14 September 2016 Insurance

Touriga Risk’s new niche underwriting capacity in London

Touriga Risk, a specialist managing general underwriter, is aiming to launch its underwriting capacity at Lloyd’s by December 15, 2016, following the redomiciling of its business to London from Texas in June.

“We are now in the final stages, everything has been submitted—we are just waiting for approval from Lloyd’s,” Ashley Hunter, managing director, told Monte Carlo Today.

Hunter is in Monte Carlo negotiating with existing and new reinsurers as she seeks partners to support the company’s growth.

Touriga Risk currently underwrites for very niche areas of the insurance market, in particular the sharing economy, including services such as Uber and Airbnb.

“There are not very many people doing this. There are enough people covering the other areas so they didn’t need me to start doing the same thing,” she said.

The underwriter also works with corporations that employ the use of drones, which now face stricter rules from the US Federal Aviation Administration (FFA).

“They’ve put rules in place because drones have been a problem—now you have to be licensed as a pilot. That’s helping underwriting and making it a bit easier—it’s got rid of that segment of a dad flying a toy plane shooting a laser beam in front of real planes carrying lots of people,” Hunter said.

She has also been working with institutions that use drones for more educational applications, such as determining wind speeds.

In terms of the risk Hunter said: “It’s interesting—they fall out of the sky, they’re very expensive—so you have a property exposure. It’s a different thing, but a drone’s exposures are very similar to those of a plane.”

Hunter suggested that there is also a potential cyber exposure to a drone—it could be hacked, for example.

“It all falls into the sharing economy, because people are using drones to share, moving from one location to another to use it,” she said.

Since moving to London, Hunter has been working with a lot of start-ups that don’t necessarily have a risk management profile.

“We have spent a lot of time creating a risk management profile for these companies as they don’t have one. It’s not their core business—they’re a start-up and they can’t afford a risk manager.

“Unfortunately, the risk aspect of their business is probably going to be the one part that is not covered correctly,” she concluded.

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