A Lloyd’s of London anecdote from years back.
A dubious billionaire wants to insure a curious ship and gets his broker to ask both a female and a male underwriter for a price.
The female underwriter notes that this ship has crashed three times already and says it’s too bad a risk.
Her male rival takes a different view. He reasons that this ship can’t possibly crash again, and offers the billionaire a very high premium deal, the only one he can get.
The ship, now insured, duly crashes into one of the perfectly safe ships insured by the female insurer. Claims’ battles ensue.
The point of this possibly apocryphal tale is to highlight the different attitude the genders have to risk. It’s a stereotype, but stay with me.
The female insurer is patently better than the male, but her approach – safety first – was not rewarded.
This suggests that industries that are placing bets for a living need to be diverse or at least balanced, else trouble will ensue.
When it comes to other financial services – stock picking for example, the science is in.
Women are way better at it, precisely because they take a calmer approach, stick to their principles and don’t think they can second guess markets every 15 minutes.
Studies that show this are numerous. Whether it is retail investors, hedge funds or mutual funds – women do it better.
There is not much point in pretending that the Lloyd’s of London market isn’t still a blokey place, despite efforts to make it otherwise.
Last year Gracechurch noted in its London Market’s Leading Underwriters review this:
“There has been another slight shift upward in the representation of women in the rankings and some prominent female leaders, but overall the progress toward a gender balance in London is still glacially slow.”
Ouch. The Gracechurch report for 2025 is out toward the end of June and is plainly going to attract plenty of interest. Whether it will have good news to report on the gender balance issue, we’ll see. We will let you know when it is out and how to get it.
Last year’s report noted that risks are evolving at such a pace that insurance is getting harder to price, dodgy ships or not.
The authors said: “In the wider environment insurance is in the spotlight as the world wrestles with evolving risks and challenges. The Financial Times has described an increasingly ‘uninsurable’ world where catastrophe models are not working well to take account of the changing risk profile, especially the increasing frequency of secondary perils.”
If insurers can’t, or won’t, insure things that’s a problem for possibly everyone, not just the insurance sector.
How is it going to deal with, say, the increasing cyber risk, which seems to get greater by the week. Just ask Marks & Spencer.
Who is the best underwriter this year? Well, we’ll let you know when Gracechurch does.
But from last year: “The 2024 research shows, as always, that brokers and underwriters have somewhat different opinions on who are the leading underwriters, but still the top ‘iconic’ underwriters build respect across both communities and the traits that are most admired by both groups are, for the most part, the same: knowledge, leadership, technical expertise, client focus, strong service and experience.”
Beazley won for overall brand bench strength, with Convex not far behind.
The leading individual underwriter was MAP’s Richard Trubshaw – he faces intense competition to hang on to that crown and, most likely, we will see some new names in the top 10.
There was one woman – Nicola Wood of Canopius.