Richard Brindle: the unique matrix of The Fidelis Partnership

Hello and welcome to Behind the Headlines brought to you by Insurance Insider. I'm your host Sam Casey and this is our first episode for 2026. As ever I would urge you to subscribe to the show which you can do on our website or on your podcast platform with choice. Today's guest is one of the London markets most recognisable and successful entrepreneurs, the Fidelis partnership CEO Richard Brindle. Richard made a name early in his career underwriting alongside John Charman, their Mentons found and eventually float the insurer Lancashire. At the Fidelis partnership he's built a unique business, an underwriting entity with a diverse spread of capital support including a listed balance sheet. The firm now also boasts two Lloyd syndicates as well as an MGA incubator pine walk. Richard told me that the distinct model is the best thing he's built in his career and means the Fidelis partnership is not a competitor to traditional balance sheet reinsurers but rather a valuable source of distribution. The network of the matrix of relationships we have now is pretty extraordinary and what's very interesting to me and what's very vindicating in terms of our business model which is he rightly saying thank you for that unique. He's how the really smart companies like Renry have come to regard us as transry, genry, these type of people really professional re-entures, don't regard us as competitors, they regard us as a distribution source and our relations are calibrated accordingly and that's brilliant because that's what we are. We are a sense of business and we're not a competitor, we're not a balance sheet. I thought it would take people longer to get their heads around that but it hasn't. Before we come to that kick off of 2026, the insurance insider team has been working hard to establish which themes are set to be the most influential this year. To discuss our findings, I am joined by insurance insider editor Fiona Robertson. Fiona, welcome back to the show and a happy new year. Same to you Sam. I mean it's no secret from suddenly on the reinsurance side or the broker reports we've had out the market is softening and this is definitely going to be a sixth trend for the year but as we look at that a bit more granular, what are the kind of real elements of the cycle which will be noteworthy to watch closely in 2026? So I think it is definitely, last year I think we called 2025 a bit of a transition year for the market in this year is going to be where that really starts to be felt. I think the first one is probably just obviously watching the pace of softening and how it goes from here both on re-insurance and primary markets but more broadly I think because of that softening that you're going to see some knock on impacts and probably the one that everybody will get excited about including us obviously will be M&A because as you get into a softer market people start to look for new ways to find growth and consolidation and ownership change will be I think a big one. Then there'll probably be other knock on impacts like expense savings and you know how do people try to become more efficient that will still be a focus. A big emerging trend we've seen in the last couple of years has been around facilitation and brokers launching lots of these vehicles. It's probably now to the extent that the market is more facilitated really than we've ever seen before. How might that develop this year as we enter that next phase of the cycle? What are the things to watch? It is going to be a really interesting one to watch and that facilitation is all part of that efficiency drive as well or the grab for business on the carrier side. We've come through the one one renewals where some of the big facilities renew and so far we've only heard publicly about a couple of renewals where they were flat so ACT and M1s amplify and that I think points to the sort of maturity of the space and the fact that they may have got to the scale they want to but I think I'm sure the brokers will be trying to find new facilities to launch and monetize so it could come through in terms of watching for commission pressure extra commissions or it could come through in terms of just more facilities you know whether that's monoline or other firms that haven't yet got a big cross-class facility there's not very many of them left now but you know new types of firms might be looking to do bigger facilities so for the follow market as well that's where if you're not in the game it becomes a concern and you know where that capital goes I don't know that anybody really knows yet that will be something to watch and see and your historic area of expertise Vienna is the ILS market which has been going through a bit of a boom time in terms of camp bond issuance and also an increasing diversification of what kind of areas of the market that these camp bonds are covering do you think where do you similar boom market this year? Love the ILS market such a great market and it has been a very competitive one at one one but I was slightly ashamed to have realized that I was a little bit behind on what we were tracking towards for annual issuance in 2025 when I looked at the numbers and realized just how big of a year it had been I think you sometimes get lost in the headlines and when you look at the total you realize gosh that's quite incredible where used to be so there was you know more than 23 billion assist a title insurance insider ILS tallied up in terms of volume throughout last year and they've spoken to broker dealers forecasting the outlook for this year and it's it's quite similar really so another 20 billion year and just a couple of years ago that would have been a really big lift for the ILS market and this is just on the camp bond side as well that's one corner of the ILS market and the one that's been the busiest in the past few years but not the sole part of it by any means so I think that there will be more volume continuing there's also a lot of mature issues coming through the camp bond space though so if you look at sort of new new volumes that might slightly taper back and obviously there has been a lot of pressure on rates already so it could be the case that cat bonds spreads start to find their floor perhaps and while remaining a very important part of capacity for sponsors could be that we've seen the most acute pressure in terms of competition so far but I think definitely we'll still be an active year for that market. Good time to be an ILS then. Yes well I think it might be time for me to ask you some questions Sam. Yes go ahead. Essentially what we're talking about here is what do we need to be thinking about for the year ahead? It was quite interesting that in the 1-1 renewals reports you know there's all the usual chat about rates and what's going on in different markets but almost all the major firms really focused on data centers and what data center business could bring to the market so what are the highlights of what people are hoping to see or what can be achieved do you think. The whole discussion around data centers in the market seemed to begin around conferences and when we were just beginning to get inklings that it was viewed to be a big thing for the industry and since then there's just been a crescendo and now you can barely tune into an earnings call as you say reader reinsurance report without mention of data centers and the opportunity for the industry. The boom in data centers is being driven by the similar activity growth in artificial intelligence which everyone knows about both from reading the news and also using chat GPT to fulfill any mundane day-to-day tasks and because of the growth of AI the construction of data centers in order to support that is set to be pretty monumental funny money trillions of dollars and naturally for an industry which is always in search of new opportunities to write business that's music to the years of insurance and re-insurance in terms of how big the opportunity will be some of the big players in the industry have actually come out there and put some numbers on it. Aeon for example the Sierra Gregg case and some recent earnings calls sets the opportunity will sustain and monumental and Aeon as a brokerage have estimated that by 2030 alone the premium volume tied onto data centers could be in the region of $10 billion. So it's a big deal and it's definitely going to be an emerging theme. There's also naturally challenges with any kind of emerging business like this one thing which is emerging for data centers some of the construction projects are simply so massive the insurance limits being sort of really stretching the capabilities of the industry they're in the multiples of billions of dollars. So whilst there's clearly going to be a lot of activity there it's also going to require some innovative thinking in order to help facilitate that real cyclical shift and economic activity. Yes I think the aggregation risk must be what everybody's worrying about possibly alongside hoping that all the activity keeps going but I think you know it will be interesting to see whether some more splicing and dicing of the risk goes on going back to the ILS market. I know some suggestions are that they could perhaps get involved in taking some of the net-cap risk associated with it so that might help. Yes and as you say people are excited about the opportunity of the new business but we've seen in other emerging areas renewable energy for example that when you go ahead long into these more approach typical type technologies sometimes you can end up being faced with some unexpected lost activity. The tech stocks just seem to be gaining lore so I'm sure that the insurance industry will be hoping to get there slice of interest. I guess more broadly speaking that the headlines as we've gone into this year have been very much focused on geopolitical volatility which we picked as one of our themes for 2026 didn't have long to see that play out in reality. What do you think insurers will be up against on the geopolitical front this year? Donald Trump in the US administration kicking off the year by sweeping into the Venezuela and picking up its presidents and taking it back to New York on the Trump's charges just underlines the ongoing volatility in the geopolitical climate which insurers and brokers are navigating. Then we still have the active war and negotiations around Ukraine, a fragile oil ceasefire in Gaza so there's no shortage of things for people to consider. For the London market it's one of the key centres of war type insurance so really monitoring all these developments and underwriting around them making sure that global trade can still flow is going to be key consideration for the likes of the marine and political violence markets. The tensions between China and Taiwan remain a really key focus for that market and whether that is going to be impacted at all by what the US is doing and how China retaliates is certainly something which the very smart people who they employ, who experts in geopolitics, which we'll be thinking about. But more broadly for these international companies there are more big macroeconomic things to think about. Donald Trump's tariff regime, Swiss Rehearsal has already hit premium growth thanks to the impact it's had on the global economy and insurers also hold huge asset books which can be impacted by these sorts of developments. So I think it's definitely going to be something which is going to be on the top considerations for companies this year. Like you say sometimes it can be those knock-on implications can't it because when you look at a country like Venezuela where there's been sanctions in place the war markets tend to be quite nimble about having adjusted their portfolios or indeed not being able to offer cover it. So in this case we wouldn't be expecting necessarily an impact immediately would we? Yes I think in Venezuela suddenly for the marine side the cause that goes into that country which are not such sanctions are pretty negligible but as you say the situation has changed very quickly and they have to be very nimble in responding. But I think that's all we've got time for today for you and it but thanks for coming on again and by the sounds of it there's going to be plenty for us to continue reporting on in 2026. Yes we'll keep tuning in. The Fidelis Partnership CEO Richard Brindle is one of the London markets best known CEOs. Richard doesn't shy away from speaking his mind and in this interview he goes into real depth about the strategic rationale of the Fidelis Partnership's business model and its plans in the future. I hope you enjoy our discussion. Richard thanks for coming on the show and happy new year. Thank you. Given we're speaking in the first week of January I think it makes sense maybe if we start off by touching on the one more renewals. Re-insurance to start off with when our team were first reporting in mid-December it was a bit of a stampede towards reductions which we detected the brokers have obviously come out putting core property camp business in the double digits. How was the market from your point of view? I spoke to our team in probably first week of December. We obviously realised it was going to be a different type of renewal than we've had in recent years with the dynamic more in favour of buyers and sellers obviously and obviously I've done this for a long time and obviously as a group we've evolved a lot since our bifurcation three years ago. So we are now covering a multiplicity of lines of business and we operate pretty much in every corner of the globe so we now underwrite as a group including PineWalk 148 lines of business and we have a very deliberate and specific strategy as I think you know to develop what we're calling a high growth market business so most of the growth in the world is outside of the OECD and in fact the growth levels are much higher outside of the OECD and it makes perfect sense for us as a business not to be overly reliance on the areas where our industry has traditionally excelled namely USA, Western Europe, Japan or Australia. We have to do better and as I think we've probably covered before Sam our industry probably derives 5% of its premium outside of those areas that's woeful. We as a group are around 12 and a half to 15% at the moment and I want to push that up to 25% in the next couple of years that involves a lot of travel that involves you know being very relevant and useful to our clients around the world to our brokers around the world and in that context I sort of advised the insurance team about how to go about the renewal I said look you've got to be as helpful as you can be to the brokers on the clients. Go early, go big, go multi-line, offer to travel, offer to leave, offer to price, write generally through programs if you can unless it's just horrific. Well it was a renewal where everyone wanted to do more isn't it so I guess you've got to persuade people to give you the time of day. They did want to do more but often in a rather narrow context in other words a lot of the underwriters in Bermuda are just mono-line property excess of loss underwriters that's all they do. Now we do a lot more than that we now have casualty A and H we have surety we have obviously a big specialty capability this is all within the context of reinsurance but we also pivoted in many cases to proportional away for non proportional where the underlying rating was more favorable so you know we've got some very strong relationships around the world on the proportional side now so I think a lot of the guys in Bermuda are kind of one trick ponies if I'm honest with you and yes everybody wanted to grow broke us told us anecdotally pretty much everybody just accepted the FATs and basically said right we'd accept the FATs and can we double our line we didn't do that you know I said to our guys early on we're going to have to come off some business here I don't think we're going to have to come off a huge amount but we will have to come off some if we have clients and I really will absolve the brokers on this they're just doing their job but we had a handful of clients and it only was a handful Sam who were just completely unwilling to have any sort of discussion with us and he simply said those are the FATs of stuffing up your jumper there's nothing you can do about it take it or leave it and in those circumstances we left it because we are very reasonable people but we're pretty big and we're pretty influential and we frankly demand to have a level of dialogue we're always up for a compromise always and I think any of the brokers will tell you that we're tough but we're always here to do a deal but if we're simply being having FATs ram down our throat with no possibility of negotiation that doesn't work for us and was there anything that surprised you about the extent of the softening or was do you think the writing was sort of on the ball if you look at conferences and everyone's wanting to expand the increase of capital I think there was a degree of panic in certain quarters and I think that became more acute as December went on when you account for the fact we rose a lot of post-loss business we were able to do a lot of private deals or semi-private deals and because we are so relevant now to our major clients because we're able to offer not only throughout the property piece including ads selectively new ads can be pretty dangerous but ads can be fine if they're structured properly but also we're able to offer across the whole gamut of products that I've just mentioned and because we went early and because we were always up for a dialogue and tweaking here and there horse trading all of the things underwriters should do and I might add because our underwriters stayed on the island right up until New Year's Eve a lot of people left you know around there was a flight when I was out there on I think the 19th which is a Friday and a lot underwriters left but how does that work if you're underwriting a cat renewal book out of the meter and you leave on the 19th of December I don't understand that so that's where perhaps we do work a bit harder than some of our they're not really our competitors anymore because we're not a balance sheet but some of our peers what's that saying life is 90% perspiration 10% inspiration I think all the brokers would tell you we were there we were always there to pick up the phone right up until New Year's Eve and we were always there to do a deal so we were able to frankly massively outperform the market through a combination of of those factors and taking a step back how was 2025 more broadly for the Fidelis partnership yeah I'm in the second syndicate for example the wonderful year the first Lloyd syndicate 313 has grown now the capacity what he's over a billion dollars now for 2026 our cooperation with Lloyd's has been magnificent on both sides we're very appreciative to Patrick and Rachel of the team of how they welcomed us into Lloyd's we think we fully redeemed our side of the bargain which is that we would provide underwriting discipline price making thought leadership we've done all of those and we've helped Lloyd's we claim ground that it's lost over probably three decades now and a lot of those specialty lines so that's kind of what we said we do we kept our expenses low our expenses for the syndicates are yeah around 4% of gross premium which is very low compared to the market average of 11% so I think we've done everything we said we do we have a fantastic open relationship with Lloyd's we are very critical of some of the more ill-discipline stuff that we're seeing going on and we make our our voice known but hopefully in a constructive way now of course we've done syndicate mark two so yeah can you talk a bit through more about the rational of that syndicate the partnership with Blackstone what it brings which maybe the other names back syndicate doesn't do well first of all I have to pay tribute to havedans you know I think names traditional names have been written off many times over the course of my career and frankly treated with a lack of respect by various people they are actually a wonderful form of capital not any are they enormously patient in the long term and we regard them as semi permanent capital but they're also very knowledgeable about what we do you know a lot of these names really understand our market and they've been very very well represented by John Francis and the team of hamdened so that's important to state that Blackstone is obviously a different form of capital but their capital they've allocated to syndicate two and six comes from I think I'm right in saying they called it their permanent capital fund so that kind of says says what it does on the tin it's a long-term collaboration we have an excellent relationship with Blackstone they did our debt back in the days when credit markers were basically closed and they went out on all of them for us and we've repaid them handsomely they're also actually holders in the Fidelis partnership I think they have from John Gray down a genuine interest in our industry and Lou Salvatore who's our interlocutor in New York is a great partner and friend and I think what I like about that syndicate is it's so diversified some of the business that accepts his intergroup re-insurances of the insurance group and of syndicate three one two three but also because we now ourselves are so diversified we're putting a bit of this bit of that bit of the other it's not particularly catty you know some of these new syndicates and lois these new sponsored syndicates are very very property heavy and you're only quite binary if they're a severe whether a strain of service severe weather events we're not that type of outfit so we think it's going to be a very strong partnership for the future if I look at the structure of the business now I've got the MGU with the balance sheet two Lloyd syndicates yeah an MGA incubator within it it's unique yeah are you pleased with how that's all set up now is it all working as you intended it's the best thing I've done in my career very very proud of what we've achieved I think we had a situation back in 2022 when our original private actually backers wanted liquidity the market at the time was pretty uninteresting in terms of multiples with the balance sheets barely above book it was hard to see how we could you know offer our original private actually backers liquidity at anything approaching an interesting return for them the act of the bifurcation was almost like an act of alchemy was it unlocked an effective goodwill payment which meant that the multiple for the private you guys was you know depending on how long they hold the IG shares for you know not far sure of two times books so that's a great result and what it then did was create the conditions for us to launch the the Fidelis partnership I do want to talk about our relationship with the insurance group because it is fundamental they bear the same name as us they literally are one floor up in this building from us I've known Danny Burroughs since the mid 90s it is a unique relationship and I'll give you a really good example everybody talks about these data centers so when they started coming to market it became clear to me that this was going to be a big opportunity we had to be big and relevant and first responders I always say to our underwriters we have to be a top three market and everything we do that's partly a function of line size he's also part of a function of being very responsive being available 24/7 to brokers which we are I'm like pretty much all of our peers but we had a relatively small line for these DCs under our binding authority with the insurance group we called their CEO in Houston and obviously he spoke to Dan and all those guys and within 24 hours we agreed we mutually agreed it was a really interesting opportunity and made agreed to more than double their line on the DCs we then built a consortium in addition to that so now we have a line approaching $300 million to write on DCs but the point about the IG as we did that in a day now there is no other carrier MGU relationship like that in the world where you could get that sort of thing done so quickly so yes we're big yes it can get complicated yes the risk allocation rules are a little bit mind-boggling sometimes but we built a something very special here sound to your question and I'm enormously proud of it the two words that we used to describe ourselves now are risk allocator we don't really like binkled an MGU traditionally an MGU is a single line of business with annual capacity we've got a hundred and forty eight lines of business we have ten year rolling capacity with the IG we have as I've described semi-permanid capital with Lloyd's and we have permanent capital from the blackstone fund that's a brilliant position to be in again the IG is absolutely our principal relationship and I will remain so for the foreseeable future but these other relationships are paramount too we have eight consortium and loiter we have over 60 outwards quite a share so the network of the matrix of relationships we have now is pretty extraordinary and what's very interesting to me and what's very vindicating in terms of our business model which is usually rightly so and thank you for that unique is how the really smart companies like Renry have come to regard us as transry generally these type of people really professional re-insurance don't regard us as competitors they regard us as a distribution source and our relations are calibrated accordingly and that's brilliant because that's what we are we are also so business that we're not a competitor we're not a balance sheet I thought it would take people longer to get their heads around that but it hasn't and talking about that distribution aim and you've got the bricks plus strategy of building business in those countries how do you achieve that penetration where the industry historically has suddenly failed to achieve a similar traction outside it's North American and European heartland a lot of it is by the way we call it a high growth markets now because I think the trouble is the bricks is Russia sanctions we've concluded India is probably too difficult to market to operate in nothing against India but it's just very bureaucratic and burdensome regulatory wise so we can't really call it bricks anymore but we're calling it high growth markets and I think the simple answer Sam is first of all you've got to have the geopolitical vision you've got to see what's happening in the world it's clearly a multi-polar world it's clear that not everything comes to London anymore and the those who sit in this square mile with that mentality are going backwards not forwards and it's also just much more interesting frankly I intelligent guy would like to think I have a deep knowledge of global affairs it's very interesting to me to trade globally you know one of our underwriters today has a zoom call with somebody in Ulaan Batua in Mongolia that's brilliant I love that kind of thing that's a market which doesn't really been exploited at all by London till now obviously very very useful having the laws licenses now but the basic answer to your question is again perspiration versus inspiration hard work get on planes go and see people wherever at any one time we've got people traveling around Latam southeast Asia meaner you're an officer now the Derby now I like to think we're covering the globe now and having the Pinewood cells is very complimentary to that for example we've just launched in Marla Rio which is a Latam reinsurance cell based in Miami run by a guy who my deputy chairman Charlie Mathis gave him his first job 30 years ago but either we just launched a surety cell with a speciality in in Latam we've got offices all over the world down and Pinewalks well over a billion dollars now I think it's going to be about a billion and a half this year more cells this year or yeah we we did I think we did five cells last year and there's a lot of embedded growth there the great thing about the Pinewall model is we bring in entrepreneurs we make them a working capital loan which they then repay to us we then own the majority of the equity but they have a big chunk of it they're able to remunerate themselves on their teams on a track talent and then we provide all of what you might lose to call the back office function so they're just free to trade and you know Clive Washington is a great example very well known London market figure podcast as well he's brought in Clive's actually brilliant what you might call an old-fashioned underwriter who just wants to deal with brokers and clients he travels a lot by the way he's very joined up with us in terms of our high growth markets initiative we were just talking about it today how we need to get people on planes together across TFB and Pinewalk because we're all one company at the end of the day and you're he's doing extremely well out of the deal and I'm delighted for him and so his team Oddy Clarks he's fantastic deputy Henry on the cargo side they've got really strong team they get to do what they do best and they're in the quality options via call options it's exciting you have to work hard you have to be self-motivated because these guys it's their business at the end of the day we're the sort of side of shareholders but they run the business we don't overly interfere we do cross sell we do collaborate with them but it's their business and it's very attractive to a certain type of very self-motivated entrepreneurial individual if you just want to do the United Five Monday to Friday forget it I mean for Dennis has that reputation in the market somewhere where people come and they have to work hard yeah and here five days a week or they're across country yep and you're quite undershamed of that reputation you have I'm very proud of it yeah I mean I don't know what's happened to the work ethic and I think the UK seems to be particularly bad but I think it is a global phenomenon that people don't want to go into an office anymore I don't understand that cold day to day so that's probably an ice on treks or something I should think stick another layer on and you've mentioned a few times getting on planes the aviation market was a bit of a bit noir last year that you cooled out I think we didn't interview where you called itself destructive there were so many events in the latter half of the year did it start to sort itself out it did it was good to see more resolve than we expected to give for I think the hull and liability market was really a pretty okay actually I mean it's still under water if you look at the Lloyd's stats we missed a lot of the claims I think we probably have just about the best results in the aviation market the last couple of years there were plenty of losses and there's still more needs to be done but there was certainly no rate reductions in Q4 that we entertained and pretty much everything was going up in pricing we still stepped away from quite a few risks where we didn't think the pricing was adequate but it was better than expected and on the war side you're obviously one of the carriers heavily involved in the yeah Ukraine situation we had the butcher ruling in the middle of last year has that squared things or fewer there's still negotiations taking place around there that's a question for the insurance group to quote what they've said publicly I think they said 95% there there may be one or two things still out there but they basically took the view which I think was exactly right which was to get out there settle these claims avoid any bad faith judgments and just get on with it and then they did exactly the right thing and I would just say that I think it's quite remarkable that the insurance group had to deal with what was for them really a black swan on a black swan because there's no secret we've always been big in aviation war and this was the biggest aviation war claim in history and they've absorbed it in a three-year period without going over 100% command I think that's a fantastic story and it speaks to the diversification and the breadth of the offering of the fordodas insurance group that they can ride a storm like that and come out on stage well that they Richard I think it's all we've got time to speak about today but I really appreciate you coming on the show thank you very much before you go here are some of the top stories from the last two weeks insurance and cider revealed that Eric Anson has been lined up as the CEO-elect of AIG from the beginning of June with Peter Saphino moving from CEO to become executive chair and there was a flurry of deal-making in the transactional liability space with CRC confirming its acquisition of the ambient GA euclid transactional and halden buying Atlantic global risk that's all for today but we'll be back again in two weeks time