Running Towards the Fire: Richard Brindle and Clive Washbourn on the Art of Underwriting Greatness

Richard Brindle and Clive Washbourn have each appeared on The Voice of Insurance before but never in the same room together. Five years into running the Fidelis Partnership and Navium side by side, the two underwriters join host Mark Geoghegan for a conversation he calls a masterclass in what separates a good underwriter from a great one, tested against the backdrop of the AI revolution. If you work in specialty underwriting anywhere in the London market, listening to what these pair have to say will change how you think about growth, judgement, and what still cannot be automated.

The Multipolar World: Growth Beyond North American Property

The headlines about a softening North American property market tell only part of the story. Brindle is quick to reframe the conversation: “The press focuses relentlessly on North American property business,” he says, “and it’s true, there are certainly headwinds in that area.” But with gross written premium past $5 billion and a book now spanning 150 lines of business across 140 countries, Brindle is blunt about a structural weakness he sees across much of the London market since the pandemic: an industry that has retreated into its shell. “This industry is characterised by a very neo-imperial mentality,” he argues. “I hear this phrase all the time – it’s going to come to London. Well, guess what? It isn’t.”

Nowhere is that more apparent than the newest frontier: data centres. When brokers came calling with a fast-growing, capital-intensive class tied to hyperscale computing, the Fidelis Partnership moved in days, not months, doubling its line and assembling a Lloyd’s consortium that now carries $300 million of capacity – putting it, in Brindle’s words, “at the top table” alongside the market’s biggest names. It is one of 10 consortia the group now runs, each built on the same principle: speed of execution as a genuine competitive advantage, not just an ambition.

Why AI Still Cannot Replace the Underwriter’s Judgement

The conversation’s most pointed exchange comes when Geoghegan relays a challenge he had heard from a technologist: that AI should not simply industrialise the judgement of senior underwriters like Brindle, because the next generation, armed with AI, might build entirely new classes of business the old guard would never think of. Brindle does not hedge. “I pretty flatly disagree with that,” he says. “The value of experience and relationships and expertise” cannot be replicated by a tool, however capable. He points to speaking directly to the master of a Chinese tanker in the Gulf, by satellite phone, about the vessel’s cover: “You tell me how a 24-year-old could do that. Or for that matter, how AI can do that.”

That does not make Brindle or Washbourn AI sceptics – quite the opposite. Brindle describes bringing “disruptors” from across the business together to identify what should be automated and what should not, freeing people from the repetitive, low-value work that once defined a young underwriter’s early career. Washbourn is equally clear about where the line sits: “It’s a tool,” he says, “a fantastic tool… but I’d like people to think, certainly on Navium, to underwrite with their brain, not just to have someone say that’s the number.” For both of them, a rater might set the starting point; it is the underwriter who has to ask whether the risk actually makes sense.

Discipline, Bravery and the Respect That Keeps Brokers Coming Back

Discipline is the thread running through the rest of the conversation. Brindle points to the Fidelis Partnership’s long-standing refusal to write broker facilities in political violence business as a decision that was “completely vindicated” when the Gulf conflict produced losses running as high as $1.5 billion, concentrated almost entirely in facilities with little visibility over pricing. “If you don’t have the discipline not to write,” he says, “of course you’re not going to see the business” priced properly – the market simply moves to whoever will.

That same discipline extends to how the pair define underwriting skill itself. For Washbourn, it starts with genuinely understanding what, and who, you are insuring, and then having the nerve to act on it. Being “brave at the right points of the market” matters as much as analytical rigour, he says: “when most people are running away, you want to be running towards the fire.” It is a philosophy that shows up in the numbers. Brindle describes a range of outcomes that stayed within a narrow band even through a black swan on a black swan in aviation war losses. And it extends to how both men talk about brokers, whom Brindle refuses to blame for losses, insisting on genuine respect rather than the theatrics of a bygone Lloyd’s.

The Full Picture

Growth strategy, AI’s real limits, and the underwriting judgement no algorithm can replicate: Brindle and Washbourn cover extraordinary ground in this episode, and that is before the conversation turns to the future of Lloyd’s, market discipline and the philanthropic work that keeps both men motivated well beyond any number on a P&L. For anyone building a career in specialty underwriting, or trying to understand where the market’s real growth is hiding, this is a conversation worth hearing in full.