of attention. You spend weeks dealing with all the questions. And so what? Whereas Lloyd's reporting annually has more tolerance for those. So again, what we're able to do is shape our offerings such that we feel, if you like, the risk buckets of each capital partner, that the holistic offering is very attractive to the client because they can have some frequency cover by Lloyd's have a severity cover by the insurance group and stuff in between from both. There's all dealt with by the same underwriters. And as an overall package, it's very attractive to them. Forever, you know, in the aviation market, people have always had deductible buybacks, haven't they? But there's not something that everybody wants to write. Or is it necessary, very efficient to write? Well, maybe I don't know now with higher interest rates, is there a bucket? And that there's less friction, perhaps with a more digitised market, which is less frictional costs, might there be more appetite for what we used to call money swapping? Basically, if you're earning 5% on cash, it's not bad. Yeah, if you go back to my previous point, I think there will be some things that we look at and say that just doesn't work. We aren't in it for cash swapping. If you can construct your portfolio and you can have certain deals that will run a typically a higher loss ratio, but are less volatile and fit the overall performance on portfolio returns for that capacity, then yes, but something for money swapping, I would say. No. What would you say if we're in an interest position for lots of retained earnings, and I would guess where you are philosophically on this, when you have excess capital, what should you do with it? Generally, I presume you'd say you should give it back. We're not a balance sheet, Mark, so no, I know. It's already a question for us. No, but you're just an opinion. As an opinion, as we're talking about balance sheets, would do with excess cash? Well, I think they should return it. I mean, when I was running Lancashire, we pioneered the concept of the special dividend, and it was enormously popular with shareholders, and it's since been widely adopted by others. And the premise of that was, if you've got excess capital and nothing to do with it, give it back. But I'd see more of that. You're a leader in everything you do, and that's what you just said. Other leaders are now pioneering a new form of underwriting. It's not necessarily new. I mean, it's been around forever. I mean, it's like writing a proportional treaty, portfolio underwriting, tracker underwriting, more capital-focused underwriting, using better data than we used to have, and perhaps more technology. That seems to be coming part of the toolkit. Is it part of the toolkit that you're just saying I'm not interested in? When we're looking at automatic semi-automatic algorithmic, what do we want to call it? And there are so many different flavors of the same thing. Broke facilities. Things that are certainly on the face of it are becoming much more sophisticated. You can get in the weeds, and you can get your technologists really in the weeds on these things. And if you can get the data, would you consider something that could be a good right? Not really. It's just a risk. I mean, it's another risk for any other. Yeah, but it's a risk paying less premium with higher commissions. That's fair enough. That is the bottom line. You're getting less money than last year, and you're paying higher commissions. However much you dress it up with all the algorithms and the tech, I mean, I mean, you've got a half a point mark. There is a greater ability to slice and dice what you participate in. It's not just a binary thing to rewrite the A on all the marsh global full follow facilities. More sophisticated now. I accept that. But still, the fundamental is your taking risks. You're reducing the premium and you're adding additional commission. And that's not what we want to do. And I suppose if you're already under 1845 classes, you've already got diversification. So you don't need diversification in that sense that, you know, if you were a monoline, you could say, well, I'd yeah, it makes sense. I'm a mono. I'm only one or two or three lines. I'm really good at. And then I can then decrease my cost of capital by writing this in this way. It might make sense. But then you're not balance sheet business so you don't have to worry about that. Indeed. I think it's about relevance. We get back to our leadership stats and the multiplicity of our lines of business and our sheer hard work and availability. We like to think we are incredibly relevant and helpful to brokers. And I think they would all admit that sometimes they didn't like our price. Sometimes they find us a little bit hard driving in terms of demanding the right allocations, the right signings on risks. But at least with their, I've never been a broker. But I think if I were a broker, what I would want is an answer, not a bunch of out-of-office emails coming back. And we're there when it matters. And JP made an interesting point earlier in the context of AI is hard to see how AI replicates that Friday night call when everybody else has switched off their phones. Well, at least AI is on. Yeah. It's on. So if it can answer that question, a, the computer can give you a answer, at least it's on. Rather than being on out-of-office, it probably won't give you an intelligible answer, which is the main problem. I'll assume. You already mentioned about the dynamics of the market in the digitized world. These dynamics of the market obviously in aviation have always been this case, this verticalization. We're starting to see that and it seems that the digitized world with less friction or zero friction is starting to bring this back to the fore. What do you think the dynamics of the digitized market? You already mentioned about verticalization of pricing and having leader and then leader minus X for everybody else. Do you think we're going to see much more of that? I would love if you could have better data quality, you could have more standardized flow of submission information, if the AI could improve workflows that you get deals to the underwriters desk quicker. But I don't feel it's there yet in our industry, in particular, where it can make those decisions, where a client has a problem. You want to have an innovative solution. You need some new wordings, something that needs tailored to the client. The AI digital process isn't there yet. I don't think it can answer a phone call. I don't think it can develop that relationship when you go visit a client. As much as it's great to see it developing, it's great to see these digitalization in the industry progressing, I think it's a long, long way from where we don't like to sit. This is not going to start getting the weeds about your claims control versus your claims cooperation clause and the actual wording. What that clause actually says and the difference between one and the other. Exactly. Or changing it post-loss, where you're looking at radius clauses for a wildfire event and how it should interact. It's going to take something off a shelf and propose it and an underwriter may just say yes, without really reading or understanding it. Yes, again, so we can all trade shares of BP because they're all identical to each other and this is not quite the same and it's never quite the same and it's always been the case. Again, reinsurance has to be backed to back on the original and that's not always the case either and of course that's often deliberately not the case. What about AI? We can be sitting in 2025 and not talk about AI and I know in previous conversations which we've had conversations about technology and you having that four sides of embedding the technologies with your underwriters so they actually all talk to each other. How's it been going in terms of experimenting with AI and finding out what it's good at and so have you had any good experiments that you think great we're going to carry on doing this because they've been credibly productive. It's great at getting better. It's not there yet but it's great at getting better at cleansing information coming in from submissions so the specialty market in particular is less structured. It's getting better at cleansing that information and being able to pass it through a pricing model, pass it through wordings to get it to an underwriter. So that's where I mentioned earlier. I think that is something that is getting better and that's where we're really pushing it. It's on the submission flow to get that through as quick as possible, get a model of price as quick as possible and get it in front of an underwriter. So the classic thing whether it's the broker's emails got a PDF and two spreadsheets attached to it. Exactly. We can read through the PDF. You can extract information from the spreadsheets. You can throw that through and then have an underwriter have a look at a proposed pricing. So that's been the moment where you can say right this is really useful. This is increasing productivity and means we can get back to that broker much quicker. But the problem is the quality of the data coming from the broker. So we had a wrist last week in Myanmar where there was just no information from the broker about all of the issues in Myanmar. Sad is a civil war going on. There's sanctions. It's complicated stuff. There's sanctioned individuals. There was no information. So AI could only go so far. Sometimes we just have to go and do it ourselves and in that case we found ourselves doing the work ourselves. Yeah. Back to the old bespoke roll up the sleeves, get the intel. Yeah. I think AI will be years away from being able to deal with that level of complexity on a lot of our portfolio. What about new risks and the new classes of business that seem to be emerging with carbon credit risk? I was even talking to someone recently about the scaling up of nuclear fusion. There's not a lot of things going on and of course just good old renewables still new and still of course scaling up massively. Any of those more nascent classes of business that you're particularly excited about and pleased that you're getting involved in? A good example of that is Novigen. It's a pain walk cell. We started in Q4 last year focusing on renewables. That's the growing space. In terms of fusion and carbon, I think we're always looking at new products to see how we can be innovative and create something that becomes a product. The difficulty is always data. So it's how do you know what you're covering, how you're structuring the wordings and how do you know that the price will be acceptable to provide profitable business for their capacity? So definitely interested in all of those things, but the stumbling block will always be, can you get to something that is a viable product? A great example of something that we did back early 2016-2017 was related to aviation financing. That is something that we developed the product for, created the wording, got comfortable around the pricing. We have a pain walk cell called the TASCA, which is really the market leading goal to place for that business. So that's the case where we have done it, and it's showing that something that TFPs I was pushing to do. The innovation problem, of course, is the classic broker goes to Underwriter and the Underwriter said, "Where's the ten-year loss record?" And you go, "Well, there isn't one because it's nuclear fusion. It hasn't happened yet. Can you help me pioneer this thing?" Maybe I could do a 1% netline. But I've certainly spoken to some people to say that this is where AI may be very useful to create a synthetic loss record when none exists because it's forward-looking. And also, in a lot of industries, they're using AI to design those products, for example, to build a satellite. They're using a lot of that technology. The product itself, the thing I'm being asked to ensure, is being designed in a much more intelligent way, so therefore I could be more comfortable with it. Do you think that might be a good use of AI in the future in terms of innovation? Yes, where AI has models that can turn through thousands and thousands and thousands of PhDs and all sorts of academia, then that will be a very powerful tool to, I guess, just crunch numbers, but faster, crunch analysis faster to help understand what if, what should the price be, what could the claims' historical experience be, even if you don't have any. Getting near to the end of my questions, we mentioned that the Syndicate haven't had an update on how's that going. The Lloyd Syndicate sounds like you're very happy. Very happy and very, very impressed by the Lloyd's management team, I think, from Patrick Downe, Rachel Dorne, all the people we do with a bit, absolutely, first class. What did they want from us? They wanted Lloyd's to fight back. The Lloyd's I grew up in was a lead market in pretty much everything we did with a 40, 50, 60, 70, said market share. Now often Lloyd's has got a single-digit market share and has been a following market for years. Lloyd's rightly wanted to turn that around. One of the things that we've really noticed with our clientele is that Lloyd's brand still has huge appeal all over the world, and that's enabled us to increase shares, to take even more strong leadership positions on a whole range of business across our portfolio. Lloyd's wanted underwriting discipline, and I talked to those guys a lot about that. It's terribly important, particularly now that there are signs of ill discipline, and believe me, we see some stupid stuff, I mean, some epically stupid stuff. We saw a risk last week in Puerto Rico, which has been priced with no exclusion for a weather system, which is now dissipated, but as of what Wednesday, Thursday last week was looking like it would turn into a full-on hurricane, and people were writing this risk with no exclusion for the current weather system. Unbelievable, highly irresponsible. Lloyd's quite rightly wants to see an end to that sort of ill discipline, and I do think I've got a well-earned reputation for strong underwriting discipline, I don't know, that they want thought leadership, they want price-making, and we've delivered on all of that, and they in turn have been very flexible about our growth plans, and it's a terrific partnership, but I'd also like to mention Hamdons, we won on a award last week, it's normally the outskirts of Kiss of Death when you win an industry award, but we won on a award for partnership of the year between Fidelis Partnership and Hamdons. They've been amazing. I think the name's capital had been patronised and marginalised quite unfairly. It's an extraordinary source of capital, very loyal, very knowledgeable about what we do, and we were delighted to pioneer, I think the first exclusively name syndicate for decades, certainly at any sort of scale, and Hamdons have grown with us, have the other members agents on the syndicate, and it's been a terrific three-way collaboration. But you mentioned really at the beginning about potential new capital partnerships, again, anything you can say so far. We have got conversations underway, not quite able to talk about it yet, but we hope to have much more to say very soon. And again, it's all in pursuit of this holy grail, Mark, and we're rapidly advancing towards that holy grail of the multi-platform risk allocator. Yes, the insurance group is our sibling company, they're literally on the 43rd floor, on the 42nd floor of 22b of skate, we talk all the time, and they are our main capital partner, and probably always will be, but there are others because we have a very clear binding authority with the insurance group, which is very clear about what's in scope and what's out of scope, and that's often around credit ratings, around counterparty limits, about risk appetite, but there's also softer conversations around how much of this risk you want, so we talk all the time. I'm proud of the fact that we provide a level of information to the insurance group, which is quite unparalleled in the market. I mean, you look at a lot of these MGA's, and it's a quarterly border, if you're lucky, and the detail is scratchy to non-existent, we're daily contact, and I think that's extraordinary, sometimes it's a little bit overwhelming, but it's an extraordinary relationship, but it's unique. You don't want some second-guessing, if they've got a live feed of everything you're doing, it could be-- I know, we do the uncertain-- We do the underwriting, that's clear, but we're incredibly transparent, and we're proud of that. Again, it goes back to Pinewall. Why do people want to come and join Pinewall? Well, alongside all the other attractions, we have 10-year rolling paper from the insurance group, and we have names, capital lois, which is just about as sticky as it gets, versus, as you know, a lot of these MGA's where they have annual capital. That's an annual sort of damacles. If that's sold fools, it's over. My last question would be going back into this real world, this complicated world, increasingly more complicated and multi-polar world, which is wondering what your first thoughts have been on the effects for insurance, and re-insurance of the imposition of tariffs on trade with the US. It's been, I would say, very-- I wouldn't say minimal, but we've been able to handle it pretty comfortably. We have a lot of American clients and brokers that we value massively, and many of those relationships go about decades, and we will always be very loyal to them. We're out in force of the Whizier Conference next week. I think one of the biggest allegations of any underwriting organization, and that's a sign of how much we value those clients. We are very close to our retailers, in America like a client, you know, who control vast sues of municipal business in America. We know these guys personally. We never run a home run around the wholesalers. They're obviously very important too, but we know our retailers. I would say to the underwriters know who your retailer is, because ultimately those are the guys who control the business. But we live in a multi-polar world, as you rightly say. So the meeting in Tangent last week was striking in the sense that leaving aside your political views, there was probably over 40% of global GDP in that room. Yeah, and our industry as a whole does a terrible job of trading outside of North America, Western Europe, Japan and Australia. Shocking. We think on average in our world, it's probably about 5% of premium versus 40% of global GDP. That's not good enough. We're already at about 15, 16% I'd say, and I want to get that up to 25, 30% within the next three years. So Charlie Mathias, my deputy chairman, is in charge of what we call our BRICS Plus initiative. Obviously, the R is moot because they're sanctions, but Brazil, India, China, huge economies, and there's all the countries that have since joined, and we're constantly traveling, we're constantly looking at distribution channels and to see how we can do better. And that's another key source of growth for us Mark. But in terms of those tariffs on the US market, obviously the importer pays, just sounds like it's just something you have to feed into your loss assumptions, because rebuilding a US property is going to, on the face of it, cost more than it did before. Exactly right, and that's the exact sort of work that we conducted as soon as all those different mechanics that you mentioned, cost of claims going up, cost of timber going up, cost of claims going up because of delays, impact on B.I. All of those elements. But in terms of us, as you're working to make sure that from a fidelist partnership point of view, you're going to catch your share of that well-trade that is happening without relation to the US. Absolutely. It's been really good talking to you. Thanks so much for taking up some time at Monte Carlo. It only remains me to say thank you so much and hopefully we're booking the time to do this all again next year, but thank you so much. Very welcome. Thank you. 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The Voice of Insurance podcast is produced in association with Advantage Go, enabling enterprise scale underwriting through a single pane of glass. Voice of Insurance is produced by me, Mark Gagan. Music was written by Anna Gagan and produced by Carlos Gagan. Check out more podcasts and written comment pieces at www.thevoiceofinsurance.com