The Sky’s the Limit – Jeff Radke, CEO & Co-Founder, Accelerant

In this week’s first The Voice of Insurance podcast, Jeff Radke, CEO, Accelerant Holdings, speaks about Accelerant´s business model and why having a customer-centric strategy sits at the very core of his organisation.

Founded and led by a team of insurance industry veterans who understand the challenges of MGAs and PAs, Accelerant partners with its Members to help them grow and succeed.

In this podcast, Jeff speaks about the creation of Accelerant, his plans for the business, the impact of data in assessing risk, and why he’s a believer in algorithmic underwriting. Mark kicks off the podcast by asking about the main idea behind the creation of Accelerant. Jeff discusses the motivation behind Accelerant and why customer-centricity is a key to its success, “How can you have customer-centric strategy across such a wide geography with so many markets, and the conclusion we reached is the most customer-centric organisations we saw in the industry were MGAs,” Jeff responds.

Many leaders speak about putting the customer first, and it’s refreshing to hear a CEO discuss in detail how vital customer-centricity in today’s economy, commenting on this, Jeff says, “If you believe, as we do, that customer-centricity is a) key, and b) incredibly lacking historically in our industry, you start with the thought process of we’re going to go to market, we’re going to access our business through these MGA’s, which at least the MGA’s we do business with tend to be about ten inches wide and a mile deep. I mean they are pretty specialised in their niches which is where the customer-centricity comes from. Once we made that decision, then the question was how do we support these MGAs in a way that works better than historically it has.”

Jeff expands on how customer-centricity is two-fold, centering on technology and data and relationships. Jeff discusses how Accelerant’s focus is to make those MGA members successful, and by achieving that, everything else will take care of itself. Commenting on the importance of building and nurturing relationships, Jeff says, “What we decided to with Accelerant is have a relatively small number of relatively significant relationships where we really, really back the MGAs. In fact, we call them members just to remind ourselves about how we should think about them.”

Continuing with the topic of relationships, Jeff speaks about how Accelerant is focused on improving the value chain from the insured and retail broker all the way to the risk capital provider with the aim of making the entire whole value chain efficient, transparent and fair.

Granular data

Turning the conversation to technology, Mark asks Jeff for his views on getting granular data from retail brokers; Jeff replies, “It’s a problem, it’s a challenge, I’d encourage you and the listeners when they hear about challenges and problems in the data stream to ask how many layers back are you, because when you find a customer-centric MGA or MGU suddenly they don’t have any trouble getting data from the retail broker.”

Staying on the theme of technology, Mark raises the topic of algorithmic underwriting by asking Jeff if he would back a great algorithm; Jeff says, “I would, I would, I would say how big is your policy book and tell me about your insured and I think that algorithm is likely, eventually to be better than people at small risks that have a lot of volume.

What next?

Looking towards the future, Mark asks Jeff about Accelerant’s focus over the next few years. “For Accelerant, because we just started in the US, the opportunities in the US are truly upon us, we’ve got tons of room to run, and sort of the sky’s the limit because of the number of quality of potential members out there.”

Bringing the discussion to a close, Jeff expands on Accelerant’s value chain and culture, “We’ve been very fortunate to have put together a group of members that we’re really proud of, and we’re going to run this thing and have it grow and grow as long as we can grow profitably. We’re trying to build the best business we can be in 2026.”