{"id":6589,"date":"2024-03-04T08:17:03","date_gmt":"2024-03-04T08:17:03","guid":{"rendered":"httpss:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/?p=6589"},"modified":"2025-03-26T04:06:23","modified_gmt":"2025-03-26T04:06:23","slug":"voi-podcast-with-renaud-guidee-ceo-of-axa-xl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/content\/voi-podcast-with-renaud-guidee-ceo-of-axa-xl\/","title":{"rendered":"Technology focus \u2013 digital transformation and reinsuring cyber"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><iframe title=\"Ep200 Renaud Guid\u00e9e CEO AXA XL Re: Much more than just a transaction\" 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\/?i=6mpx8-15925d5-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\" loading=\"lazy\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>The latest Voice of Insurance podcast featured Renaud Guid\u00e9e, chief executive of AXA XL Re. He spoke about the reinsurer\u2019s risk appetite and the market\u2019s technological journey.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Ongoing technological transformation in the re\/insurance market was a focus of conversation in the latest episode of the Voice of Insurance podcast, with AXA XL\u2019s CEO, Renaud Guid\u00e9e, as guest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>With executive experience in investment banking at Goldman Sachs and with a challenging AXA Group role as chief risk officer already under his belt, in his current role as AXA XL\u2019s chief executive, Guid\u00e9e is responsible for a $2.5bn global premium base.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He underlined the enduring role of human judgment, decision-making and relationships, despite the widespread digital change going on among re\/insurance firms, in the London market and globally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cDo I believe that our whole industry will become fully automated and underwriter-less? Certainly not,\u201d he said. \u201cI do believe that there will always be room for human connectivity and human judgment \u2013 relationships do matter,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cWe need to strike the right balance and to make sure that technological progress comes as a support and not a substitution to our knowledge or insight and judgment provided by our decades of experience in underwriting,\u201d said Guid\u00e9e.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It is impossible to have a client-centred strategy without human relationships at the core, he emphasised.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Getting faster through automation will perhaps not change reinsurance\u2019s nature, veteran re\/insurance journalist and host Mark Geoghegan suggested \u2013 contrasting this with Guid\u00e9e\u2019s investment banking experience and that industry\u2019s adoption of high frequency trading \u2013 the host suggesting \u201cday trading cat risk\u201d was unlikely to take off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cWe&#8217;ve seen a transformation of the securities and capital markets industry, but when it comes to insurance, not all papers have the same quality,\u201d Guid\u00e9e said, making it impossible to \u201callocate capacity blindly\u201d with a high frequency machine learning algorithm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cThere&#8217;s so much differentiation, despite a shallow appearance of sameness, between the robustness that reinsurers can provide, that you can&#8217;t move full blown to something automated and formulaic. That being said, there&#8217;s progress to be made from the starting point we\u2019re at now, in terms of transparency of price discovery and efficiency of capacity allocation,\u201d Guid\u00e9e added.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A few years ago AXA made a statement that it wanted to rein in its property catastrophe risk exposure, which has been the lifeblood of the AXA XL part of the business, since the XL Catlin acquisition in 2018.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Guid\u00e9e said the segment was \u201cprobably overweight and underpriced\u201d, something the firm had in common with many other insurers. The process is now complete, he revealed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cWhat we did was right-sizing that business, recalibrating its share in our portfolio,\u201d said Guid\u00e9e. \u201cAll of that effort is behind us, and we are very happy with the business that we have now in our portfolio.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Conversation moved to cyber re\/insurance, in hot demand, the fastest growing class of insurance in the world, Geoghegan noted. Reinsurance capacity has been a concern to support the cyber market\u2019s continued growth, he suggested, but that the market had reached \u201ca level of maturity\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s maturing, I\u2019m not sure if it\u2019s matured,\u201d Guid\u00e9e said. \u201cCyber is a good example of what our industry is about. It&#8217;s about harnessing innovation. And it&#8217;s about the alignment of interests between insurers and reinsurers\u2026 it&#8217;s about the individual risk, it&#8217;s about the wordings, the terms and conditions, the risk selection.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Cyber insurance still lacks \u201chindsight on the loss history\u201d, compared to models for hurricane. New regulations, such as rules set by the US Securities and Exchange Commission, are also helping force firms that fall victim to cyber-attacks into fuller disclosures, he referenced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cWhat is important is that we can get data transparency, so that we can build for the benefit of the broader economy and society, a record of incidents,\u201d said Guid\u00e9e.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Improving data will help underwriters better assess what the loss distribution profile for the product class, leading to better risk selection and pricing decisions. Guid\u00e9e\u2019s comments emphasised the importance of careful reinsurance risk selection for cyber.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cWe are happy to support our clients provided we are comfortable with the approach to underwriting and the controls and the risk management framework that they have in place,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The latest Voice of Insurance podcast featured Renaud Guid\u00e9e, chief executive of AXA XL Re. He spoke about the reinsurer\u2019s risk appetite and the market\u2019s technological journey. Ongoing technological transformation in the re\/insurance market was a focus of conversation in the latest episode of the Voice of Insurance podcast, with AXA XL\u2019s CEO, Renaud Guid\u00e9e, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6590,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[35,10,39,14],"line-of-business":[24],"class_list":["post-6589","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-podcasts","tag-exact-max","tag-exposure","tag-reinsurance","tag-underwriting-workbench","line-of-business-cyber"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6589","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=6589"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6589\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6590"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6589"},{"taxonomy":"line-of-business","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/line-of-business?post=6589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}