We won’t be ditching our reinsurers: Novae
Novae Group will continue to focus heavily on growing and refining its specialty business, backed firmly by its reinsurers and brokers.
Speaking to Monte Carlo Today, Matthew Fosh, CEO, Novae Group, said that the company is seeing growth through direct business, which requires the backing of reinsurers.
“We’re never going to scare anyone with the size of our balance sheet, so for us it’s about specialty, this is what we do,” he said. “As the world of reinsurance continues to be flooded with capital, the commoditisation of certain classes comes more and more.
“We can’t necessarily play in that space, but it’s the directness where we’re seeing growth, and that requires reinsurance partners as we don’t want to take all the business on our books up front.”
Fosh said that Novae had found a “good hearing” in the current market as their traditional approach continued to access reinsurance.
“Reinsurers and brokers can see that we still need them,” he said. “We’re not playing the same game of retaining more; we’re just looking to build a specialty book with the backing of reinsurance.”
Fosh spoke of the dynamics within the Lloyd’s market, and said that an interesting dynamic of the market’s evolution was its changing make-up.
“There’s a great deal of chatter about the changing make-up of Lloyd’s and the international
ownership, which they would regard as ‘on strategy’,” he said.
Fosh said that Novae is in an interesting position within the market as it has for years been “a family of quoted Lloyd’s vehicles with the association profile”, which might not say anything about the company’s size, but says something about its transparency and numbers.
“We could regard the changes going on in Lloyd’s as an opportunity as there’s endless chatter in the sector about merger and acquisition (M&A) activity, but from our point of view, we’re here to grow the business, so it’s important to stay focused and not get our heads turned,” he said.
“As the tectonic plates of the industry shift, we now find ourselves at a reinsurance conference, trying to build the business and define our competitive advantage.”
