{"id":10199,"date":"2025-10-17T06:19:05","date_gmt":"2025-10-17T06:19:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/?p=10199"},"modified":"2025-10-17T06:19:09","modified_gmt":"2025-10-17T06:19:09","slug":"voi-podcast-with-joe-plumeri-and-tony-ursano","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/content\/voi-podcast-with-joe-plumeri-and-tony-ursano\/","title":{"rendered":"Industry legend Joe Plumeri delivers rousing messaging on the crucial societal role of insurance"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><iframe title=\"Ep272 Tony Ursano &amp; Joe Plumeri: The M&amp;A Continuum\" allowtransparency=\"true\" height=\"150\" width=\"100%\" style=\"border: none; min-width: min(100%, 430px);height:150px;\" scrolling=\"no\" data-name=\"pb-iframe-player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.podbean.com\/player-v2\/?from=embed&amp;i=4ae45-1991586-pb&amp;share=1&amp;download=1&amp;fonts=Tahoma&amp;skin=3267a3&amp;font-color=auto&amp;rtl=0&amp;logo_link=episode_page&amp;btn-skin=1b1b1b&amp;size=150\" loading=\"lazy\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Insurance legend Joe Plumeri has spoken passionately about the crucial role insurance plays in business and society, giving a typically uplifting and clear-eyed view on where the industry must excel.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Speaking to Voice of Insurance podcast host Mark Geoghegan, the former Willis chief executive, also gave a straight-talking insight into the lessons of 9\/11, which still hold relevance today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He was joined by Tony Ursano, co-founder of Insurance Advisory Partners.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Plumeri has taken up the role of chairman at the boutique insurance investment advisory specialist business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>9\/11 and insurance excellence&nbsp;<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Reflecting on his time in insurance, Plumeri said he was a great cheerleader for insurance, but he &#8216;didn&#8217;t think that it had invested enough in technology and in processing&#8217;.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The insurance around 9\/11 was typical of what was not quite right in the industry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;I think manualisation of placing business, it was too manual. I think the whole wording process and getting wordings done took too long,&#8221; he said, reflecting on his time at the centre of the global insurance world.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;I experienced that with the World Trade Center. As you know, we bound that insurance in July, but with wordings never took place. And I always use the expression it was the only industry that shook hands and never knew what the hell it shook hands about.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He questioned why, at the time, the insurance claims were not processed and paid quickly, concluding: &#8220;So I still think that the responsibility that the insurance industry has, both from a broker side and from an insurance company side, is great because it&#8217;s so vital to the epicentre of capital and the epicentre of commerce.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;But with that, you need to raise your game and be able to place business quickly and to be able to pay claims quickly.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Winners and losers&nbsp;<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In a wide-ranging interview, the duo discussed insurtechs, global insurance conditions and M&amp;A.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Ursano gave an insightful view of MGA and hybrid-carriers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He said a whole industry of &#8216;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/products\/underwriting\/\" target=\"_blank\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/products\/underwriting\/\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">specialised and excellent underwriting&#8217; operations<\/a> were being created with MGAs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But he emphasised: &#8220;It&#8217;s only going to take one or two to burn a carrier, to take a little bit of the balloon off the roads and cause people to be a little more cautious.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He also had a word of caution on hybrid-carriers. Hybrid carriers are players which reinsure a large part of the book, keeping a slice of the risk.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He observed: &#8220;Hybrid carriers, where the leverage that they employ premiums to surplus, the reliance that they have on reinsurance, recoverables to write the business, it doesn&#8217;t take a lot to create pressure on those business models. And so I think we&#8217;re going to see a bifurcation of winners and losers in both the MGA and the hybrid-carrier space over time, and there&#8217;ll be plenty that are highly successful, and they&#8217;re likely to be a few that aren&#8217;t.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Insurtechs will fail&nbsp;<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Ursano estimated that only 15 to 20% of insurtech businesses that start actually succeed.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He said: &#8220;And for us, it&#8217;s been a lot about trying to see businesses where you have a very clear path to profitability.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s been trying to see businesses that actually can be broadly utilised by the industry to make it better, whether that&#8217;s from an expense perspective or an underwriting perspective.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;And businesses where they truly have something distinctive from a technology perspective, we see a lot of businesses that are data centric and analytic.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He cited businesses such as CyberCube, which is &#8216;now the standard for modelling cyber exposure in the context of the ILS market&#8217;, as &#8216;businesses we like&#8217;.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He threw in a note of caution though, stressing that overall insurtechs can be tricky to evaluate: &#8220;So those are businesses that we like, but discerning which ones are going to be successful from which aren&#8217;t is a tricky exercise, and one that we&#8217;re trying to be very careful about.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Investment in insurance firms&nbsp;<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The discussion expanded further onto what makes a good insurance investment opportunity.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Plumeri put a high value on an insurance business that understood its role in benefiting society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;Is your real purpose, and understanding, that you play a very vital part in society? Whether you&#8217;re a broker or an insurance company, and if they understood that &#8211; so that was their ethos every day &#8211; I would invest in that company.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Ursano summarised his view on a good opportunity: &#8221; I would say there are two things I&#8217;d be looking for. One, is truly best in class, management team and culture &#8211; right, like, who has it right in terms of the right culture to grow the business? And also who has sufficient scale for and commitment to investing in technology?&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He said you have to &#8216;use your wildest imagination&#8217; to work out what the industry will look like in five or ten years based on the pace of technology.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Insurance legend Joe Plumeri has spoken passionately about the crucial role insurance plays in business and society, giving a typically uplifting and clear-eyed view on where the industry must excel.&nbsp; Speaking to Voice of Insurance podcast host Mark Geoghegan, the former Willis chief executive, also gave a straight-talking insight into the lessons of 9\/11, which [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":10093,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,26],"tags":[38,14],"line-of-business":[24,20],"class_list":["post-10199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-podcasts","category-latest-insights","tag-technical-vision","tag-underwriting-workbench","line-of-business-cyber","line-of-business-property"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10199"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10199\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10093"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10199"},{"taxonomy":"line-of-business","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/line-of-business?post=10199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}