Building a $2bn business: Rokstone targets ambitious growth

Earlier in October, speciality re/insurance managing general agent Rokstone Underwriting launched its new terrorism facility in the UK. It’s just the latest of a series of launches by the business, following a US specialist agriculture division launched in July and an $18 million cargo facility announced the same month. It’s targeting ambitious growth to see $2 billion in gross premium over the next five years.

The real challenge, according to the firm’s managing director, Ian Anson, is picking where to go next.

“The market’s awash with opportunities at the moment,” he says. After joining Rokstone Underwriting from Alesco Risk Management Services as a portfolio manager in February 2020, Anson has been managing director since August.

He works alongside chief underwriting officer Dean Pitts, an industry veteran who came to Rokstone in March 2020 from Markel International and before that spent 24 years at Liberty Specialty Markets, where he was head of insurance.

The pair joined the 1.1 Club, Intelligent Insurer’s online, on-demand platform for one-on-one interviews and discussion with industry leaders, to talk about the business’s plans.

As Anson explained, while the group’s short-term aims include maximising the current lines of business, product launches are a big focus.

“We can barely keep pace with the opportunities we see coming through the pipeline,” he said. The business currently has four or five business plans in construction with the marketing team, he added.

“There are massive opportunities in the market at the moment. The key job is sifting through these to choose the right ones,” he said.

As well as new lines, the business is eyeing new markets, Pitts added. The company already has 14 offices across Florida, Kentucky, London, New Jersey and Texas as well as in Asia, Bahrain, and Mauritius to name a few. It will look to add regions such as Australia and Canada.

“If you’re going to go from a $600 million to a $2 billion business, you need to be a real global platform,” he explained.

Rokstone’s infrastructure allows it to deploy wherever it sees opportunities, said Anson.

“We’ve seen in the past where the market decentralised too much, and you end up competing against yourself, so we’re very conscious of that,” he said.

“Where there’s business to be captured in a territory, we can deploy our platform easily for the right underwriting team sitting in a domicile anywhere across the group.”

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Sailing with the wind

It’s also helped by a benign market. Launched in 2015, the business has seen significant growth in the last four years as rates have improved.

“The previous 10 years of my underwriting was continued rate reductions, quarter over quarter. In the last four years, the market has woken up, realised the errors of some of the top-line growth that was going on and started writing in a more disciplined manner,” said Pitts.

“We’ve been in a marketplace the last four years where the rate environment has been great, and we may not have the legacy issues that some of our competitors do.”

Today, the market is “stable with continuous improvement on certain classes”, as he put it.

“The better-performing risk will get adequately priced, and the lower-performing risk will be priced accordingly. It’s a risk-by-risk basis, and we empower our underwriters to make those decisions.”

Consequently, getting the right underwriting teams remains a central focus for the business. The recent terrorism launch is headed by Rebecca Steel, who joined the company in February from Ensurance, where she was lead underwriter for terrorism. With more than three decades’ experience, Steel was 14 years with AXA Re, eight years with Aon in the US, and later vice president at Cooper Gay NYC.

“Opportunities are afoot everywhere in the market, and choosing the best lines ultimately comes down to the people and recruiting market-leading talent,” said Anson

It is helped by technology, and again the recent launch is an example: it’s being rolled out through iSure’s digital platform.

“The more digital we can get, the more agile we can be as a business,” said Pitts.

That agility is crucial because, while there are plenty of opportunities, others are looking to capitalise on them too.

Anson concluded: “Opportunities don’t last forever. Normally they come about fairly quickly, and you have to act on and execute very quickly because there’s competition out there for people, and we want to attract the best talent.”

To view the full 1.1 Club session click here