{"id":6812,"date":"2024-06-06T08:29:38","date_gmt":"2024-06-06T07:29:38","guid":{"rendered":"httpss:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/?p=6812"},"modified":"2025-03-26T04:50:57","modified_gmt":"2025-03-26T04:50:57","slug":"voi-podcast-with-wendy-houser-of-markel-specialty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/content\/voi-podcast-with-wendy-houser-of-markel-specialty\/","title":{"rendered":"The Golden Age for E&amp;S \u2013 set to continue?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><iframe title=\"Ep212 Wendy Houser Markel: The Golden Age of E&amp;S\" 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=mtmgg-162f49e-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 features Markel Specialty&nbsp;and focuses on US E&amp;S lines, the largest wholesale market in the world.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The US excess and surplus lines (E&amp;S) market is going through a boom, which continues to excite underwriting interest, among US insurers, in the London market and internationally. An unprecedented level of business flow and rate rises has produced something of a golden age for E&amp;S, although for how much longer than can continue is a matter for debate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The latest episode features a senior executive who has day-to-day visibility of the booming US E&amp;S market. Wendy Houser is chief wholesale officer of Markel Specialty. She leads a team of around 400, writing a book approaching $3 billion in gross written premium in the largest wholesale insurance market in the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cI&#8217;m sure that you&#8217;ve heard the term \u2018the golden age of excess and surplus lines\u2019. And that stands true today,\u201d Houser said. \u201cThe E&amp;S market today is extremely strong, and we have seen multiple years of double digit growth.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This continues to be the case amid so many underwriting uncertainties, she suggested, with the US admitted lines market lacking the flexibility of rate to place large, sophisticated and emerging risks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cAs we see things that keep emerging into the world that we live today \u2013 war, emerging technology, for good and bad, climate change, social inflation \u2013 we need to be problem solvers. In E&amp;S we can have bespoke forms and we can do the rate analysis to make sure that we are charging adequate rates for the long term,\u201d Houser said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>She was upbeat about the E&amp;S market\u2019s prospects for continuing to boom. \u201cI see E&amp;S continuing to be strong well into the future, because of the world that we live in today.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There are some areas where she sees the market levelling off, with risks and rates still more or less in balance, such as professional lines business, challenging the market \u201cto think about it differently\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Houser added: \u201cI don&#8217;t know that we have all the actuarial data that we need to say that it should be peaking. I would keep doing the portfolio management, using all the tools, to take a look to make sure that we are still getting an adequate rate in those areas.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>E&amp;S property insurance has also reached something nearer equilibrium, she suggested.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cYou see property with more capacity today, and maybe the rate slowing down, but it still has a trajectory of growth, and there&#8217;s still a need in the market to be able to handle more challenging risks,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Slowdowns in rate increases, or even level pricing, can dominate journalistic conversations, host Mark Geoghegan acknowledged, but in the longer term, \u201cup is up\u201d, and cumulative rises are still being banked by insurers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The question of whether capacity between E&amp;S and admitted markets is \u201csecular or cyclical\u201d has been discussed on the podcast before. Insurance cycles come and go, and the tendency has been for hard markets to lead to more E&amp;S business, that returns to admitted markets once rates begin to soften \u2013 but with some suggestions that risk trends may break this cycle. Houser provided a view.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cWe live in unprecedented times,\u201d Houser said. \u201cI\u2019m probably in the camp of it being more secular than cyclical, based on my 25 years in the industry and the hard markets that I&#8217;ve seen.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Severe convective storms, with \u201cbaseball-sized hail\u201d in Texas, and destructive wildfires in the Rocky Mountains and western US states, are keeping the pressure on property business, and \u201chomeowners insurance is doubling, if not tripling\u201d, she suggested.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Such events will keep driving hard market pricing, she stressed, also noting current predictions for an active hurricane storm season for US wind risks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cIf we say that that market is stabilising, I wouldn&#8217;t say that anyone is saying that it&#8217;s soft. But if those things all hit at the same time, then you will see a change in the market once again,\u201d she said, adding: \u201cit\u2019s definitely more secular than cyclical.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The latest Voice of insurance podcast features Markel Specialty&nbsp;and focuses on US E&amp;S lines, the largest wholesale market in the world. The US excess and surplus lines (E&amp;S) market is going through a boom, which continues to excite underwriting interest, among US insurers, in the London market and internationally. An unprecedented level of business flow [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6594,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[14],"line-of-business":[30],"class_list":["post-6812","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-podcasts","tag-underwriting-workbench","line-of-business-political-risk"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6812","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=6812"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6812\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6594"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6812"},{"taxonomy":"line-of-business","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/line-of-business?post=6812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}