Culture of Innovation – Javier San Basilio, CUO, Mapfre Re

In this week’s episode of The Voice of Insurance podcast, Mark Geoghegan chats to Javier San Basilio, Chief Underwriting Officer at Mapfre Re.

Since joining Mapfre in 1992, Javier has worked all over the world and has seen many market trends come and go, which places him in the perfect position to comment on the state of the market.

Speaking about Mapfre’s long-term view and business relationships, Javier says, “In terms of deploying capital, for us, we are, as you know, in Mapfre Re a very, very long-term view focused company. We try to build relationships over a long period of time. We are not opportunistic by definition. We try to be stable. And because of our size, we are in a position where we’re not particularly over-exposed anywhere in the world, so we can still find growth opportunities in many markets.”

As the conversation turns to the technology renaissance in the insurance industry, Javier discusses how Mapfre has always had a culture of embracing innovation, “In Mapfre, as a group, we’ve always been very involved in innovative solutions and trying to improve the way in which we transact business with our clients and apply this innovation to insurance problems. We’ve had, in the past five years or so, very clear innovation initiatives at the group level, and we’ve been deploying capital in some firms where we saw potential. We’ve been creating facilities for new people in the industry to come and show us what they think we could be doing in our industry, and we’ve seen some fantastic ideas. We definitely want to improve the way in which insurance is transacted, how we solve the insurance problems, how we provide better client service with innovative tools.”

Listen to the full interview here.