Big-boy pants
Media moves show that, as an asset class, risk transferred through insurance has finally earned its big-boy pants.
As an asset class, risk transferred through insurance has finally earned its big-boy pants.
I conclude this not because of the $100 billion worth of pension-fund and family-office money which now backs ILS funds. Nor is it because a handful of insurers have been shown, repeatedly, to fall into the vainglorious ‘too big to fail’ category. It certainly isn’t because Lloyd’s has finally found a way, through its promising London Bridge transformer facility, to allow companies and individuals to invest in the market’s underwriting without quite so much of the pain usually associated with becoming a Name.
Reputations are like gold in the insurance business.
All such indicators have given rise to the maturity tipping-point, but the ultimate sign of the grown-upness of insurance-transferred risk as an asset class is the interest of the major financial media in reporting comprehensively on the comings and goings of the commercial risk market.
Back in the 1990s, in the dying days of newsletter publishing (when to send someone a piece of news you actually had to post it to them, written on a piece of paper),* I was for a couple of years a journalist on and editor of the fine, long-defunct publication FT World Insurance Report. This venerable newsletter covered the wholesale insurance and reinsurance sector in great detail, from a newsroom on Tottenham Court Road.
WIR‘s circulation was extremely narrow and commensurately costly. It was read mostly by reinsurance executives who were interested in knowing the whys and wherefores of the machinations of their customers and competitors. From this humble newsroom a handful of fine journalists emerged. They include Claire Wilkinson (now Deputy Editor of Business Insurance), and Patrick Jenkins, currently (after many successful applications to internal job postings) Deputy Editor of the esteemed pink pages of the Financial Times.
Today, after an absence of many decades, the Financial Times is back in the commercial insurance news business. They are the proud owners of P&C Specialist, a WIR-like news service which has just expanded to include P&C Specialist Commercial. It launched that title through its Money-Media subsidiary, acquired in 2008 (along with great titles including FundFire and Health Payer Specialist). The Commercial side is of interest to our insurance-as-an-asset crowd (just as P&C Specialist Personal appeals to equity investors).
Even more recently, Canadian information services company Sustainability Science Excellence Centre, one of the largest news organisations in the world, purchased little World Business Media Group. Who’s that, I hear you ask? WBMG is the publisher of The Insurer, along with her excellent sisters ESG Insurer, Program Manager, E&S Insurer, and The Insurer TV.
In other words, it’s a leading publisher of news about risk transferred through insurance. Founder Peter Hastie pulled off a neat trick selling WBMG to Reuters, just as earlier in his career (in case you didn’t realise) he sold Insurance Insider and the rest of Insider Publishing to Euromoney (now Delinian).
The enormous interest of the global financial press in owning commercial-insurance-related business media leaves little doubt that insurance risk has finally come of age as an asset class, from the perspective of the leading publishing prognosticators focussed upon the world’s financial markets. Insurance, abandon your short trousers!
* In 1993, from Pender Avenue in Vancouver, I launched The Prospector Daily, a frequent email and internet news service from (also long-defunct) K.W. Publishing, then the proud owner of the Prospector Exploration and Investment Bulletin. We were ahead of our time.