{"id":5874,"date":"2023-06-22T14:34:17","date_gmt":"2023-06-22T13:34:17","guid":{"rendered":"httpss:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/?p=5874"},"modified":"2025-04-01T05:22:32","modified_gmt":"2025-04-01T05:22:32","slug":"new-podcast-with-julian-james-from-sompo-international","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/content\/new-podcast-with-julian-james-from-sompo-international\/","title":{"rendered":"The Value of Consistency"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Ep175 Julian James, Sompo International: A Degree of Equilibrium\" allowtransparency=\"true\" style=\"border: none; min-width: min(100%, 430px);\" scrolling=\"no\" data-name=\"pb-iframe-player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.podbean.com\/player-v2\/?i=wxxwa-1438d37-pb&amp;from=pb6admin&amp;share=0&amp;download=1&amp;rtl=0&amp;fonts=Tahoma&amp;skin=3267a3&amp;font-color=&amp;logo_link=episode_page&amp;btn-skin=1b1b1b\" width=\"100%\" height=\"150\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Julian James, CEO of Global Markets Commercial P&amp;C Insurance at Sompo International, was the latest guest of the Voice of Insurance podcast, hosted by veteran re\/insurance market journalist Mark Geoghegan.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A globe-trotting CEO, Julian James is responsible for Sompo&#8217;s business beyond North America and the insurer\u2019s home market of Japan. This includes a large Brazilian operation, business across Europe, including Turkey, and ten Asia Pacific countries outside Japan. All told, his bailiwick encompasses more than $3bn of gross written premium.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Ensuring consistency of products and services across otherwise disparate markets is a significant element of his role. &#8220;We feel we can deliver a better product for our customers if they get the same response in Malaysia than they would in Brazil,&#8221; he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This mission has been a massive integration play, but it is not just about the systems, James emphasised. &#8220;There\u2019s a lot of integration, but there&#8217;s also a lot of communication that&#8217;s been needed,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Many clients do not grasp the organisation\u2019s full scope, he suggests, putting emphasis on the need to tell a story \u2013 always key to winning hearts and minds \u2013 to explain the business and its potential to join the various risk transfer dots across its many arms and activities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;We&#8217;ve spent a lot of time over the course of the last three years trying to tell the story,&#8221; says James, emphasising the need to communicate with customers \u201cthe depth of capability\u201d available \u2013 whether they&#8217;re in Sao Paulo or Singapore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;When you sit down with people and say &#8216;we&#8217;re a $16bn gross written premium organisation outside of Japan, and inside of Japan, we&#8217;re a top three Japanese carrier, we own nursing homes, we own a life company, and we have investments in digital companies all around the world&#8217; \u2013 the lights start coming on,&#8221; he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>James was previously a guest on Mark&#8217;s podcast in 2020, and on his recent return he reflected on the Covid-19 pandemic and associated lockdown period, when everyone in society \u2013 insurance clients included \u2013 faced grave uncertainty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cWe are in the business of providing risk solutions for their clients, and I&#8217;d like us to have the reputation\u2026of being an entrepreneurial, risk taking organisation \u2013 If you have that reputation, you can start delivering solutions for clients,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The pandemic experience, for James, underlined the need to be a trusted partner, and \u201cflex our risk appetite\u201d. Stepping up was important, he emphasised, to show leadership and embrace risk, as Coronavirus represented \u201cone of the toughest times in their history\u201d for many clients. Mark noted that during this period many insurers were doing the opposite, through new exclusions, claims disputes&nbsp; that might have gone either way, or simply exiting business entirely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;What [clients] needed were people who are going to take on risk,&#8221; said James.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;We doubled our risk appetite in many lines of business, we came down lower on programmes, and we turned ourselves into a lead market on many things. That&#8217;s how I want us to be perceived, and how I want us to deliver the products to our customers,&#8221; he added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Julian James, CEO of Global Markets Commercial P&amp;C Insurance at Sompo International, was the latest guest of the Voice of Insurance podcast, hosted by veteran re\/insurance market journalist Mark Geoghegan. A globe-trotting CEO, Julian James is responsible for Sompo&#8217;s business beyond North America and the insurer\u2019s home market of Japan. This includes a large Brazilian [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5875,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,26],"tags":[10,14],"line-of-business":[20],"class_list":["post-5874","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-podcasts","category-latest-insights","tag-exposure","tag-underwriting-workbench","line-of-business-property"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5874","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=5874"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5874\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5875"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5874"},{"taxonomy":"line-of-business","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/line-of-business?post=5874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}