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Insider in Full: Insurance Insider’s Talent Tracker - three trends to watch in 2023

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Topics: Market Moves Topical Trends

We launched Insurance Insider’s Talent Tracker – an interactive database to help you stay on top of who is moving around the industry – three months ago, and have now collected seven complete months of data.

With this information, we can begin to generate insights into the movement of talent around the world of (re)insurance. Here are three trends to watch out for as 2023 progresses in terms of active hirers, high-turnover segments and the timing of change.

Activity in marine and aviation sectors

Thanks to the tag attached to each move in the Talent Tracker, we can investigate which specific lines of business have seen the most activity over the last seven months.

As the chart below shows, three of the most active parts of the industry since the start of July 2022 have been the marine, cyber and aviation markets.

  

 

Around 9% of all moves logged in the Tracker so far related to individuals working in the marine market. Philip Graham – former global head of marine at Chaucer – resurfacing at Allianz this week is the latest example of the ongoing battle for underwriting talent in the marine classes.

Aviation insurance – still in the midst of turbulence resulting from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – has also seen a substantial amount of talent movement, with just under 5% of all reported moves in the tracker so far linked to the line of business.

Ardonagh Specialty’s aviation broking business Piiq has been hit particularly hard by departures, with a number of senior figures – including former senior partner Mark Costin– leaving the company last year.

How the aviation market’s talent responds to the continuing uncertainty around Russia-Ukraine is a trend to keep an eye on as the first anniversary of the invasion approaches.

Peaks and troughs 

It’s no surprise that the frequency of movement between firms in the market ebbs and flows throughout the year based on holiday and bonus season, with the period over Christmas and into the New Year at the lowest level of activity of any stretch we have tracked to date.

During December, the number of reported people moves was around 35% below average.

So far in 2023, January has seen an uptick in movement to around average levels – but there are a number of broader factors which are likely to impact activity as the year progresses.

Primarily, the extent to which a cooling economy will impact brokers’ and underwriters’ wage inflation – and, as a consequence, the ongoing ‘war for talent’ in the sector – remains an open question.

The busiest stretch for talent movement in the second half of 2022 was the month of October. In the four-week period ending on 23 October, there were approximately 1.5x as many reported moves as in the average four-week period we have tracked so far.

  

 

This high level of activity in early October was driven by a pair of significant line-of-business expansions: one by a carrier, and one by a broker.

In the first week of the month, CNA Hardy – in pursuit of growth in continental Europe – added six underwriters across its specialist lines business.

And, a week later, Consilium appointed six brokers from Ed in order to expand its financial lines operations.

Net acquirers of talent: BMS, Everest

Perhaps most interestingly, the Tracker allows us to investigate which companies in the market are currently net importers of talent – at least based on information available in the public domain and through our own reporting.

The table below illustrates this for the current most active players in the talent tracker database: it summarises the proportion of all tracked moves which involve employees leaving a given company, the proportion that involve employees joining a given company and the extent of talent inflow or outflow.

(As a reminder, internal promotions are not covered in the Tracker.)

  

 

The three major global brokers – Aon, Gallagher and WTW – all appear in this table, for example, as all have been involved in a considerable proportion of reported moves over the last seven months.

During this period, we have reported on more employees leaving Aon than joining, while WTW has effectively ‘broken even’ with as many reported joiners as leavers. Gallagher – with its share of all reported joiners more than double its share of all leavers – is the only one of the three to have recorded a positive inflow, according to our data.

The Tracker is still in its relative infancy, but as we continue to report on comings and goings in the market we’ll have an even larger set of data points to analyse – and even more insights like these which we can generate.

Click here to access Insurance Insider’s Talent Tracker: an interactive database which collates all the people moves we report in the London market – and beyond – in one place.

 

Insurance Insider delivers global wholesale, specialty, and (re)insurance Intelligence that enables you to act first. Redeem your complimentary 14-day trial for more premium content from Insurance Insider.

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