Hi Everyone and Happy New Year!
Can you believe we are already in the middle of January, and in the blink of an eye, it will be Easter!
It has been a busy few months since our last newsletter, but in the middle of all of that, Tanus and I popped over the pond to London to try and see what is happening in the market over there – from both a broker and underwriter’s perspective, but nothing could have pre-warned us of the chaos that was about to reign on the 1st of January renewals! Lloyds has shrunk in floor space, and it seems like the UK market as a whole has largely adopted a Tuesday to Thursday work-week, post-Covid. Most people are working from home on a Monday and Friday. The general situation relating to renewals (in London) was that the various Retrocession programmes were late in being finalised this year, so that had a knock-on effect on the underwriters putting us on hold until almost the last minute, and with the tightening of capacity and renewal restrictions they got, it put us under pressure on one of our programmes, and undeservingly so, because it is a book of business that has only ever been profitable and it ran at a 13% loss ratio in 2022! Long story short – we managed to get it home in the end but it took us to 6pm on the last working day of the year! The UK generally are struggling with double digit inflation too (significant gas and petrol increases, and general transport, to name but a few). This sort of inflation is not something they are accustomed to like us South African’s, and London is very expensive. This coupled with some of the catastrophes experienced in the last few years, lead to some programmes increasing pricing by 50+% even with sizeable deductible increases!
In terms of the local (SA) market, we found generally things ran a lot smoother with our general go-to’s, than how things went with our London-based placements, and happy to report that we had very few hiccups here!
Internally, the team are all doing well, and we are all looking forward to another good year, and we are all ready to offer a world class service. We are going to be embarking on a social media and marketing campaign, as we want to push for growth this year. Please help us by following us on Linked In and Facebook. Team-wise – Werner Badenhorst has joined us (effective 1st November) to assist me on the new business and client retention side of the business. Werner comes out of Genoa Underwriting Managers stable, where he held the position of COO, so he has a great understanding of the semantics behind the workings of a specialty underwriter. I believe this will put him in good stead to help our existing UMA clients and also in helping us find new ones. Seth Wade has officially moved over into the broking team now from Nadine’s department (Finance). The plan is that Seth will be under Werner’s and my wing for the coming year, and will be assisting us with everything from marketing, renewals, new business and keeping up the high standards we have set ourselves in terms of service delivery!
I am looking forward to seeing you all in the coming month or two, and I will be reaching out to arrange a get together soon, not only so I can introduce Werner and Seth to those of you who don’t know them, but because I miss you all!
I would like to take this opportunity to wish you all of the very best for the coming year, and may you all be blessed with Health, Wealth and Prosperity! May your businesses see success like no other year yet!
I look forward to catching up with you all really soon!
Onwards and Upwards!
Best Regards
Gordy
Managing Director