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In this episode of Making Risk Flow, host Juan de Castro sits down with Greg Hendrick, CEO of Vantage Risk Companies, to unpack what it takes to build a modern underwriting company from the ground up, right in the middle of a pandemic. Greg reveals how Vantage has grown to $1.2B in equity by combining the best of traditional underwriting expertise with a business-driven risk data technology strategy.
From creating an “Opportunity Score” to prioritise submissions, to fostering collaboration between underwriters and data scientists, Greg shares practical strategies for boosting efficiency and culture in a remote-first world. Whether you’re an insurance professional embracing digital transformation or a leader refining underwriting workflows, this conversation is packed with lessons on thriving in today’s complex risk landscape.
Listen to the full episode here.
[00:00:05] Greg Hendrick: We're here to build a technology, tech enabled company, and we're to create that together. And to me, it's an incremental step. You don't start out by saying, alright. Welcome to Vantage. Let's build our AI driven predictive modeling tool for your class of business. You start by saying, hey. What's the technology play that we can bring to bear where we can get a business in faster, worked on, and back to the broker and client faster than most.
[00:00:32] Juan de Castro: Hello. My name is Juan de Castro, and you're listening to Making Risk Flow. Every episode, I sit down with my industry leading guests to demystify digital risk flows, share practical knowledge, and help you use them to unlock scalability in commercial insurance. Greg, thank you so much for joining me today. Let's go ahead directly into an overview of your background, your new current role.
[00:00:58] Greg Hendrick: Sure. Thanks, Juan, for having me. I appreciate it. I'm looking forward to the conversation today. My background, I won't go back to birth, but I will start kind of what was very formative for me, which was going to St. John's University in Queens, New York. Ended up meeting my wife there, but also in this context of the business, was a math major, graduated a math degree, and didn't know what to do, like many people at that age, and got placed into insurance without knowing anything about insurance other than I had to buy some for my car. I was starting a company called AIG, which is a global powerhouse in the late eighties, and I've spent a few years there, transitioned to reinsurance, and then transitioned to underwriting as well. So I think of all the career moves I made, one of the biggest regrets was I didn't finish my actuarial exams. I only passed two and a half of them part of 10. So things did work out well, but I certainly narrowed my odds by not completing those exams. But transitioned to underwriting, moved to Brito, company called MidOcean, which XL bought a few years later. So we'd spend kind of from ninety five to fifteen years mostly around reinsurance. And then from 2010 to roughly 2020, more insurance, and then I ended up running XL when AXA bought us in 2018. Left there in February '20, and pandemic hit, and the opportunity to start Vantage came up in kinda late twenty twenty, and we launched and started this company then.
[00:02:23] Juan de Castro: In the middle of a pandemic, was that a good idea?
[00:02:25] Greg Hendrick: In the middle of a pandemic. It was part of what creates the opportunity, and it was also part crazy. We had sat Adios, Iordano, and I had started having conversations, and we were quickly of the opinion that because of the catastrophe activity that had happened in kinda 2017, 2018, and then the reserve deterioration that was happening in the casualty lines from kinda 2015 to 2019. On top of that, now a pandemic of uncertain proportions, of uncertain impact to the industry was the kind of the last straw that made us have the opportunity to go out and raise the money we did from Carlisle and H and F and start a company. Yes. In the middle of the pandemic, which happy to go deeper on that, but this certainly a very interesting time.
[00:03:10] Juan de Castro: In a minute, I would love to hear a bit more about how did that influence the future of Vantage. But, obviously, let's start with an overview of who is Vantage, what do you write, what type of list, what lines of business do you write?
[00:03:22] Greg Hendrick: Absolutely. So Vantage is now over $1,200,000,000 equity company. Our money comes predominantly almost all of it from H and F and Carlisle in equal proportions to great private equity partners. We knew the people at both those firms for quite a while. Some of them had been invested when I started in Bermuda and MidOcean. Some of them invested with Denos when he started Arch, but a really good understanding of the dynamic at play and what it takes to build something. And we rapidly settled on, we're not gonna go buy something that exists today that might be not running as well or a little bit broken and fix it up. We're gonna build from scratch, which, again, has pros and cons, but we felt it was very strong benefit to not have legacy reserves because those were all deteriorating in the industry, but more importantly not to have legacy technology, which we can come back to in a little more depth in a moment. So we set out. First person I met with in those very early days of 2020 was Chris McEwen, who runs two of the three legs of our stool here at Vantage, which is reinsurance and ILS or partnership capital, as we call it. Chris and I had been, we're long time friends through various numbers of different interconnections over the years, sometimes as a competitor, sometimes as a partner in building some stuff together at XL. And he and I first yeah. And back to this pandemic theme. First meeting we had was the first time either one of us was meeting with somebody that wasn't an immediate family member. And so we met outside in Mystic, Connecticut, and we scratched up a description of this business. And so we took the opportunity to say, we're gonna build reinsurance. So we've built a specialty reinsurance platform of about a half a billion dollars of gross written premium in 2025. Think of it as it's some of the things that it's not, which is property catastrophe reinsurance. We do that on our partnership capital platform, and it's not casually reinsurance. So it truly is marine, aviation, energy, crop, a number of lines of business that really fit into that specialty opportunity. And we view it as it's much more about accessing those types of risks through reinsurance, uh, which are quicker to get onto the balance sheet, quicker to develop and mature. And so we've been really focused on that part of it in reinsurance. The second piece that Chris has is advantage, which is our partnership capital model. We started that at the very beginning of the journey, very small when we set out. It was $50,000,000 just to be transparent, but we felt strongly that we were gonna have much more opportunity to source risk than our balance sheet could handle. And that third party capital model was continuing to evolve and gain traction. And that, ultimately, it would be a bigger and bigger part of our industry, not just in the property cat where it is a very meaningful piece of the capital base today, but into other classes of business. That rapidly grew in '23 and '24, and we're now pleased to share here. We have deployed a billion and a half of capital in 2025. So a very strong support there from our investors. And it's a group that wants to be very exposed to property cats in a way that has a maximum return, but a pretty meaningful downside as well. So that's the reinsurance and the partnership capital model, and then the third leg of the stool, but the one growing the fastest for the last few years is insurance. Alex Blanco leads that. Alex and I were colleagues for many years at XL. He had a deep passion for analytics like I do. I was one of the first people when we were making that push at XL to really bring, at the time, we called it multivariate modeling. Today, you might call it AI into the fold of underwriting. Now it's embraced it and really produced a very, very profitable business for us. And so he and I had always wanted to work together. That opportunity came up in 2021 when he joined us, and we really took off from there, building out the insurance franchise, which will be around about a billion 1 of gross premium this year, mainly longer tail lines of business. So while we don't target casualty insurance as a class in our reinsurance operation, it is a meaningful part of our insurance offering. So excess casualty, D&O, political risk, cyber, health care. We do write property insurance as well, but all classes of business that are longer tail. And that insurance franchise has continued to grow, and the top line of premium is roughly 70% insurance, 30% reinsurance. There's no hard or fast rule to that, but that is where we are headed to as we move forward in time here. And so that's what we've built Vantage reinsurance, partnership capital insurance.
[00:07:53] Juan de Castro: What is the rationale for writing longer tail insurance versus some of or sounds like reinsurance is more a shorter tail. Would you write? Right?
[00:08:03] Greg Hendrick: We call it more medium. Yeah. Short and medium tail. So classes because we break the market up into short tail, medium tail, and long tail. Medium tail would be aviation, marine as two good examples where you know about an airplane crashing. You know about a boat knocking down a bridge in Baltimore, but you don't pay the claims for quite a while. So we haven't paid any claims on Russia, Ukraine. We haven't paid any claims on the Baltimore Bridge yet because they haven't been presented to us. And so while things happen two or three years ago, they take time to actually execute. Why more of that in insurance than reinsurance? I think there are three things. One, the dislocation that we saw in 2020 potentially appearing in the marketplace was definitely around those longer tail lines because there was a lot of pain on the existing carriers' balance sheets as these reserves of these years deteriorated that they started to retract from the business and it gave us an opportunity to enter them. So foundationally, there was definitely a market opportunity. Second, they've continued not so much D&O where there's been more of a headwind on pricing, but on casualty itself, particularly where we play, which is excess casualty, the deterioration in the industry continued and the rates have accelerated. So we think the second piece is and it's a really good opportunity today as well in these classes of business. And so we're leaning into the areas where we have the best opportunity. And then the third thing is quite often, we find it's a stickier business in insurance than reinsurance. And so when you can build an insurance franchise, you should try and do that not because the reinsurance is unprofitable or not desirable. It's just the insurance business sticks with you more than reinsurance does, and so we felt that was the other reason to build in that area.
[00:09:48] Juan de Castro: So sounds like, obviously, you've grown really quickly in the last few years. Are you actively managing the different lines and potentially shrinking some of them, or are you seeing growth at this time across most of the lines?
[00:09:59] Greg Hendrick: It's very much a set of microcycles going on in the industry. Not one cycle of harder or softer happening here. If I break it up, short tail on property has risen to a very strong profitability opportunity. Yes. Coming off the peak pricing, but still, we feel it's a very strong return available there, and we're growing in those. At the other end of the spectrum is kind of d and o and cyber insurance, where there's much more pressure on the marketplace with rates having declined meaningfully over the last couple years, where we're growing because we're new, but it's very, very incremental, smaller much smaller growth rate there. And then each of the lines is a business you can walk down, and most of them fall in the category of growing because we think both rates are headed in the right direction and the profitability levels are there. But there's a mix of each business being a slightly different story depending upon where they are in their cycle.
[00:10:53] Juan de Castro: That is really helpful. So, basically, as you said, you've worked at AIG, Catlin, XSL, all of them very large companies. Now I wouldn't call Vantage a start up, but you've set it up from scratch, and you've had the luxury of defining everything. So, I guess, well, first of all, let's do a comparison. Like, what are the pros and cons of an established versus a newer insurance company.
[00:11:15] Greg Hendrick: Yeah. So the wonderful thing about the areas where we participate in advantage, almost all of them are what I would call excess of loss marketplaces. And so there's multiple carriers on a particular offering, sometimes tens and, in some cases, 50 or more. So it isn't a zero sum game of x y z carrier wins the excess casualty and ABC loses. It's much more about you both participate and where you participate. But so there isn't a zero sum game. My observation around big and small, we like to call ourselves a young company now. That's what I'm told to call us. So no longer say startup, but a young company because we're in year five. So you are starting to hit our stride now. On the one hand, the big company has the advantage of a very large balance sheet able to absorb greater volatility in outcomes and, therefore, able to put out larger capacity. And so that advantage is quite a strong one, particularly as you execute in the markets where we play, which is reinsurance, and then insurance mostly for middle market and large corporate customers. On the other side, on the smaller, we're able to be very nimble. We respond very quickly because of the technology and the build that we've put together. We've got the ability to get a submission set up in under eight minutes on average across our insurance portfolio. We're able to sit down on excess casualty and use our technology where our broker and underwriter can meet either in an office or over lunch, and we can get the whole risk submission in, underwritten, and quoted right while we sit there. And so those kind of things you can do as a smaller company means you're a little more nimble and a little bit leaner. You have to do things in smaller chunks because your balance sheet isn't as big, but that to me is a healthy part of our marketplace. I think the markets that we operate in, our customers want to have, multiple choices, but not overexposed to any one carrier and those outcomes. So I think that neither right nor wrong, you tend to see on the larger carrier side kind of legacy technology, technology debt. We don't have any of that over here. Everything was set up in the cloud. We're able to do a lot more here relative to larger companies because our data is very clean and we're very nimble. But, likewise, there is definitely an advantage to being a larger franchise with more capital and resources at your disposal, which we are always working hard to minimize that advantage, but there are just that pull and give and take that goes on in the industry.
[00:13:37] Juan de Castro: You mentioned two things that I found really interesting. One is you just mentioned the lack of legacy. And also in your introduction, you mentioned about you talked about your passion for analytics. So I was thinking, like, how have those two things come together as you've set up Vantage? Like, what is the role of analytics? Is that part of your competitive advantage or not? And how the absence of a legacy platform allow you to move faster on that?
[00:14:02] Greg Hendrick: So we were very adamant, as I said earlier, at the beginning of Vantage to make sure that, yes, we didn't wanna buy an existing carrier because we didn't want the legacy reserves because at that time and continues to do so. They continue to deteriorate. Wanted also, though, more importantly, the opportunity to not have legacy technology, not be constrained by the technology stacks that so many of the larger carriers have because they've acquired a lot of companies or they've been around for a very long time. My experience has been that those companies have the advantage of having large datasets of their own existing data, but they're in very unconnected and not integrated structures. So we came at it, and we said, okay. We're gonna build in the cloud. We're going to license the technology that we don't think makes a difference in the valuation advantage, things like the ledger, the policy issuance, the claims, all the core systems that others have done a much better job of building, that we should just license those. And then we would build with our own software engineers, with our own data scientists, with our own underwriting capability. We would build the real we call it underwriting studio here, but the real value creation of marrying analytics and insights with our people, allowing them to make better decisions. That really was the idea of we are strongly of the opinion that talent is the number one asset we have. Advantage, I know, um, most CEOs would say that in any industry, but certainly where we traffic that excess of loss marketplace, it's a people business today. And I think for the foreseeable future, still a people business. Yes. There's technology coming that may disrupt that at some point way down the road, but we don't see that happening for the near term. So towns are number one, but our second most important asset is our data and our technology and our ability to create analytics and deliver insights to our colleagues to make better decisions, whether that's on the underwriting side, whether it's McLean's, whether it's in the actuarial. We feel that analytical threat needs to come through because at its core, an insurance and reinsurance company is nothing more than a data analyst company. And, we don't often state that in our industry, but we should say it more. We get a submission. We analyze that submission. We perhaps enhance it with data externally, and we make an offer of a promise to pay at some future date when something cataclysmic happens, and then we fulfill that promise. And so why shouldn't data and analytics? Why should you not think of that as being after your people, your next most important activity? So we were really driven to bring that to life, and it's the core of who we are. And it's a journey. It's a long journey. When you start up new, you have nothing. So you've gotta build this entire technology stack. So we have definitely been on that j curve of investing heavily to build what we've needed to build and now reap the rewards as we bring all these capabilities online.
[00:16:50] Juan de Castro: And as you said, you're so very passionate about analytics, but I'm sure as a CEO, you cannot get in the details of pushing that. So, how have you thought about two things? One is, how do you drive that analytical mindset in the modern way of thinking about analytics and get the right underwriting talent that appreciates that level of analytics. Right? Because, I mean, every CEO of the insurance company would say exactly what you said, but, like, very few of you actually execute on that mission.
[00:17:19] Greg Hendrick: Yeah. It's definitely a journey, and it's a challenging, but in the beginning, to me, a fun and rewarding one. In a young company, you have had to start out and say, I need to balance. Where do I see the end state of this firm being in terms of this blend of talent and technology and data and analytics? And in the early, you've gotta over index on talent and the ability for that talent to access the market and generate submission flow. So you're definitely going with people that you've known for a while that are well known in the market, that are recognized. We call them trusted experts. And you're up front, though, at the beginning with these folks that you're here because we think you're the best at x y z in your writing class of business. But we're here to build a technology, tech enabled company, and we're gonna do that together, and we're gonna create that together. So you've gotta have folks in a young company that really wanna roll up their sleeves and get going. So I needed the expertise from people or leaders in the market, but they had to be willing to roll up their sleeves and build, and they had to be willing to go on this journey together with the technology and the analytics. And to me, it's an incremental step. You don't start out by saying, alright. Welcome to Vantage. Let's build our AI driven predictive modeling tool for your class of business. You start by saying, hey. What's the technology play that we can bring to bear where we can get a business in faster, worked on, and back to the broker and client faster than most? And so we start on that part of the journey. And so that doesn't involve necessarily high end analytics, but it involves things like we've built something called an opportunity score in our excess casualty area where we've blended for every submission that comes in. We've analyzed with data the brokers that give us the best outcomes in terms of when we quote something, do we bind it with the underwriting intuition of and we think these industry groups are better than those, and so let's prioritize those. And so the underwriter, when they come in every morning, gets the two filtered right at the top where you've got the best brokers that you've been the most successful with with the most desirable industry classes right at the top of their work pile. And that's huge because that area of the business gets 27,000 submissions every year, so you're not gonna get through all of them. So I think that part of the journey is important that you're trying and not just trying to jump into it all at once, that you're taking people step by step. And then as you make that successful, yes, you start to say, okay, well, we've got a submission from every excess casualty purchase over the last twelve months rather than just storing the ones that we didn't write in some image right or data system. Let's actually scrape all that loss run. Let's marry it with exposure information from publicly available sources and build a predictive model for trucking, which is what we did next. And so you continue on that journey with the folks that it takes time, but I strongly believe that in order to make that embedded connection of the people and the technology and the analytics, trusting each other and being optimal, you gotta kinda go on that journey together. And each journey is at a slightly different pace. Some will adopt it either because their business lends itself to it. They have a lot of submissions like excess casualty or because the leadership strongly wants to get going on it. But in the end, we get everybody along the journey up to the same kind of plane, But that's a multiyear journey of a thousand steps that I'm happy to say were more through it than not, but still on it.
[00:20:40] Juan de Castro: Yeah. So I guess playing that back, at least I think this framework I'm fully aligned with which we're doing is capturing all the data you receive from all the risks you see to really get the full universe of submissions. With that, you build the predictive models, if I heard correctly, with two main goals. One is how can you prioritize the ones that you think are the best risks and coming from the brokers that you've got the best buying ratio with. So make sure that your underwriters, given that they have constrained capacity, are focusing on the risks you really want them to buy. So you're really focused on both risk selection, but also, as you've mentioned this a few times already, speed of responsiveness to broker.
[00:21:20] Greg Hendrick: Yeah. It's definitely for us, the technology and data analytics play. I know we tend to kind of gravitate to the ones that say, well, how do you tell the riskiness of an offering, and how do you analyze that? It's definitely what you just articulated, the operational side. There's huge advantage operationally that we feel strongly. We can do more with the same number of people than the average carrier because we've been enabled them with a technology setup that makes them more operation efficient. Yes. We're still gonna go hard and regularly and frequently at the, what I would call, the risk analysis piece, but the operational pitch shouldn't be overlooked.
[00:21:56] Juan de Castro: And is the value of that responsiveness to broke out, is it the same across insurance and your reinsurance business, or is it more valuable if you want?
[00:22:06] Greg Hendrick: It's valuable above, for sure. The reinsurance business, because of its nature, each submission itself is a portfolio, so you're analyzing it on a much more data actuary, we'll call it credibility level, in and of itself. This is treaty. Right? Reinsurance treatments. Yes. Because each one of them can be analyzed as a portfolio, and the reinsurance industry in general has been executed. If you think of the easy example of property catastrophe reinsurance, people have been using models now for thirty plus years. And so there's more of a it's part of the industry in general analytics, so there's value there. But in terms of the building new and insurance, it's not that insurance carriers don't do it. It's just that in our area of the market, kinda that specialty insurance area of the marketplace, it's been less brought to bear than it has, say, in personal lines, in auto, and homeowners where things are very model driven these days. We see it as a new opportunity to bring that to bear in the specialty insurance marketplace. So in terms of new, yes, it's more in insurance. But in terms of where does it impact, it impacts both the insurance and reinsurance. Just, it's a little further along in the journey to reinsurance.
[00:23:13] Juan de Castro: And in that mindset that you are describing, which is, like, how do you bring the best underwriting talent with the analytical edge? So how have you created that collaboration with Advantage? So do you have, like, an analytics team that sits separately from the underwriting one? So how do you foster that collaboration?
[00:23:30] Greg Hendrick: It takes a village. And as you probably know, you know, getting one of the biggest challenges you have in any organization is getting folks from different areas to work together in a very collaborative and productive way. I'm sure we'll cover it in a second, but the culture piece of it is huge. But we do it by saying, look. You need everybody in this boat together. You need traditional underwriters to be able to articulate what's the problem we should try to solve, and how do we solve it. I would call traditional actuaries that are steep in the pricing and analysis of p and c risk. You need claims feedback because you're gonna want you know, we have thankfully, because we're a young company, we have less of that than we would in a long established company, but you still need that capability. And then we think you need data scientists that are collaborating with those folks and then a strong data architecture and then a strong technology delivery back to them. It's great to have a wonderful model, but if you can't deliver it to whoever's gonna use it in the most optimal form, it doesn't get used as much. So we think it takes all those people and each of those bringing something different to the table. And I think most importantly, in any given situation, somebody in a different group potentially driving it. Sometimes the data scientists will drive a multivariate model that's trying to do frequency and severity for trucking exposures. Other times, it's the underwriter trying to articulate riskiness in what we talked about earlier with excess casualty, and it could be the actual you know, and on and on. Different folks bring different moments of time, different strengths, and can drive, but they all have to go on the journey together. Right? If you don't get on that together, you're not and the operational efficiency pieces of it have come much faster. Who doesn't want a Power BI application on their desktop like we have where you can slice and dice your portfolio any different way? It's really on those more longer term, how do I gain a competitive advantage by bringing data and analytics to bear? Those take time. And if anybody's been around them, they don't all work on the very first version of them. They sometimes don't work at all. And so you have to accept in part of being innovative and creative that not having a good outcome is okay because it's part of the journey. And then you just have to be relentless of how you keep iterating them to keep driving incremental more value through them. So it does take a large group of folks to make it happen.
[00:25:49] Juan de Castro: And, actually, in my experience, particularly those that will require many iterations are best received when the champion of that initiative is the actual user. So, like, let's imagine it's a model for an underwriter. Right? It's if it's the underwriter understanding, okay, why didn't it work on the first instance? What's the need for the iteration? What's what but there's like a benefit, like, an external
team trying to convince the underwriter that they should use it.
[00:26:17] Greg Hendrick: Yeah. And when you're young, I am fond of saying and continue to say there is way more work to do than there are people to do at your advantage. We're not good at what we do, or we're not investing. It's just, that's just the reality of a young company. And we haven't always gotten it right. I'm first to admit that, but we've learned from it, and we're getting it right more and more often now as you need that strong champion that, yes, is the underwriter sometimes, but I would say also the actuaries, the data scientists, in in certain lenses have that same need to champion because they're trying to bring someone along in a different way to a different outcome that isn't always obvious by trying to play forward what you've done for the last ten or twenty years. So it's the blending of it that makes it work. But, yes, you do need a champion, and without the champion, you kinda get stuck in neutral.
[00:27:03] Juan de Castro: So let's jump in here. You mentioned culture, and you've touched already on a couple of angles of culture. But I think, again, one of the benefits of starting what you call the younger company now is having the luxury of creating a culture from scratch. So I guess two questions on that is, what do you think makes it special? But, also, like, how did you think about the culture as you were setting up Vantage?
[00:27:26] Greg Hendrick: We were in the reality of coming together as a leadership team in the middle of the pandemic, including ourselves not even be able to meet live until well into 2021. And so every leadership team has to be incredibly disciplined about culture, and it's a never ending journey. It doesn't just get done once and you move on. But I think the stakes get amplified when you do something in what I would call a modern company, which is some kind of hybrid blend of people going to an office. I happen to be in our Norwalk, Connecticut office today, but many people also working remotely. And I think we thought about it in the sense of, well, what do we wanna cause to have happen here? I've talked a lot about the analytics, and I won't so that's definitely a lens of our culture as you can probably tell. But I would say collaboration, which I touched on just a moment ago, huge in any organization. Really big when your 360 colleagues are scattered across Bermuda and something on the order now of 35 or so different states because you can't assume it'll happen in the hallways or in the coffee room or the lunchroom or wherever. You have to make it happen. And so collaboration's a very big part of our culture. Transparency's another one. Because of that same destroying information flow, you've gotta really put some mechanisms in to make sure you're being as transparent as you can be. So we use a Monday all hands call, which all the hands, I mean every colleague, all three sixty, are invited every Monday at 02:00 New York time to join a call where, yes, there's an update from me. There's some updates from some of the business leaders, but it's also an open agenda for folks to raise whatever they would like to talk about. And so that transparency is another big part of it. And then I think to me, you need to make a difference in the industry you work in with your brokers and clients who we've been so fortunate to have so much support from in these first five years, but also in your communities and how you give back. And so we've definitely felt that's a strong piece of Vantage even in our early days. And, yes, maybe more in the time we give than the funds we give, but we've really rallied around along with our efforts around education and making sure we're bringing a new stream of candidates into the industry that have a wide range of diverse backgrounds and outcomes that maybe not had the opportunity to be exposed to this industry in previous generations. So we put a lot of our effort around that.
[00:29:48] Juan de Castro: And then you talk about this Monday, 2PM all hands meeting. So do you actually bring the full team together at all, or do you somehow support pockets of the business getting together, or are you like, are most teams working completely remotely?
[00:30:02] Greg Hendrick: Yeah. So we have a, I call a multilayer approach to this. There's the virtual Monday, everyone is invited in a call, which now 360 people, you know, you may not have 360 people all, each interacting, but it allows everyone to hear the same message and to ask questions as people do and to talk about other topics. We also have a Friday, we call Vantage Connect. You opt in and your name gets randomly matched with another Vantage colleague, and you have a fifteen, twenty minute coffee meeting on Friday morning. That's, to us, another way to get folks connected. Then you have to go back and that works and was, uh, and remains a necessity for the fact that we're so spread. But now you start to layer it up. Well, okay. The teams that underwrite together in the same businesses and the teams that pay claims together and so forth, legal, they need to be coming together at regular intervals. And so we don't dictate what that interval is. Some teams happen to be lucky that they're in, for instance, in reinsurance, it's all ever needed. So they go to the office every day. They see each other every day. Other teams, maybe our construction business in The US has leadership in New Jersey and Florida and Texas. And so they have to be more disciplined around. They need to get together every three months or so to make sure that and then when you're working on a project, you need to come together because you need to get people in a room to set up what you observed earlier about a champion. Well, you're not only a champion, but you need a work plan and milestones and measures of success, and you need to have that happen in a room together as opposed to up and down the screen. So I think it's that the right set of outcomes to bring people together to make the business is what we do as a leadership team. We're together once a month for a couple of days, and we're obviously having regular calls throughout the other weeks. I think the last piece of it is about every eighteen months, we'll get the entire firm together. So in March, we'll be doing that with what should be at the time about 380 or 390 people.
[00:31:59] Juan de Castro: Where are you going, Brooks?
[00:32:01] Greg Hendrick: We're going to Miami. The choice of location is, in my mind, only a little bounded. 50 of the 360 of us are in Bermuda, so we wanna have somewhere where you can get to from Bermuda with one flight easily. And, likewise, you wanna have a major airport so all the different folks around The US can get to it with one flight as well. So you kinda end up in the New York, Washington, Atlanta, Miami type area.
[00:32:24] Juan de Castro: It's quite interesting how all of us, obviously, Cytora is also remote first, and our teams are quite distributed. And I think we've all refined, like, how do we enable that collaboration? And pretty much all of us get to the same conclusion. So you mentioned this Monday meeting and this Friday Vantage Connect, I think you called it. Actually, we do almost the exact same version of that. We combine, actually, the two. So what we do is we've got a Friday, we call it a town hall. But the first fifteen minutes of the town hall, we create random breakouts where you get placed into a breakout with another four random people. And exactly I mean, the same concept is how do you create the serendipity of being caught in a team in a virtual environment? Right? So, yeah, I just thought it's quite interesting.
[00:33:08] Greg Hendrick: Yeah. It's great to hear because you're doing this, and after the business planning and the core activity of underwriting and paying claims, all that, I spend the most time on this idea of how do you stay connected as a hybrid firm as best you can. I love the year in fact that it actually works beyond Vantage, so I appreciate you sharing that.
[00:33:26] Juan de Castro: I think we all learn from each other. Perhaps one last question, which is really it's two of them, which is, like, would be great to get a sense of, okay, what are your views of where the market is today. But as importantly, how are you thinking about the feature of Vantage in that table in the current context of the market?
[00:33:43] Greg Hendrick: Absolutely. The market is where I have felt we've been for the last decade or so, which is, it's not a market. There's a number of markets no longer operating in one large cycle. If you go back to the eighties or nineties, maybe even the February of it's a hard market or a soft market, and everyone kinda rides that up and down. There are markets that we think are quite strong, and when we talked about that excess casualty, I think property, while coming off, is still at a very high level. And there's other markets, like, if I touched on d and o and cyber where I don't think they're unprofitable. I just think the rates have come off at such a point that the opportunities are very limited. And then everything in between, there's a whole spectrum of each one of these classes of business that we're in operating in that kind of, in some kind of environment, which I think we believe strongly over what we do that the overall portfolio is getting rate and getting rate above trend across the piece. So there's a good opportunity there. So you look at that, and you decide how to deploy your pieces. The way we do it is we think building a diversified portfolio like we have helps us be growing faster in one and slower in another and even shrinking in some cases because we've got that spread of business that lets us navigate through it. Where the market's headed, that's mostly dictated by supply and demand. And, again, in each of those markets, you're seeing property rates coming off because for a while, demand exceeded supply by quite a meaningful margin. It's probably at about equilibrium now, and if not, supply is slightly exceeding demand. But, also, it's the perception of risk. In the end, we sell a product that most people don't wanna buy. If you think about it as an individual, you don't wake up in the morning saying, jeez, I wanna go buy my homeowners or my auto insurance today. You do it because of some forcing mechanism. The same thing is true of in humans, which, as I said all through this, people are the most important part of this business where we operate. Humans don't wanna deal with the downside of things. And so you're working in an environment where you're trying to create, uh, solutions to things that people don't wanna do. What's happening to the general level of riskiness in the world? It's increasing, and it has been since then way before we started. But when we started in kind of a very unique moment, we felt there was a high degree of resilience in the world. If anything, I would submit, yes, we've learned to live with COVID. I'm always amazed that I, in fact, just the other day, I had someone cancel on a dinner because they had gotten COVID, but we learn to live with it now. But so many other things, geopolitically, social inflation, real inflation have all accelerated it, that that riskiness drives the need for more protection. And so we think underneath all these individual cycles of the marketplace, the overall riskiness of the world is going up, and then that will drive continued demand. And, no, I'm not calling for a a hundred year hard market, but I am saying you'll see less of these big troughs and peaks that we have seen historically in this industry because I think we're starting to find a way to provide supply. And that's where Vantage comes in. We feel strongly that in our pockets of areas that we've chosen to compete, that we bring some supply of risk protection that is needed by our brokers and customers.
[00:37:00] Juan de Castro: And as you said, the overall riskiness of the world is going up and combined with you being able to be nimble given your size, that gives you the perfect opportunity to identify, like, where do you wanna grow.
[00:37:10] Greg Hendrick: Yep. And we operate where we operate the markets today that we have. We're scratching the surface of where we can. You know, right? As I said, predominantly excess of loss on the insurance side. Can we go down and get down those towers into the primary and become a viable option in some classes of business as a primary rider? In reinsurance, we definitely are very happy with the areas we take on. We also do a lot of what I call our innovation reinsurance operation, where they'll take on new exposures. Some that went very well for us, film and TV cancellation due to COVID, and some like intellectual property, and that might have been a little more challenging. But we view reinsurance as a really great way for us to get involved with InsurTech, with emerging risk opportunities in a measured disciplined way that's appropriate to our balance sheet. And so we use reinsurance for that. Again, these are not mutually exclusive. Our insurance people sometimes will innovate, and our reinsurance people will sometimes grow into our existing opportunities, but I think that that balance is a strong one.
[00:38:10] Juan de Castro: Yep. So we should expect Vantage keeping on growing at a similar rate for the next few years, sounds like.
[00:38:16] Greg Hendrick: Certainly, to have maintained a healthy rate of growth over the foreseeable future. Yes. Fantastic, Greg.
[00:38:21] Juan de Castro: First of all, really pleased to see the kind of the growth you've achieved in the last five years and gonna be excellence in your operation, but also looking forward to seeing further growth in the next few years, as you said, capturing some of the increased riskiness in the world. Thank you so much for joining me today, Greg.
[00:38:37] Greg Hendrick: Really appreciate you having me. Enjoyed the conversation.
[00:38:40] Juan de Castro: Making Risk Flow is brought to you by Cytora. If you enjoy this podcast, consider subscribing to making risk flow in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast so you never miss an episode. To find out more about Cytora, visit cytora.com. Thanks for joining me. See you next time.
