Ep320 Mark Groenheide LIRG: Facts, Not Feelings

0:03I'm Mark Gagan and you're listening to the Voice of Insurance podcast, produced in association with Advantage Go, now part of Sapiens. Pick and choose your own best of breed insurtech and data providers with the Sapiens Advantage Go ecosystem. Today's podcast is one of the most fast-moving and broad-ranging I've recorded in seven years of the Voice of Insurance. For instance, today's guest links running an insurer on a native AI infrastructure, tackleful insurance, and the application of parametric insurance to almost every peril, with ambitions to grow his own reinsurance balance sheet and a medium-term goal to return to the Lloyds market with what he's built.

0:40As you will gather, Mark Gruenheide, the CEO and president of NIRG, isn't built exactly like all the rest of us. Following a classical insurance upbringing with underwriting stints at the sorts of blue-chip carriers one might expect to see on a standard resume, Mark's career has since blossomed to embrace imaginative thinking, change and insurance and reinsurance innovation in myriad forms. Mark's enthusiasm is infectious and at points I'm sure he'll have you nodding in agreement with his views about making insurance better as a product and far more relevant to the world and more effective at solving its problems than it is today.

1:16This is a fascinating discussion with an insurance renaissance man that might inspire you to try something new in your own career. So if you're feeling a bit jaded, I challenge you to listen to this and not feel re-energised and refreshed. My only caveat is to make sure you've had your coffee, because this is at times a breathless conversation. Listen on, and you'll definitely hear me trying to keep up with Mark as he puts me through my paces. I had a lot of fun, and you definitely will too. Enjoy the podcast. Mark, welcome to The Voice of Insurance. Pleasure to be here.

1:50Mark Groenheide: I've been a longtime fan. Well, thank you very much. So this is for the benefit of anyone out there who doesn't know you. What I've come to do with all my guests now is to get you to introduce yourself to the audience and run us through your career to date and start with that question that we all ask each other as our way of kind of industry icebreaker is to ask each other how we got into insurance. Sure. My story really began during the time where the dot-com crash had happened. So I was in school and not knowing really what I would do. But at the time, it was not great for someone who had a degree in computer science.

2:25It was not a wonderful job market. And a lot of things looked bleak. But I knew someone who was very important in the insurance industry and admired him very much. And he was able to connect me into an industry that I never would have thought of. My father was a school teacher and my mother worked in banking. but my experience, like many others, was very biased towards the insurance industry. And I am so incredibly thankful I took that journey into this industry because it's taken me all around the globe. I've worked on interesting things and it's been one of the defining characteristics of my life.

3:05I'm very passionate about risk transfer. I've been fortunate that in my career early on, I worked for some amazing organizations. I was an engineering lines underwriter at ACE in New York City, as well as Boston, and was able to work for some really fantastic underwriters, Mark Adair. And under his tutelage, we worked on some of the most important projects in the United States and also elsewhere. That really instilled in me, number one a lot of underwriting discipline there was just fantastic underwriters at the time john tutera who i got to work with and market there and many others and really saw those practitioners in their prime do some amazing things and then that led me to a lot of curiosity about our industry i initially became exposed then at that time to lloyd's for reinsurance and many other things.

4:04From there, I worked at W.R. Berkeley, their flagship carrier Acadia up in the northeastern United States, for which I ran Inland Marine and Ocean Marine. Really amazing to work for W.R. Berkeley, the company that I admire very much. Both Rob and his recently deceased father, Bill, were incredible people who made themselves available, even though they were in the stratosphere of folks in our industry and took the time to bring people to Greenwich. And I was able to meet with them. And it really was one of the defining characteristics of learning how to operate organizations and mimic a lot of what they did because they knew a couple of things.

4:49And one of which was get really good operators and have them operate businesses independently in local markets, in markets for which you can have a durable competitive advantage. but you need to be close to the customer and distribution and relationships and reputation are paramount and then from there was able to work at Zurich and then HDI and was one of the people originally bringing on the ENS carrier in the United States Jim Clark and Lothar Becker were my bosses amazing people Jim went on to be the CEO later on for North America I was able to go to Hanover Germany and for the first time worked in Europe from time to time amazing again experience was very fortunate to work at great carriers then went on my own and did an MGU which was successful and we then started doing parametric and that's where I met Brad Meyer when he was at new paradigm and Brad was an amazing mentor I came on board became a partner in the firm we then transitioned it into Norman max what an experience I mean for someone who's in their 30s to help co-found a syndicate and present to very interesting people in Lloyd's and get to know the names.

6:04And everything that went on with that was an incredible opportunity. I then took a small time out to deal with cancer. But once that passed, I took some time, went to an island in Columbia off the coast and isolated myself and said, okay, Mark, You've done some cool things, but now it's time to go out on your own and really try to match what your passion is, which is parametric and alternative versus transfer with an organization that is boutique in nature that can take on a lot of the blue ocean opportunities that return our industry to relevance. In other words, figure out a way to put parametric into every program on earth possible and take it from hurricane cat in a circle to cyber and war and supply chain and everything else that we know it's extraordinarily well suited for.

7:07And we can create indexes around and outcomes that customers will be happy with. So that's what I did with LARG. And I assembled my best friends to join me on this journey. We're a small boutique firm, even though we do quite a bit of business. And our focus is in the alternative versus transfer space. We have seven active binders, and we support MGUs in their creation.

7:29Mark Groenheide: Well, it's really glad to see you looking so well and healthy. Fantastic news, and horrible to have gone through that. But then great to see you here with this new lease of life and this whole new business. So what was it about the idea for LARG? How did it come to you? And did you have some kind of a eureka moment where you thought, right, this thing needs to exist because there's nothing quite out there. So therefore I need to build something. So with Parametric in particular, it's not suited for large organizations in terms of innovation. Innovation is a very difficult thing. It's like moving to Titanic.

8:00And that's good in many ways because these organizations are stalwarts, they're stable, they've got great capital, and that's what they're built for. We, during my time at Norman Maxx building the syndicate, were able to get Lloyd's to move into parametric for an exclusively parametric syndicate. And that was a massive undertaking. But even with that and the innovation that they allowed for us there to move at a pace that was really necessary for what I would call the next parametric 2.0, that was going to be very difficult under syndicate business forecasts and the filings that were required and all the changes and the things necessary to innovate in this space, because we're really moving towards algorithmic underwriting at a pace that many people can't even comprehend.

8:49And I knew that there was so much else that I wanted to accomplish in this, that Lloyd's would be the right place for it in probably five or six years, but it needed to start from the ground up and it needed to start in ways that would probably likely not be compatible with the checks and balances that are currently in place that are required for introducing new products and other things. So we set up to proceed with non-NATCAT parametrics and that was always my dream. We were able to put together some very interesting programs, many of which we invented They are entirely new. Also with some of our partners, such as we work a lot with Fire Tower, which is a new cyber startup.

9:40Stephen Schwartz and I worked together previously when he was setting up SAFE. We really focused on that and dove deep in and then also focused on program creation for others. And we assembled a team of brokers, Larry Lipman, Sal Garcia. We brought in other folks that I'd worked with, some of which at Norman Mac. and we just set out to do this and it's been incredible. We recently won specialty team of the year at the U.S. Business Insurance Awards. We've been nominated now for startup of the year at the U.S. Insurance Insider Awards and we have had tremendous opportunity and tremendous success with some of the largest firms on the planet.

10:24We currently transact business with 70 % of the top 50 reinsurers around the globe doing portfolio solutions similar to ILWs. Some are ILWs, many of which are hybrid ILWs. That's our space that we play quite a bit in across seven binders that we have as an organization. But we bring to the table a lot of capacity that previously didn't have access to this type of business. And we have exclusivity agreements with those folks, or we bring to the table people that saw the business, but they saw it at such major deductions from other brokers that it's not even comparable to what we do with them. During my time at a leading carrier, I was responsible for some of the transactions with respects to retros.

11:13And during that time, I became friendly with a lot of very small, independent, sometimes family-owned re-insurers around the globe. And I always found it striking that they were treated by some entities as less than or not equal to, even though they may have a very great rating and they have sufficient capital, but because they weren't located in Europe or the United States, they just didn't see the risks on an upfront basis. So our thought was we would essentially treat everyone fairly and transparently and go out to these folks that previously didn't receive, let's say the submissions at the same rates or the same pricing or same terms and conditions and very honestly and transparently work with everyone to bring them these types of opportunities.

12:03And it's been highly successful.

12:04Mark Groenheide: And how did you get off the ground in terms of how much investment you've had to have? Have you been able to bootstrap it yourself or have you got third-party investment? So I bootstrapped everything with myself and a friend. And it was obviously nerve wracking those first four months when you're making payroll. We were very fortunate in that we have some other businesses that are successful. We own, for example, you can see on my profile, I'm a board member of Vitamin Energy. I'm a shareholder there. We have other investments in other organizations as well that are non-insurance related. And those fortunately provided me the capital to be able to pursue this.

12:46So I'm very proud that we're completely independent. I'm very proud that we don't have a VC backer or we're not part of some large conglomerate.

12:54Mark Groenheide: Must be nice when you hear the clock ticking, it's just the time ticking, not the PE clock ticking where, you know, there's a countdown to five years time when you're supposed to be 50 times bigger than you are now. Well, it also gives us the freedom to say no. That's a really big thing for me. If we're not aligned with people from a culture standpoint or we're not aligned with them on what their objectives are, or we feel even that their products will not work for customers, we don't want to be involved in those. We also take on things that many other firms probably wouldn't because there is no history with the product and the product has to be created.

13:35If we are working with a firm, we put ourselves in their shoes. They are not for us to extract as much commission or fees or anything out of them. Our mission is to see them successful. And that will breed further people wanting to do business with us.

13:54Mark Groenheide: Yeah. And obviously, you help them grow profitably and you grow alongside each other. Then they come back and next time they're back, they're bigger, aren't they? Absolutely. And we're not looking for long-term five-year contracts. It's really year to year. We want our work to be the measure for which people judge us. And we are extraordinarily committed to this. I'm a bit obsessive myself. I love interest transfer probably too much. I'm not the guy you invite to a dinner party because I'm going to start talking about parametric. But for what we do, we're extraordinarily adaptable. And we execute.

14:27That's really our focus. We're very much signal, no noise.

14:31Mark Groenheide: How far have you got so far in terms of the scale that you've hit? And what are you trying to target in terms of GWP that you're handling, the amount of people that you've hired and offices or platforms that you've opened? So I can give you a couple of facts. In our ILW binders alone, we've transacted over$150 million in premium, making us what we believe the largest MGU, MGA in the space, handling ILWs. And we accomplished that in our first 12 months. We as an organization in total, including large placements that we do for very big MGUs, which drive the bulk of a lot of our premium, are in the neighborhood of$400 million, closing in on a half a billion in premium placed.

15:17Mark Groenheide: That's pretty quick. It is. But we have the benefit of some very large clients and very large premiums. We have one customer, for example, one policy is$12 million. So for us, our average per transaction is about$1.7 to$3 million in premium. We do huge placements on very large MGUs, very large reinsurers. We don't do any insurance, and we're primarily focused on systemic issues, blue ocean opportunities, and helping MGU's MGAs deliver blue ocean solutions. The TACAFUL solution that we're working on in the United States is probably the most famous one. We're expecting that to be fully operational in the next four weeks.

16:06It's the first of its kind in the United States. We're very excited about it. now the Islamic community in the United States will have faith-aligned options. We're rolling it out first in six states, potentially seven. Is that Techful America? We have two names under it. There's American Techful and Techful America.

16:25Mark Groenheide: Oh, good. I hope you've blocked all the bases there. If you're the only one in the market at the moment, then it's up to you. Yes, make sure you grab all the domain names, Mark, before they all go. And so is that an MGA? So that is set up as an MGA, and it's actually owned by people within the Islamic community. It was headlined by that. There is a board of directors, a Sharia board, as well as re-tackleful behind it. And we set up a cell separately that will act as the carrier for which we provided the reinsurance for. But from ground zero all the way through, it is compliant. And that opportunity came to us day one.

17:05It's something that I felt passionate about. I previously was with a faith-based insurance organization, and it was one of the things that I had brought to them as a program opportunity because I felt if you look at the statistics in the United States, less and less people are going to houses of worship, and there's massive problems with the deterioration of actually the properties in many instances, or the fact that then there's megachurches and there's huge accumulations of values in many of the small faith insurance organizations, which is not compatible with a reinsurance treaty, et cetera.

17:35So I had always looked at that as potential opportunity, but obviously there's challenges with respects to making sure that from a tackleful perspective, it's compliant. So we were day one working on this opportunity along with another one from a homeowner's perspective that's separate for the Spencer Agency and Mike Dimitrio, formerly of DGA, which was one of the key folks involved with AccraSure previously, to create a homeowner solution for them, for which we're putting in parametrics.

18:02Mark Groenheide: It's really interesting because it's something probably almost over 25 years ago, the last time we had a bit of a boom probably in the European market on the Tackleful side of things. And it's gone a bit quiet because obviously the ones that have succeeded have done very well or they've been quite niche. And obviously in countries like Malaysia, there's an awful lot of business being contracted that way. But it's great to hear that there's still opportunity in the Tackleful business. It's really interesting. There's huge opportunity. It's the fastest growing community in the United States. There's no faith aligned options of scale in the United States.

18:31There's just a huge need for it. And we're happy to provide it, even though myself, I'm not part of the Islamic community, but for us, we like creating access and relevance to insurance and insurance products. So we're very involved in that. And then there's a number of other things that we've gotten involved in cyber warranties, where we've created the first parametric cyber warranty products in conjunction with DLT Alert, in conjunction with Fire Tower and Insuro. We've become the broker for Insuro, which is a really interesting organization in Bermuda that essentially can take crypto assets and hold them in custody.

19:08And it has a license for this in Bermuda and be able to turn that into collateralization for their reinsurer. And it was the first of the kind at its time. They provide many different parametric solutions, including but not limited to ski pass cancellation. The weather is incorrect for that, either not enough snow or heat or whatever it might be. These are the types of things that are embedded solutions that are very intriguing and return significant relevance to our industry and create situations where you're not at dinner and your aunt is upset with you because you work in the insurance industry and she recently had a bad claim.

19:48This is things where the outcomes are typically very favorable and that's where I'm excited. Index solutions where everyone knows what's going to happen and the outcome is predetermined. And you can see the index. You can go look at the index,

20:02Mark Groenheide: see where it is. And obviously, I suppose you can argue that the index is somehow biased against you or you already signed that you should do that before you buy the contract rather than afterwards. But it's incredibly eclectic what you're doing. But I suppose if it's a simplest way of boiling down what you do, the big part is parametric. And obviously, ILW is probably the first parametric that anyone in the insurance industry ever first came across an industry loss warranty. If this number exceeds this, then there's a loss and we'll work out exactly how much, depending on how you've structured the contract.

20:31Mark Groenheide: And the other part is that facilitisation, that providing the reinsurance capital or alternative capital to help back up novel insurance operations. If my job as a journalist is to try and pre-see everything you're saying, is that about right? And then if that's right, if it's these two strands is to cause, what's the balance between the two? So the balance at the moment is we're 58 % to 60 % on our own binders. And then what we call our foundry. So that's us building programs for other people. So we operate seven binders ourselves. And then we have the MGUs for which we help facilitate and broke the reinsurance, et cetera.

21:13That's roughly about 40%. Yeah.

21:16Mark Groenheide: And with those, are you a kind of like incubator in some way? Do you take any kind of equity interest in those businesses or not? Are you just purely a facilitator? So we have invested in one. We've offered to invest in another. We are very interested in providing capital for startups should they need it. Because in my opinion, unlike others, I think the MGU space is going to continue to grow. I think it's vital and necessary for us to have innovation. My belief is that the organizations that want to start up that are typically run by brilliant underwriters will be at a huge disadvantage if they go down certain roads in our industry, which often are predatory or the lending is not beneficial to them long term.

22:09So for us, we don't tie the investment to doing the broking with us in any sort of form or fashion. But if we meet good people who have great ideas, who have a history of positive execution, we want to find them and back them. And that would happen either from LRG corporately or potentially even from my own family office and other wealthy organizations.

22:33Mark Groenheide: But it's more case by case. It's not necessarily that it's the design that you have, that you have a deliberately hybrid operation or a deliberate incubator operation to say, well, we will take a stake in you. If we like each other, then we'll have a situation where we end up with an option in year five as well to buy the whole thing or not like that. It's more case by case, it sounds like. Correct. It's boutique in nature. We have eight partners at the firm. There's eight of us. I own a majority of the organization at 68%. We operate as owner operators similar to like a small law firm. And we're very interested in maintaining our independence.

23:11And we're very interested in having not bucket solutions for everything because every deal and every MGU and every person is different. And we recognize that. But we are very bullish on the folks that we're working with. If some of them would allow me to buy more of their organizations, they certainly would. I mean, we're working with some really smart people. For example, Orbway is one of our customers for which we broke the re-entrance for, which is for near-Earth orbit satellites. And there was a huge hole in the industry for this. I mean, parametric was ideal. I mean, what are you going to do?

23:50You're going to go up to space and view the satellite and see how much damage it has.

23:56Mark Groenheide: You can't send the adjuster up, you know. Well, I mean, maybe we can soon, but it just was not really well suited for a lot of the products that were currently available and they're pretty much really ideal for this. And to be able to be involved in things, you know, with Falcon 9 rocket launches with SpaceX and everything else that came with that, it was a huge learning experience for us. But at the end of the day, index solutions are index solutions. and those folks, they really are rocket scientists. Yeah, by the way, what is the index there? What are we looking at? What are we looking at if more than X amount of satellites go down in any given year or in time frame?

24:32So there's a whole variety of them, many of which on the index side are under NDA, but it is robust. They come from NASA and other space organizations around the globe. And Alessandro, who I highly recommend you have on this podcast, He is just a fascinating individual, but found a massive hole in the market. And we were able to fill that. I would put someday as our intention to have our own risk-bearing entity, potentially maybe even Lloyd's. And this is something that I would underwrite myself any day of the week. And that's how we really choose whom it is that we're working with. We make sure that everything is copacetic and we would do it ourselves.

25:15And then that's when we arrange the capital sincerely, honestly, and openly. Many times, too, it's the first time it's ever been done. So there's a significant amount of due diligence that takes place. We're bringing in actuarial firms, outside firms, as well as our own people. And we use most of the major models as well. But our focus is also on building a lot of the infrastructure ourselves as well, on top of existing systems.

25:42Mark Groenheide: It sounds like, yes, but for something truly novel, of course, there isn't a model yet, or if there is, it's not widely commercially available. Well, this is where it gets extraordinarily interesting with the leaps and bounds that we've all been able to take with artificial intelligence. And where we play in particular is really putting together robust data sets and data solutions and very technical. But our focus is working with other firms that see the vision, that see that the next set of entrepreneurial ideas have the potential to really either create entire markets or change entire markets.

26:23And we think in particular, it's very positive that firms now are partnering with folks like Anthropic and Google and others, because our industry either has to embrace these changes or will find itself watching the train go by.

26:40Mark Groenheide: Yes, I certainly had up my list to talk to you about AI because I talk to everyone about AI because, I mean, it's absolutely compulsory. You say, what's your view? Where are you finding the best use cases within your own business and also within the insurance value chain generally with the people that you're backing? So we are entirely AI native with Braven. Braven is built on Claude and we literally speak to our user interface with respects to our customers and queries, etc. It's entirely different than I would say a majority of folks who maybe have a license for ChatGBT or Claude. Our entire workflow is centered on this.

27:23So, for example, if I want to pull a report on what's our accumulation in Florida at the moment across every career that we work with, the attachment points, etc., and show me the EL calculations and whatever it is, it will do that in real time for us.

27:42Mark Groenheide: You just ask and you get the answer. Yes. And in addition, the ingestion of submissions, data, everything is done through agents. It is. If you compare that to whatever life was like in 2002 at Ace or any of these blue chip carriers, I mean, that would have been a lot of head scratching, a lot of people looking like they're going to lose their weekend and looking very unhappy with you and saying, yeah, it'll take about three weeks. And actually, we can only do it after we finish the last report that you asked us to do if we haven't finished doing yet. It's incredible. And our partner, Argenta Marie, and our other partner, Nebula MGA, we act as a constellation of companies together.

28:19we are all platformed in braven and it is fantastic it really changed everything for us we even have agents that can do the cap modeling for example which processes that in the past would have taken months now they're in seconds or minutes the agent can run the model for you can run rms or something it can run air for us yes excellent and it can interact with celsius pro and many of the other things that we utilize, it's amazing. It has also allowed us to spend significantly more time. So our brokers, our licensed brokers like Larry Lipman or Sal Garcia or others, spend time with the customers having conversations.

29:03And the back office is incredibly efficient as well as incredibly, the number of errors that we now see in comparison to when actual human beings we're doing a lot of the king is astronomically lower. But I believe, and this is where I think it's very important, we cannot lose sight of human beings' necessity in our industry. And we also can't allow for computers to run unchecked. This is something that I believe very firmly in. We haven't laid off anyone at my firm because we implemented AI. We use it to make our staff better. I fear in our industry, we're going down the wrong direction because it's going to be very difficult for us to attract young talent when now as an industry have all time high profitability.

29:56And to say then out the other side of our mouths, but we're laying off all of these people because we have AI does not set well on me.

30:02Mark Groenheide: It's funny, you know, your career started in that kind of dot-com drought, jobs drought for graduates. And at the moment, there's a very clear kind of AI why graduate jobs drought at the moment. It's only because I'm the father of quite a lot of children graduating at the same time. And of course, I'm pushing them towards insurance if I can, and I'm pushing them towards it, but there's not a huge amount of obvious opportunity at the moment. So they're taking other opportunities, and I'm not going to be the sort of person to chaperone their careers to that degree. But obviously, I put the idea in their minds and put that seed in the soil there for them.

30:33Mark Groenheide: But it is fascinating that, yeah, there's clearly not as much hiring going on. But it's good to hear you say that, of course, this should be freeing us all up to do the things that AI can't do, which certainly it can't go and talk to someone and see what's missing. I'd say AI is not very good at seeing things that aren't there. It can see what's there and work with what's there, but it can't work with what's not there, which is what a person can do. You can say, what are you not telling me? Reading between the lines, gauging an opportunity, sensing, literally sensing, because I don't think AI can sense things.

31:03Mark Groenheide: It can analyze things, but I don't think it can sense in the same way that we can, or come up with the hypotheses to test, which of course then the AI can go and test the hypothesis. It's unlikely to think of new hypotheses or ones that are particularly interesting or opportunistic or ones that are blue sky type things. It's amazing at refining. It's amazing at organizing. It's amazing at drawing conclusions with data. But you're absolutely right. For innovation, for human connection, even for marketing in many instances, it's not that great. And there's a huge pushback on AI marketing in general.

31:35But I believe though, we're going to enter an age of abundance. I'm positive in terms of the future and what AI will do and unlock. Soon we'll have robots building robots and there will be such an abundance of things that I think we are headed towards a very positive future, not a dystopian future, but is up to leaders to say, we have to make room for people and there are jobs that are needed and AI is not the way for us to get 60 combined ratios or create superior defenses to deny claims. It should be more about how do we engage more? How do we make blue ocean opportunities a reality in our industry, create more relevance and better user experiences?

32:26Because I think that's where AI is fundamentally amazing. But the one thing that I do worry about is what AI will do in terms of cyber risk. We are at a very interesting time now where, you know, a lot of organizations will tell you, oh, they have fantastic policies with respects to cyber or they have the best defenses. Or we've been riding cyber for 15, 20 years and we're comfortable with our accumulation. Well, that's well and good, but I think the hubris that our industry has that we will not have a black swan event within the next 24 months that can challenge the amount of capital that is even in the system, especially amongst the top 10 cyber writers, is a very scary reality.

33:11And I strongly suggest diversification of capital when it comes to cyber risk and also regulators to get very hard look at where the accumulation sits and what that potentially could do. Because with AI, we could have a black swan event that is far greater than I think anyone really understands. and with the on-again, off-again war in Iran, how would the forums even respond? Because I get so many different answers from very smart people. Is this excluded or not? What if it's the Tuesday where Donald Trump says the war's not on, and on Thursday the war's back on, and the hacking started on Tuesday but didn't rear its head until Thursday?

33:57How is that going to work? And what if it affects us in ways that we never thought previously, such as, I don't know, launching intercontinental ballistic missiles from an ally. You know, there are things here that are very, very real exposures. And there is a war going on in space, whether people want to admit it or not, between nation states that could easily manifest itself in the cyber realm. And that right now is such a unknown as to how those claims would be adjusted and what would happen. And that's things that we wrestle with daily with some of our customers and people we're trying to create solutions for.

34:40But I think as an industry as a whole, we are entirely unprepared and we really need to be focusing on that. So that's my one big thing with AI.

34:50Mark Groenheide: Because yeah, even if we were sitting two or three years ago, we could say actually the finite limit to how much a systemic event can occur is really limited by the number of human beings. who are good enough hackers or bad enough, bad enough people, but skillful enough hackers to hack. You know, you could say, well, yeah, theoretically, there's a systemic opportunity in Windows 12 when it all comes out or whenever that comes out. And we've all got it on our desktops and 2 billion people have got it. And there's some day, you know, zero day vulnerability in Windows 12. But of course, back in the days before authentic AI, there are only 14 ,000 or 23 ,000 hackers in the world who actually know how to exploit that thing.

35:29Mark Groenheide: They won't have time to exploit them all before it gets patched. But now, of course, you said an army of robots to go and exploit that thing and take the$10 off every single person in the world, you know, or empty all of our bank accounts, then that's going to be very serious. And obviously more serious, obviously, when you're talking about nation states involved even more, it's something that certainly wasn't on the agenda three or four years ago, because it was limited by a number of human beings. And now it's not limited. No, and it happens 24 hours a day, and it's creative and it's a real exposure that can mimic voices that can do a whole host of things that people are very unprepared for.

36:08Mark Groenheide: But let's deal with the final question I would have on AI would be, do you think it will create new business models, obviously new product, but also new ways of doing business? I had somebody on the show very recently who said, you're driving around in your big super tanker and then you attach these AI rockets on the side, you'll be going faster, you'll be pleased in the short term, but actually you may be missing the point that you should be flying around on rockets rather than chugging around on super tankers with rockets attached to them to go a bit faster. Do you think there might be whole new business models that weren't possible before?

36:37Mark Groenheide: I mean, one of the obvious ones is going to be broker agent to carrier agent or just human being to carrier agent. I do. I think in particular, we're going to see a merging between cameras, AI, monitoring locations that is going to fundamentally change workers' compensation in the United States. We will see the ability to have predictions and other things in workforce and safety and almost parametric triggers for falls and other things that will entirely change that space. advice also including predictions and putting in resources at the location and a much faster response you almost like saying i don't know if my knee has a sensor in it and it says i'll write you a policy if mark's knee goes over something nasty something that we know will cause injury to mark's knee if it goes over 953 then i'll pay mark straight away because i know his knee's broken and he's going to be off for at least six months correct and also saying get that employee off the line, their back is straining in a way that's not favorable.

37:52Based on their medical history, we believe that they should stop work at this period of time and we will pay them for the period for which they are out because it's cheaper for us to pay for the expense of putting in another employee or a robot or whatever it might be in comparison to what it would have cost us if they

38:08Mark Groenheide: were injured. Yeah, and you're repeating that strain day after day after day until you really off. You can't stand up anymore. Correct. The ability to monitor these locations and do a variety of things that we're not doing today. Obviously, there's a lot of privacy concerns and other things that go along with this, but the future of being able to predictive model occupational hazards, I think it's going to be a massive, massive opportunity for our industry. I also believe that from an auto perspective, we're going to go through a very interesting time with respects to self-driving vehicles and what will happen with that.

38:45And there's going to be a whole host of auto carriers that likely won't have business in the future.

38:51Mark Groenheide: Yeah, do you think it's just going to go to product liability at that point? I do. I believe that cyber will become a much bigger part of all of this as well. But product liability will be massive in that. And likely you'll see folks like Tesla and others taking risk on these things, especially given the fact that they've expressed interest in this previously, but there will be a glut then of capital saying, okay, well, what do we do now that our entire business model is necessity for change? Obviously, my job is to ask skeptical questions. You must get this skeptical question from traditional indemnity-based insurance people and reinsurance people all the time saying, hey, Mark, I like parametric.

39:31Mark Groenheide: I love what you're saying, what you're doing. And obviously, as things get more and more accurate, more measurable, the models are better. Everything's better. There's less basis risk than there would ever have been before, which is something that might have got in the way, we can really measure things much better. But then they might say to you, but it's still a really niche market, isn't it? What is the total addressable market? We can kind of guess that in the consumer's realm, my mother, I wouldn't want her to buy a parametric flood policy because if it was based on a deductible of a line painted on her wall, you know, of course, and we know that that could be terribly badly missold where you have the deductible where it's 10 centimetres off from the floor.

40:11Mark Groenheide: The price for that is$10 ,000, but the one where it's now a whole metre off the floor is only$10 because we know that's never going to happen because that's the difference between a one in five year event and a one in 5 ,000 year event. Whereas of course, a consumer just look at it, well, that one's$10, I'll buy that one. So we can imagine that regulatorily, it's not something for widows and orphans to be buying. And so therefore that does reduce the market size considerably, but where do you think the market size lives? It sounds from what you've been saying earlier, it sounds like there are so many new opportunities that we haven't imagined yet, whereas most of us just think of, hey, NatCat, et cetera, things that we understand.

40:46Mark Groenheide: If the wind blows more than 127 kilometers an hour for three minutes, then we'll pay. Sure. Lots to unpack there. So let's start with my view of parametric is it is the lead violin in a symphony of risk transfer. I still suggest that at least at a consumer level, unless it is a highly specialized situation, traditional insurance is still purchased. But parametric makes traditional insurance better. I believe we're heading towards a world where parametric will be a policy feature of every policy. And on top of this, parametric MGs are not set up for distribution to compete with folks like the Hartford or Travelers or others on a distribution personal lines or a small commercial basis.

41:36But where I think MGUs and others can present a very compelling option is becoming like Hartford Steamboiler and offering a very specialized coverage that makes a package policy or a personalized policy better. And that's where Parametric really takes off for that market segment. Now, we don't focus on that market segment. We focus on building the machines that build the machines. Our customers are often the MGUs who do those types of things. We build those. Our buyers are large institutional buyers, for which we write under our own delegated underwriting authority. For that, I have a lot less of those questions where, you know, why would I have my parametric?

42:19I still don't know. These are very sophisticated buyers. They know it. They want it. They've experienced it. They've had claims. And claims are the best selling point of parametric if it is structured appropriately. If it's structured inappropriately, it's right up there with, you know, your aunt at Thanksgiving dinner complaining that her insurance she bought isn't applicable. So that's where I think the rubber meets the road. Now, in terms of the total addressable market, this is where it gets very interesting and difficult because there's a lot of different thoughts. And I think the folks at Aon, in my opinion, if we talk folks that really know what they're doing in the parametric space, those guys in Lockton, amazing.

42:58Aon in particular doesn't set the threshold that high. And I believe that they're very credible in the numbers that they put forth. But I think it's extraordinarily difficult because there's this huge segment of the market that calls itself, I guess, parametric. Some people don't. That's massive and growing that we haven't even spoken about, which is the hedging on price commodities that happens within captives that is parametric in nature. Some folks quantify it as parametric. Others don't. And those transactions are huge. We participate in that space. So these are not derivatives. They're not futures contracts.

43:41They're indemnity based, but they hedge against commodity prices or other things that affect supply chains that result in real losses. And that market is quite large. There's obviously the weather derivative market for which we don't participate in that because that's separate licensing and other things and they're not indemnity. Some folks characterize that as parametrics, but it's not in our opinion. The market is quite large and it's growing. I mean, we're but one small firm in this sea of organizations that participate in parametric. And, you know, we have$250 to$300 million in premium in the space in parametric, including some of the MGs for which we support.

44:22Then we have a more traditional indemnity for which we do large MGU's, including some in the Nordic region and other places. And that's a huge part of what we do as well. But it's mainly, you know, we support some on the CAT side in the United States and others and some in Latin America. But the bulk of what we do, Alternative Transfer LWs and that, it's growing. It's growing rapidly because entire new classes are being created almost daily. And you're seeing it across marine now, too. You're seeing it across aviation. You're seeing it across space, terrorism, political risk, war. It's all coming to this market because it's facts, not feelings.

45:01And it takes a lot of the emotion out of things. And things that previously people couldn't get behind because they were worried about an unending amount of liability can now be comfortably testing their toes in the water because they have a very capped exposure.

45:15Mark Groenheide: Yeah, because your downside is always very clearly expressed. For better or for worse, you know what you're on the hook for. So we already had this conversation about the workers' comp. So obviously, most of these things we're talking about short-tail property-based business in some description, but obviously not when we're talking about commodity prices and hedging and other things. But what about casualty? What we said about workers' comp sounds interesting. So you think there are going to be loads more applications in casualty for parametric style structures? I do. I think D &O and EPLI will hit parametrics very soon.

45:46I believe that a number of other classes of business, such as toxic verdicts, could be put into indexes that could be extraordinarily interesting. We've only just begun to explore what's possible on the casualty side from a parametric basis, but the predictive analytics for which we now can get from cameras and other devices and cross-reference that into agentic AI, it is incredible what the possibilities are. many of the things that we have seen are extraordinarily interesting. They're just not ready yet. They're very close. I also believe that the surety market will be going parametric soon, too.

46:33Mark Groenheide: Yes, again, I'm just trying to think of the parameters. And again, what would be the parameters for D &O? Obviously, it's a public company. There's a share price, which is pretty easy to read. But what sort of triggers would you have? One can look to the industry to say patterns, okay? So is there a spike in certain types of exposures to organizations based on certain parameters? Or is there a pattern of now regulation that has changed, which also causes certain situations with respects to DNO? I mean, we can look back in the last 10 years and see things for which boards had to change based on composition or mandates or others in certain jurisdictions that easily could be put into indexable solutions.

47:19Mark Groenheide: Well, things where you get retrospective legislation, which extends the statute of limitations like we had with some of the abuse claims in New York and other places, you know, I suppose all these things could be indexed in some way. Yes, in the pharmaceutical industry too. There's a lot of things that have changed over time that have bled into that where there are definitely indexable opportunities. We've worked on two D &O parametric programs for which we're probably like six months out on, and they have some very interesting index. And it's interesting also what we've seen on the LPL side that was brought to us, which was a very interesting parametric opportunity.

47:58But the thing that we're seeing the most on parametric right now is data centers. Data centers and parametric are running hand in hand. And we've worked on some very differentiated products in that space for which people are attacking that to try to de-risk certain elements of it. Some of which is coming to fruition right now, which is the delay of certain data centers due to political risk and due to regulatory change, etc. And those are extraordinarily interesting things. things, but being able to quantify downside to organizations that work in IOS that have a very different view of risk and are willing to have a certain percentage of their capital allocated to higher risk, higher reward opportunities is an incredible part of our success.

48:53And we've been able to communicate those to folks and they're often much more amenable to going down a path where it's entirely blue ocean. We're working with outside organizations to establish these very credible but custom and bespoke indexes and be able to bring in experts from those particular industries to facilitate from a party perspective, eliminating as much of the moral hazard as possible. some very interesting solutions. And those have commanded a significant premium, significant rate online. We've seen some in the 30s, for example, 30 rate online. But it then provides very compelling opportunities for investors and others.

49:36And that's been an exciting portion of our success.

49:40Mark Groenheide: Yeah, and I suppose with those things, because that downside is known, then of course you don't need a regulated insurance balance sheet because you can put the capital, you can have that collateralized or whatever, can't you? So you can have that one-shot nature of the deal, can't you, rather than having to be there for each and every loss? Correct. But we have often, you know, fronting partners that operate within this, or we have insurers, a platform for which we can do collateralized contracts. And we work with others for collateralization. But it's a very interesting market. I think what we've seen is a number of folks saying, okay, I've seen enough cat in a circle wind to bring me something new.

50:18and there's only so many policies, you know, organizations can write in Miami, for example. So we've been able to provide them diversity and give their books a little bit more balance. And that's been really attractive. And we also just have some fantastic folks who work for us. Larry Libman, who's my co-founder, was the top insurance consultant at Upwork for years and years and years. And he does a great job shepherding very new ideas and getting them ready for us and our team in the Foundry to start putting our underwriting hats on. And Francesca Finnegane, who was previously with me at Noremax and New Paradigm and my MGOCGA, she does a fantastic job managing the relationships with the customers and does a lot of our underwriting with myself, but I'm really just focused on the underwriting and Nick Lamparelli is on that side as well.

51:12And then our brokers are managing the client relationships.

51:15Mark Groenheide: and something you're doing is you're going to be setting up a transformer in bermuda one explain to us what a transformer is anyone who doesn't know who thinks that maybe like what they were called um robots in disguise i remember when they were toys as well as what's the rationale and why are you doing that sure well the united states in particular where we put a lot of our capacity into has regulations obviously with either foreign alien reinsurers and collateral And some folks feel that if they transact business there directly, they may experience trapped capital because historically there have been situations where that has happened.

51:54And the organizations buying reinsurance from those folks need capital because the Schedule F provisions in their particular states are going to require them to have this at whatever time their fiscal year ends, plus or minus, you know, three months. And it's very important that everyone stay from a regulatory perspective on the right side of history. So what we do and what the transformer operates and the one that we're utilizing is White Rock with Aon to take both alien reinsurance as well as capital, including capital of our own, to put into a cell, which the BMA then licenses, to be able to write reinsurance.

52:37reinsurance in the United States and get the particular rating for it, almost similar to a fronting carrier, but it's a variety of different sources of capital and collateral. Some cash, some reinsurance, some LOCs, could be a number of different things. And then essentially operating within that licensing to be able to act as a reinsurer that is rated for the United States and particularly other jurisdictions as well. And that's what Transformers, a fancy way in many respects of saying fronting carrier, but it's separate and distinct and has its own licensing and its own rules and regulation.

53:14But it allows you to take these organizations and get then A15 paper or A10 paper, which may be necessary or required by their reinsurance purchasing teams, as well as from a regulatory standpoint, not have to be a whole of any Schedule F provisions and others. But we are very bullish on that. I think in particular, I like to express it's like the Panama Canal for capital. It allows us to bring in capital that otherwise isn't available that might be Nueva for the United States and allows us to offer differentiated solutions because sometimes people are overaccumulated. The biggest challenge that I ran into when I worked at major organizations was the fact that we wrote the workers' compensation, we wrote the GL, and we wrote the auto.

54:05So the last thing we wanted to do is put another$500 million in capacity at that location for the CAREAR builder's risk. And those situations happen often. And that's where our unencumbered capacity comes in handy.

54:19Mark Groenheide: It's a long way around Cape Horn, and the weather's not very good down there. So it's better to take the Panama Canal as long as it's got plenty of water in it. But you already mentioned about MGAs, and you've already said this. So I'm just going to get you to really clarify and restate this about your view of where we are in the MGA cycle, if there is one. We've had an amazing growth spurt in and also increase in market share of business transaction via MGAs. Do you think this is going to continue? Is there any cyclical nature to it at all? From what you've said, I wouldn't want to put words in your mouth, but it sounds like your view is very much this is a permanent change in the structure of how insurance is being transacted.

54:55Mark Groenheide: Would that be right? I think so. There are certain CEOs and others in the insurance industry that would definitely would like MGAs and MGUs to go away or be smaller. And then there are others that firmly believe that they're necessary and a key component to how individuals will transact business and go forward basis. I believe that the future of Blue Ocean products solely rests with MGAs and MGUs. I believe this because of what I had mentioned previously, the innovation that's required and the constant improvement that is necessary in order to do these things, which is very difficult to do in large organizations.

55:36I do believe, though, some MGUs and MGAs will face a crisis coming soon. There are far too many deductions in certain platforms, in certain whatever you call them, that support MGAs that go in the 44, 45, I've heard even 50 % range. Well, that's just not sustainable. It has to be manageable. Further to that, if you sell a commoditized product in an MGA or an MGU and you don't have an extreme amount of differentiation in your user experience or in your distribution, you are likely going to not have success as the market continues to soften and there's pricing pressure and those deductions get squeezed because that's a very difficult thing to do.

56:25But for folks like Orboy and others who have a really compelling product, who are serving a niche and are extraordinarily difficult to replicate, those people, and pardon my pun, will take off like a rocket. There's going to be, I think, a huge reckoning with just, I would say, the traditional commoditized MGUs struggling. But I think the ones that are focused on future and innovation and can do things that others can't, those likely will continue to see significant success and growth. But there will be, I think, a reckoning for those that are selling a small commercial in Michigan with no differentiation.

57:05that's going to be a tough sell on a go forward basis. I think Europe in particular though is ripe for a lot of MGU creation and implementation. I think reinsurance is really ripe for that. And I think Latin America in particular is really ripe for a lot of growth and continued success in the MGA space.

57:26Mark Groenheide: Certainly there's historically been a lot of good MGAs focused on reinsurance in Latin America. It's certainly been a distribution channel that has worked pretty well over the years. And do you think it's really the technology that's enabling this? Because if we end up with an insurance market that has no friction, where everyone's got an operating system, something like yours, where there is no friction other than you've got to pay for the tokens, i.e. enabling us to isolate what is the skill of underwriting. Whereas before, of course, in 2002, you had to be part of a large organization, attach yourself to a very large balance sheet to be a successful underwriter.

57:59Mark Groenheide: You needed to have the capital. That was one of the first problems you had to get over. And these days, you don't have to do that. What you can, because of technology, because of the lack of friction, and that transparency between capital and the underwriting, you can now be paid for your pure skill in underwriting. Do you think that's the right way of looking at it? Because we can disaggregate the insurance market? I do. I think the biggest challenge that MGAs and MGs will face is this gatekeeping that's happening where certain large organizations want to prove any that they don't either invest in, or own or whatever.

58:33And that, I think, will affect a lot of the success of certain platforms. I think you're spot on about not having to have as much capital as previously required. I think we will end up having a lot of disintermediation in certain ways that is going to be, I think, blowback from so much acquisition that's taken place. It's very difficult. like I'll give you just an example my independent agent got bought by a large conglomerate and I was trying to get my policy and I got bounced around three times around the world and it was very difficult and I can't see Main Street America liking that there's been folks who have come around that have been entirely digital too you know maybe we're a little bit too early but I think we'll be a huge disruptor in the future and in particular if the user experiences continue to improve.

59:30But I also believe that unless you've got like 96 % claim satisfaction, you really don't want to be laying off claims adjusters, you know, like AI should be creating more opportunity for conversations and clarification and customer experience, customer service. And that's something I think a lot of regulators will probably start asking too. Well, you know, you made these layoffs, but what's your user experience? Do you have a better business bureau rating of four stars? If those things aren't true, then why are you doing what you're doing?

1:00:00Mark Groenheide: With that relationship, you said you work with a large number of reinsurers, but do you have some pretty special relationships with some of those reinsurers? We do. You've got to tell me you work with more than others, right? Active Re, we've got a great relationship with. Edic El-Re, we've got a really great relationship with. Mandarin Re, Sharp Re, and a whole host of others. I wish we weren't prohibited by talking about our clients by NDA, but we are. But we have two really huge customers that allow us to do significant amount of risk transfer them. And we're very thankful for that. And our big distribution points, we deal a lot with Lockton Rhee.

1:00:35We deal a lot with Aon Rhee. They're fantastic trading partners of ours. And we work pretty extensively with Argentum Rhee, obviously our partners over at Nebula. And we work with BMS Rhee and Juniper Rhee and many others. But we also are selective on who we trade with. and we don't work with everyone. We work with probably 50 % of the market and the other 50 % of the market we don't when it comes to broking organizations. And we do that on purpose. So I think exclusivity drives value. I'm a very firm believer in being an enabler for your customers as a differentiated option versus working with everyone.

1:01:15Because if you work with everyone, then you mean nothing to anyone. And we're very focused on the folks that we like, know, and trust. and we have some amazing relationships. And I'm always going to be thankful to Tony Mata over at Lockton because he was our first customer when we set up and that started the snowball for us. And then also the team over at Aonbri who has just been absolutely phenomenal.

1:01:41Mark Groenheide: Say hi to Tony. I haven't seen him for years. I think I lost him in Miami and he's a great guy. So yes. He just got engaged. Excellent. Congratulations to Tony. One last question I've got here. We've had an amazing conversation. It's gone kind of all over the place, but in a really good way. Just about you, obviously, you're an entrepreneur. You're very entrepreneurial. You've set up all sorts of things, and you've set up something here, which is incredibly eclectic. What kind of entrepreneur are you? This is the kind of question I always ask entrepreneurs is there seem to be a couple of kinds, the two main types.

1:02:11Mark Groenheide: There's the one who likes to solve problems, and therefore, they see a problem, they solve it. And then, not to say they get bored, but they say, you know what, actually, there's another problem I need to solve. I'm going to hand this over to someone who's more operational, who's better optimizing this thing. And I'm going to get excited about a new problem to solve that I found that I think is even more exciting and even more important and add even more value if I do solve it. So I'm going to go off and do that. Or are you the type who wants to put your name above the door and then build this thing that you kind of hand over to your grandchildren?

1:02:39So for us, the end goal is we want to be a reinsurer. LARG is Latin International Reinsurance Group. we are collecting the capital that will be necessary that one day the things that we do under our own binders will be the things that we write as an organization for reinsurance and we'll work closely with the current partners that we have to provide retro and other things for that but i'm very much over the next two years interested in the formation of that and then eventually a re-entry into the Lloyd's market. At that time, our book will be very mature. It will be much easier to explain a consistent and profitable book of business that maybe is somewhat blue ocean to Lloyd's and pursue a syndicate with that, but also with our own in-house reinsurer.

1:03:43That's our ultimate goal. We take in major steps towards that and we take a large percentage of the profits and put it aside into what is an account for a future risk-bearing entity. But I will likely work until the day I die in this industry. I love it. It is fascinating to me. And I hope that someday my name is up there with many of the greats that I've been fortunate enough to work with. But I see the world needing more ethical reinsurers that are focused on providing solutions and jurisdictions that are underserved, that often are a afterthought, and also on projects and products that maybe are a little bit more obscure, but provide significant financial benefit to large communities that are underserved.

1:04:41I witnessed a lot of really interesting and great things working with African Special Risk and some of the other things that I've seen with others that I really admire and want to replicate some of those in our own organization. I don't anticipate that in five years, LARG will still be in the distribution space. We will likely be far gone from that and we will be supporting distribution. But our goal is to be a full-on AMBEST reinsurer in the future. And we are taking the active steps in order to do that and working right now on establishing a class two reinsurer that will be fronted by a major partner of ours.

1:05:29And we hope to be writing reinsurance sometime in the second quarter of next year under our own brand. But that is our goal. Don't want to get out of this anytime soon. Really don't have a life beyond it. I love it. And it's something that I'm passionate about. And further to that, I want to raise as much money as I can within our organization, because what I'm intending to take at least a percentage of the profits and apply them to is the preservation of the natural world in Colombia, Venezuela, and Panama. I live part-time in Panama. I love the Amazon rainforest. I love the natural world. And when I had my own health challenges, I sat and said, what do I want my legacy to be?

1:06:17and what I want and the reason why our logo is a jaguar because it's the big cat of Latin America is to be remembered as someone who put their money where their mouth is and hopefully preserved as much of the Amazon rainforest for future generations because I believe it is the lungs of the world and if that is the defining characteristic for which I'm remembered I will be very happy.

1:06:40Mark Groenheide: Sounds great Mark and in fact I'm sure you've met Gabriel Holschneider because he managed to bootstrap his own reinsurance business. They've had their own reinsurer, which I think they started with about$20 ,000. I mean, I'll have to listen back, but it was a very small number. It's much bigger than that now already. I mean, it's 70, 80 million or something. So it can be done just by saving up the pennies and retaining those profits and never dividending them out. Things can be done, but I'm sure you can also get other people to help with the capital as well, Mark. But good luck with that. But also, I think your business is so eclectic that you're never going to run out of problems to be solving because you're solving a hundred different problems already.

1:07:15Mark Groenheide: So it sounds like you're going to be having a lot of fun. We gravitate towards the odd, the strange, the weird, but we like things with vision that are complex, that want to change things materially for either outcomes, opportunities, or people. And that's where we found our success and we'll continue to do so. And hopefully we'll act as like a bridge for Lloyd's Lab because there are certain things that just are not appropriate for them or they're too new and too bespoke but hopefully we can be a landing place for some of that and then hopefully eventually have our own syndicate someday that would be our intention and be able to participate in that amazing market because I do believe that the world needs Lloyd's and it's fascinating and I hope to come back into it because it was an amazing experience for myself and it's something I've always admired.

1:08:05Mark Groenheide: It's interesting what you said about you know learn from other experiences to know that it's perhaps better to come with something that's better formed. It's harder to form yourself within Lloyd's. It's better to form something and then show it rather than tell. Yes, because it's the ultimate licensing and rating tool. There's nothing better and you can go anywhere around the world and people know it. It's the Rolex of insurance. And to me, I was very fortunate to be a part of it. I was a kid from Michigan who had been to the UK many times, but never in that manner. And just absolutely a highlight of my life was participating in creating that syndicate and look forward to eventually doing that again.

1:08:44Mark Groenheide: Great. Well, I'll see you over in London at one of the Lloyd's Lab events. It's always good fun. I really enjoy it. I love it because it keeps me young. I just, it keeps my brain alive and keeps me enthusiastic. You know, it keeps me young. Anyway, Mark, I'm going to leave you to it for a while, but I'm sure it won't be long before we have a word again, because the rate at which you're moving, the speed at which you're moving, and the amount of interesting things you're doing. We're going to have a ton of stuff to talk about the next time we do talk. So I hope it's soon rather than later. Well, thank you so much for having me.

1:09:09It's been a real pleasure. And again, I've been following your podcast for quite some time. So it's amazing to actually be here. Great. Thanks so much. Thank you. Bye. Well, I hope you enjoyed today's episode. 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.

1:09:43It's also an intimate medium where you, the listener, are right in the room with me and the interview subjects. Needless to say, that means it's a great way of getting your message out directly to an audience because you know you've got their full attention. It's also very cost effective. So get in touch with Mark at thevoiceofinsurance.com to find out how you could be speaking directly to the industry. The Voice of Insurance podcast is produced in association with Advantage Go, enabling enterprise-scale underwriting through a single pane of glass.

1:10:19Voice of Insurance is produced by me, Mark Gagan. Music was written by Anna Gagan and produced by Carlos Gagan.