Ep319 Richard Brindle & Richard Coulson The Fidelis Partnership: Darwinian Division

0:02Richard Brindle: I'm Mark Gagan and you're listening to the Voice of Insurance podcast, produced in association with Advantage Go, now part of Sapiens, enabling an enterprise view of exposure. Today's podcast was recorded down at the Monte Carlo Rendezvous at the beginning of September. This extraordinary gathering of global insurance leadership is a great place to secure time with senior executives from all around the world. I'm really glad and feel very lucky that Richard Brindle, Group CEO and Chairman of the Fidelis Partnership, has managed to find time for the voice of insurance in each of the last five consecutive years.

0:36Richard Brindle: This year, Richard was joined by another Richard, Richard Coulson, Group President of Strategic Partnerships, who was last on the show in 2024. In Richard Brindle's own words, since it bifurcated from its insurance balance sheet three years ago, the Fidelis Partnership has been moving as if it were on rocket fuel. It was therefore great to catch up again, even if it were only a couple of months since his last appearance on the show with Clive Washbourne of Navium. A couple of years ago, the headline of this podcast was taken from a direct quote of Richard Brindles, if you're good enough, you're old enough.

1:07Richard Brindle: My view on podcast guests is that if they're interesting enough, they can come on the show as often as they like. While we were gathered to talk about reinsurance, in typical fashion, the reinsurance items on the agenda were dealt with very swiftly, and we were soon opening up topics that I'd never broached with either guest before. Two themes that we really delved into were TFP's strategic decision not to write broker facilities, and the firm's high-growth market strategy, and how this really works in practice. If you don't write the big brokers' facilities, how do you make sure they keep showing you business?

1:40Richard Brindle: And if you do a lot of business in fast-developing jurisdictions, how much more likely are you to encounter dilemmas, such as those relating to ESG? All the answers, and a typically robust and uncompromising discussion are coming right up. Enjoy the podcast. We're here down at Monte Carlo talking about reinsurance again. How would you characterize the market of today? The reinsurance market or the insurance market?

2:03Richard Coulson: The reinsurance market. And then obviously they're all connected. I think you're seeing similar themes emerging in all sectors, which is quite a Darwinian division into key lead markets and follows. And this informs the whole debate around facilities, which I'm sure we'll get into. We work very, very hard to be a lead market in everything we do. I always say to my guys, we've got to be a top three market in everything that we do. And that means you got to work hard. You've got to be available 24 seven when necessary. You've got to travel in the post COVID environment. Hardly anybody travels. We go to country after country after country where they'll say some variation of, we actually haven't seen an underwriter from London since COVID.

2:43Richard Coulson: So we're proud to be different and we do work harder and we are available all the time. We don't have work phones that get switched off on a Friday evening and switch back on on a Monday, which if you think about it is preposterous in an events-driven business. So we are firmly in that lead category and I think we're very useful to clients and brokers. But yeah, it is quite Darwinian these days.

3:03Richard Brindle: And by Darwinian, do you mean this is a market where clients really can choose much more than they've been able to, let's say at 1.1.23, they necessarily couldn't choose because there was less choice.

3:15Richard Coulson: and now they can? Yeah, there's certainly clients have the luxury of more choice now, no question about it. And you've got to be relevant and available and useful. I think we tick all of those boxes. And you have to be sizable too. Size does matter in a market like this. By the way, these soft market conditions only apply to some of the stuff we do. There's a lot of stuff it doesn't apply to. But if we're talking property cat, yes, it is softening. Of course it is. There's no problem lying about it. And it's more important than ever that you're sizable, relevant, responsive, providing leadership, price making, thought leading, and we do all of those things.

3:48Richard Coulson: Yes, you're a hard worker. Do you feel you have to work even harder?

3:51Richard Brindle: Yeah. Do you feel under any pressure to do more than you've done before? And not just being more available, but then when you are available to give more concessions? No, I think we are very, very conscious in every decision that we make about the impact on our capacity providers. We're laser focused on that. We focus more on value add from the products that we offer, timely responses, meaningful responses, and really think about the client. And we're ever expanding our product range and making sure that when we do offer something to a client is with the full client relationship in mind. So we're as relevant as possible to them and the brokers.

4:27Richard Brindle: Obviously, we know there's plenty of capacity and that the boot is on the buyer's foot at the moment. What about innovation? And what about the demand? Do you think there's more demand? We spent the whole year talking about data centers and other things. Is that demand actually coming through now into real pounds and pence and dollars and cents?

4:44Richard Coulson: Again, in property catmark, yes, there is a consistent desire to buy more limit, which is somewhat helpful. And it helps larger markets like us who can carve out private, semi-private deals. Of course, that's helpful. But I think Rich touches on a more important and relevant point. If you look at Japan, three, four years ago, you know, Rich and I would go to Tokyo a couple of times a year, we'd have great relationships, but we were essentially just talking about the property cap renewal. Now, with all our diversity of lines of business, both within TFP and in Pinewalk, we are offering property, specialty, cyber, casualty, A &H, product recall, marine and energy, you name it, we're offering up pretty much across the board in a way that perhaps a Swiss or a Munich might.

5:26Richard Coulson: And that, again, puts you in a different bracket from a lot of the markets, and there's no fault of theirs, but they're just out there basically every year, if they even go there, scrabbling around on the property cap programs.

5:37Richard Brindle: Is it an imperative really to be broad these days? I'd be completely relevant and have that broader and more horizontal, deeper relationship with a client. You're not just here for one thing and you're solving. And obviously, if it's only one thing, if that one thing gets commoditized, then you're not in a very good place. You're here for that broader relationship. Do you think it gives you a better negotiating position?

5:59Richard Coulson: Absolutely, that question. I think Rich put it very well last week, he said, for this reinsurance season, we're going to go early, we're going to go big, and we're going to go cross-class. And that's exactly how we're going to operate.

6:08Richard Brindle: Do you think that gives you more, also in a trading relationship, if you're doing some of the things that other people don't want to do, does that give you more leverage? Absolutely. Of course. And often drives differential terms. Of course it does. How has it affected your psychology? Say the big story of the 1.126 renewals was, wow, it's everything, well, certainly in property, the market softened quicker than I was expecting. That's therefore a negative surprise. Does a negative surprise affect your psychology? When there is a negative surprise, when something's worse than you thought it was going to be, does it make you feel, right, I'm not going to be quite so client?

6:41Richard Brindle: Well, I think we're constantly looking at the portfolio. And on 1.26, we optimized the portfolio. We looked at the layers and the clients that made sense and recalibrated our offering accordingly. So we didn't just renew as before. We made sure that whatever we were ceding to our capacity providers was optimized for them, whether it's moving layers around, switch from non-proportional to proportional in some instances, and really recalibrate the portfolio as well as broadening the product page. Because you're responsible for your own outwards, aren't you? The strategic, you decide what to be buying to protect what is coming in.

7:15Richard Coulson: It's a little more nuanced than that. It's not our outwards. No, I know. It's the outwards of our capital partners. It's very collaborative with Pelagos. Yeah. And we buy the outwards on behalf of the Seeloy Syndicates.

7:25Richard Brindle: Right. Yeah. As a buyer protecting those syndicates books, presumably this is a good time to be buying more. You wouldn't be running as much net as before.

7:35Richard Coulson: Yeah, it's a buyer's market, whether that's for inwards or outwards business. And we also use fact markets to arbitrage some of our returns as well. If you're streetwise and good at trading the book, that's what you have to do.

7:45Richard Brindle: So in general, the broader strategy, obviously, we've had very good profitability. Is it now a question of protecting that profitability at the expense of growth?

7:54Richard Coulson: I would like to talk about this because I think we are very different from a lot of certainly London market people you'll speak to, Mark. We transact 150 lines of business in 140 countries now. We're not one of your, dare I say, standard London markets transacting maybe 20, 25 lines of business in what you might call the material markets. I've said for a long time, I think I've said to you before, as an industry, traditionally, we've done pretty well. I wouldn't put it any stronger than that in North America, Western Europe, Japan, and Australasia. And we've been shocking everywhere else as an industry.

8:24Richard Coulson: We don't look as a whole like the world as it is in 2026. The growth in parts of the world which still have low insurance penetration rates, but which enjoy higher GDP growth, the material markets is striking. And we did an exercise where we had horizontal axis showing insurance penetration, vertical axis showing GDP growth. And guess what's top right of that graph? China, of course. But there's also a lot of the Gulf countries. There's parts of LATAM, India, Turkey, as you would expect, parts of Asia-Pac, and there's enormous growth. And we have to look a lot more like the world we live in, and we have to get on planes, and we have to have language skills, and we have to go to conferences which aren't in people's comfort zones.

9:05Richard Coulson: So for example, my deputy chairman, Charlie Mathias, went to the Africa Reconference in Lagos on Abuja. We were the only people from the London market there. We'll just think about that for a minute. It's shocking. I think it was a conference in Jordan in a couple of weeks for the broader MENA region, where, again, we're one of the handful of people from London attending. And in many ways, Mark, that works very well for us that our competitors are so set in their ways, because there's a big world out there. So I kind of, in a friendly way, slightly reject your premise. We're not in a soft market as the Fidelis Partnership.

9:35Richard Coulson: Significant parts of our portfolio are still rising in rating. If you look at all of our bespoke lines from economic cat to significant risk transfer to mortgage business, to asset-backed aircraft business, which we're global leaders in, to political risk, to credit risk. All of those areas are still rising in response to geopolitical tensions, which is driving increase in demand. Our aviation book is rising. Our satellite book is rising. Elements of our non-standard property book are rising. Michael DeVerno and his team have done a great job in picking out relationships, NGA relationships around the world to focus on little niches where there's still positive price movement.

10:11Richard Coulson: So when you balance out those 150 lines of business in those 140 countries. We're pretty flat as a portfolio here today. So politely, I'd reject the premise. This is not a soft market. We have many lines of business which operate to entirely different cadences from North American property. And one of the problems is in our industry, the media focuses obsessively on North American property business to the exclusion of pretty much everything else.

10:35Richard Brindle: Obviously, this is a business of long-term relationships, which are great, good partnerships. But of course, within long-term relationships, often there are points of friction. There's maybe overall harmony, but there's always something, you know, the odd row here and there. What do you think points of friction might be coming into this renewal?

10:51Richard Coulson: Well, let me give the short answer, then the longer answer from Rich. So without causing you to blush, Rich does an extraordinarily good job of managing our, again, don't forget, we're not a carrier. So carrier and broker relations to us are paramount. And yes, niggles arise all the time. I would say almost on a daily basis, sometimes an hourly basis. and Rich is extremely good at relationship side. And the problem is that a lot of insurance underwriting companies, because we are an underwriting company, the people charged with relationships are quite obscure, quite junior. They don't really have any heft with brokers.

11:24Richard Coulson: Rich is a very senior insurance practitioner. When you get a call from Richard Coulson, you're going to take it. So that's my preface. And why don't you talk about how we do that day-to-day, Rich?

11:33Richard Brindle: Yeah. Thank you, Richard. So yeah, we have a very clear framework of strategic engagement, which is both top down and bottom up. We have quarterly meetings that are structured, data driven, and engage with the highest level of the broken partners. And at those meetings, we set out strategic frameworks as to how we engage. And then that cascades down through the teams who have a much more regularly meeting cadence to make sure that we're hitting the objectives that we set at those quarterly meetings. And then any escalations in between time they rise to the top and get resolved very quickly and I think that really is unique and sets us apart in the industry how we engage with our broking partners.

12:12Richard Brindle: I think on the friction point a real challenge at the minute is the fact that we do not write broker facilities and that comes up very regularly and again we make the point that we are not going to support those facilities. We like to show that we're adding value to our capacity providers so the challenge becomes how we get treated as if we are on those facilities and get access to the business whilst not writing the facilities. And that really comes down to the points that Richard made earlier around leadership. That is absolutely key. Product diversification, the 24-7 service being meaningful when we do deploy and being there when clients and brokers really need us.

12:52Richard Brindle: And so it's a constant battle of banging that drum as certain pockets of the market are getting softer, but others aren't. And many of the other lines they really need our capacity brokers and clients and we're there for them so it's getting that message out and just making sure that's front and center of every broker's mind does it get tougher though as time goes on and that broker with whom we've got a great relationship saying we really really it's coming from up top we really want you to write this would you do it in extremis as to maintain a relationship or do you just have to walk away no no i think we stick to our guns and to Richard's word earlier, it is a more and more Darwinian market.

13:30Richard Brindle: And much as there's lots and lots of capacity about in certain lines of business, the market is bereft of leadership. And that's what the proposition that we bring to the table. We are there as soon as the Iranian crisis happened. It happened on a Friday and our underwriters were in the office Saturday morning. We were there quoting business, making a market, and that sits in brokers' and clients' memories and they know that we will be there. So Stephanie, you are a bit awkward sometimes, but I respect that. And I know you're going to be here when I, in fact, better in some ways, because I know you'll definitely be here when

14:02Richard Coulson: I really need you. Absolutely. And I would just add another point. A lot of clients hate these facilities because they take the view that their business is just being treated as a commodity by the brokers and used to generate additional commission. So we are swimming with the ties in many cases on resisting this. And I think there will be more and more of a backlash, if I'm honest with you, particularly from larger, more sophisticated clients who are going to say, well, okay, you're taking my business place with people we've never met who may or may not be around in a few years' time. You're taking additional commissions, which you're not disclosing to us or not rebating to us.

14:34Richard Coulson: Why is that good for me as a client? A lot of the brokers would say now

14:38Richard Brindle: that, of course, they are rebating that. There is a client discount there, that they're sharing some of that. Maybe they're not sharing all of it. They're not giving all of it back. Obviously, there's some expense there for the administration of the facility. Do you feel that if they were giving, would you be happier writing these if they were giving all the discount to the client?

14:56Richard Coulson: No, I think you're trying to get a yes out of us. You're not going to get one, Mark. We're not a facilities market, and we offer value in many other ways. And you're right. I mean, in many cases, the commission is rebated in part. I don't think the transparency is there. And at some point I've made to Lloyd's, there should be total transparency. But there's lots of other issues of these things. I mean, there's the opacity of information. So we saw in Ukraine, Russia, and we've seen again with Iran, USA. Months into these conflicts, there's very little clarity about what the bloody losses are under these facilities.

15:27Richard Coulson: Well, that's terrible, particularly if you're a public company and you've got to announce your results every quarter. How the hell are you meant to know what your losses are? We, by contrast, Mark, if you'll allow me to pivot, now have 12 Lloyd's consortia, and we're adding them all the time. And we've already met with several actual and potential partners since we got here yesterday. And what we've done is to compare and contrast writing a consortium behind a proper leader who is often commanding an alpha to the market in terms of both our price and the terms and conditions of which we're writing the business, offering transparency, timely information versus a line slip where you're often months in arrears in terms of really finding out what the hell's going on.

16:09Richard Coulson: And we think that the more that people who are adopting the follow business plan. And there's nothing wrong with that, Mark, if it's done properly, but your expenses should be vanishingly low. I don't know if you remember the Secretan Syndicate. I always go on about the Secretan Syndicate. When I was coming up in Lloyd's, they were a brilliant organization. They were pure follow. They only followed me and Sharman and Stephen Catlin and Mark Brokbank and a couple of others. That was it. They had a list of people they would follow, the absolute, dare I say, A-list leaders. That was it. And they were at 7.5 % on everything.

16:41Richard Coulson: Everything. The brokers loved it because there was no debate around line size, but if it fitted the box, bang, done. They had four people working for that organization. They all sat on one box in lawyers. They didn't have an office. Their expense ratio was probably 1 % of gross premium. That's the model. If you're going to be a follow underwriter, you don't need hundreds of people. Why do you need them? Just follow the right people, keep your expenses down, and you can do okay. But what's wrong is now we've got these hybrid organizations which are follow, either explicitly so, or frankly, just de facto, because they're now writing all these facilities, which is just like being a full follow market, if you think about it.

17:17Richard Coulson: But they've got the expenses of a traditional carrier. And that's a lethal combination.

17:21Richard Brindle: Because of the way that the technology is going, of course, yes, when the broker comes to you, instead of them having to build their facility to put things in, you've already built your own facility behind you. And it doesn't really matter to the client, frankly, which way it stacks up, And if you can build your own capacity that way, and so again, making yourself much more relevant to the broker, because of course, it's not just your line, it's a whole consortium or

17:45Richard Coulson: different followers that you've built in. Exactly. But with just a clarification that we lead all the business under these consortia, and very often we're commanding a pricing delta to the rest of the market. So in most cases, the commissions payable by the consortium members are more than covered by the underwriting alpha, which is a great position to be in, because you're getting lead terms with essentially negative commissions versus following. Some of these line slips, Mark, they're not only led by other parties. They will actually have a situation where three or four leaders, particularly on the PV side, three or four leaders will quote for the business.

18:18Richard Coulson: The cheapest one gets the order. The other markets, including the leaders who didn't get the order, are all bound up the cheapest terms, and then the additional commissions kick in. Now, you can't tell me that's a responsible way to do business, particularly if the information flow is extremely poor. And it is something I know Lloyds are looking at in fairness to them.

18:36Richard Brindle: And on the information flow, one would expect today, in a world where we're talking about AI and everything else, that if one is a capacity provider backing any form of delegated underwriting authority, that one would expect to see almost real time, that there shouldn't be no reason why you can't see what has been written in your name. And I presume that's not the way you construct your own consortium and hope that your capacity providers can look right through and see what you do. No, I mean, logic would suggest that is the case, but it simply isn't. And I think that's where when we present our consortium propositions to our partners, to a person, commend the quality of the data, the reporting and access to that information real time, which de facto means they're not getting that elsewhere.

19:18Richard Brindle: In a world where those big brokers particularly have got that sort of ballast kind of does everything broker facility, and they've got the lead line, but they're now working on digitizing that middle part between the lead line and whatever this facility was writing 30, 40, maybe it'll get up to 50, who knows, at some point. There's that middle sort of classical follow, manual follow market, and they're trying to digitize underwriters' appetites to fit in there and reduce any further open market order. Do you feel that when we get to that sort of singularity, will that be a difficult time for you?

19:51Richard Brindle: Or you will be that leader and you'll always get your share there? No, I think we applaud digitization. We've got numerous AI initiatives and data initiatives that we're undergoing at any one time. And I think it's, again, looking at where you can add value, when you can add value, and focusing time on that and using technology to create efficiencies elsewhere. But when you look at the portfolio that is digitized and presented in such a way, that still needs someone to lead it, to price it, put a pricing matrix on that portfolio and to do a proper underwriting job of it, dare I say. So there will always be a role for the underwriter in performing that and putting in place that matrix for that bucket of business.

20:31Richard Brindle: Coming into 1.1.27, what would be the ideal outcome for you?

20:34Richard Coulson: To continue what we're doing, Mark. I mean, what I love about our business since we bifurcated at the beginning of 2023 is that we've just been on rocket fuel, to be honest with you. Yes, a lot of markets initiative, which is now deeply embedded in the business, and it's growing. The analysis we've done suggests that for most of our, well, they're not really competitors because we're not a balance sheet, but most of the other underwriters, let's put it that way, the business they derive outside of North America, Western Europe, Japan, Australasia is in single digits, which when you consider that, well, certainly if you look at the enlarged BRICS group, which has now covered a whole load of countries, that's sort of 43 % of global GDP, then you can start to get a feeling for how unrepresentative our industry is of the actual world we live in.

21:16Richard Coulson: And we are laser focused on our high growth markets initiative. That is providing a lot of growth and opening up, dare I say, business that comes nowhere near the London market. And there is still, and I've said this to you before, Mark, there is still this sort of institutionalized post-colonial mentality in the London market. And you hear it all the time, even for some of our guys, it's going to come to London. No, it ain't, mate. It's not coming even in London, is going to get placed in Shanghai or Delhi or Rio de Janeiro. And we have to do better. So we're very proud of our high growth markets.

21:50Richard Coulson: We're very proud of what we call our differentiated distribution. We do a lot of business with local brokers around the world. Our product offering continues to grow. We have some very significant pine walk sales, particularly our casualty and our A &H sales, which are really in their infancy. And you think about the addressable markets for casualty and ANH, they're enormous. So we're just getting started. We've added six Pine Walk sales in the last year. And at the Mothership, we continue to strengthen our underwriting teams. We continue to digitize, as Rich said. We've got a lot of AI initiatives underway now, which essentially are not trying to replace what we do at the front end.

22:28Richard Coulson: And I'm conscious we could sound like Luddites here, but we're really not. The stuff we do, We have literally negotiated coverage with ship owners, ship masters in the Gulf for their war coverage over the last six months by satellite phone. I mean, that's something that's very hard to imagine AI replicating. And we continue to revel in and enjoy our cutting edge underwriting enabled by the twice daily underwriting call, which is well known in our industry. But goodness me, in terms of the funnel of business that we can handle, the underwriting opportunities we can triage to bring to those twice daily calls.

23:01Richard Coulson: AI can just help so much with that by eliminating a huge amount of pretty mindlessly repetitive work that our youngsters have to do. And I'm keen that they don't have to do that stuff and they can do more interesting work. And that's why we're recruiting now much more analytical people. And a lot of them are actuaries because actuaries are actually great to work with. And there's a lot of waffle in our industry. And sometimes you just want to get through the waffle and get to what is this deal actually like? Is it a good deal? And so we're getting more and more analytical. call. The response times to brokers are getting shorter and shorter and shorter.

23:32Richard Coulson: So again, back to Rich's point, how do we mark ourselves out versus these facilities where we're going to get slicker and slicker and slicker? And that just means we can process more deals, get more deals triaged onto the underwriting calls and write more premium on behalf of our partners.

23:46Richard Brindle: On that multipolar question, something you've seized upon this strategically and majored on this for many years, we've never really gone into the actual detail. I mean, one, how difficult is it to do? Obviously, it's easy to say it, but some of these markets are less easy to access. Of course, one of the reasons why, perhaps, as some of your peer group, we've already got licenses, we've got channels, we know how to get into those markets. What's the experience been like?

24:11Richard Coulson: Really good, Mark. I have to say, I'm glad you asked me that question, because human beings are human beings, and people like to talk to other people, and people like to be schmoozed, and people like to feel that they're clinching deals over a lunch wherever it is in the world. These things haven't gone away. And what we find is we get an incredibly warm reception wherever we go. And again, as I said earlier, often people say we haven't seen a bloody London market underwriter since COVID. There is a sort of slight myth, I think, that the place like China is incredibly opaque and hard to do business in.

24:41Richard Coulson: It really isn't. We travel mainly to Beijing, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. And we do business there with brokers across a multiplicity of lines of business. And it's normally done as as faculty of reinsurance placement. And it's not intimidating at all, as long as it's reinsurance from a licensing point of view. Insurance is a whole different world, direct insurance, but we're doing it as fact with local carriers who we're building relationships with. And those carriers, for example, Mark, are now more and more prominent on our hours. So it's a two-way relationship. They provide us with inwards business.

25:13Richard Coulson: We provide them with outwards business. That's how you trade. I was in Rio de Janeiro three days ago, meeting senior clients in Brazil. And again, nobody goes to see them. And they're very, very open to opening up their books and seeing what the opportunities are. And again, they're now participating on our outwards. So actually, we find it, I'm not going to say it's easy, but it's certainly not intimidating in any way. You've just got to go and talk to people. And often you'll find there's all this business and it's all available, but nobody's ever asked for it.

25:41Richard Brindle: What about the ethical dimension as you're global? and as we know over the last 15 to 20 years the public is making greater demands of the insurance industry as to who it does business with and why and then 10 years ago we very rarely seen any kind of protests in london now we see them every week does operating genuinely globally without really too many frontiers does it make that harder make you more exposed in that sense i think we pride ourselves and we make sure that culturally all of our underwriters embrace the multipolar world when they're doing their work their analysis on any one transaction it's not just on the political risk but on all lines of business we insist that they get reference points which are local which are from all sides of the house in the territory that we're considering and make sure that each risk reflects that when it's presented we have a top class esg team and we don't just focus on the E.

26:36Richard Brindle: That's obviously highly important, but it's the S and the G as well. And that is analyzed on every single transaction. And a really topical point is on data centers at the minute. These could be one of the most pivotal talking points around the midterms at the minute in the US, but the backlash around data centers, it's just something people aren't considering. Is it our local communities being consulted on the planning regulations around data centers? What about the water supply? What about the power supply? And so we're asking all of those questions around data centres, for instance, and it means that we're taking a much more educated view on risking in question.

27:11Richard Brindle: But that applies to every single risk that we write. It's a core item that we discuss. And again, the underwriting call, the twice daily underwriting calls that we do, that is a key point of focus. And we make sure that's challenged appropriately on every single risk that we support. And do you find that it means you do have to decline things because they're not up to whatever Western standards or whatever?

27:32Richard Coulson: I don't think we look at it as Western versus Instagram or whatever. Yeah, I know. I mean, it's difficult.

27:35Richard Brindle: Yes, I'm learning this new language of multipolar.

27:38Richard Coulson: I don't speak it yet. What I would say, Mark, and I've said this to you before, is the power of insurance to do good is wildly underestimated. The soft power of insurance is massive. If you can't insure something, you can't trade it. If you can't trade it, you can't make any profit, and the whole supply chain just dies. So we don't use that indiscriminately, but for example, we pioneered the forced labor clause, which is now pretty much universally accepted across not only the cargo spectrum, but also a lot of property risk now, which just reminds insureds of their obligations to ensure there's no forced or child labor in the supply chain.

28:10Richard Coulson: And that if there is, there will be consequences in terms of claims payments. And we work with the major brokers and it's been universally accepted now. We're very proud of that. We're now working to try to stop live animal exports, which I think most people would agree are just horrifically barbaric and inhumane. And we've had a lot of success there too. So we don't go around preaching to everybody all the time, but we have a strong moral compass and we know what we think is right and we know what we think is wrong and we believe that we have the power to do good in our market. And of course, if you're not there, you can't even have those conversations.

28:41Richard Brindle: Absolutely. Sorry that ending was a bit abrupt. The occupational hazards of recording something at a conference where everyone has a hard stop at the same time and there's no time for formal goodbyes. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. If you did, don't forget to subscribe or leave a like or review or recommendation on whatever podcast platform you used to access this program. These really help get the word out. Before we go, just a quick reminder that advertising slots are available here and in other places in the Voice of Insurance podcasts. Podcasting is the fastest growing medium and attracts a high quality audience of key decision makers.

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29:54Richard Brindle: Voice of Insurance is produced by me, Mark Gagan. Music was written by Anna Gagan and produced by Carlos Gagan.