Compliance - the elephant in the room

Changes in compliance and regulation must be addressed if the MGA market is to make the most out of the market, according to a panel discussion at the  Managing General Agents Association conference in London.

The panel was made up of Suneeta Padda, founding chief executive of Padda Consulting, Nameeta Biswas, chief compliance counsel of Harbour Underwriting, Katherine Webster, director of governance, risk and conduct at Axa and Elliot Dunseath, head of compliance at Nexus Underwriting. It was moderated by Claire Churchard, senior editor of Newton Media’s insurance group.

Dunseath said that a joined up approach would help with regulatory issues, as there is a lot of information that needs to be assessed and dealt with as compliance and regulations change.

Webster said that the weight of the sheer number of issues was a concern, but added that many of the compliance issues being discussed were ones that had been discussed before and were not new, so that there was a certain familiarity to them. She underlined that the market needs to work together to deal with the issues and also had to understand just what it might be vulnerable.

Padda pointed out that supplying clients in the market with the sheer amount of information on compliance was an issue, albeit one that they were dealing with.

Biswas stressed that information exchange was vital, especially when updating clients on if they had coverage and if they needed to change their terms.

The panel agreed that operational resilience was a major factor for the market at the moment and that it needed to consider all the various options and possible issues, both major and minor, especially as something that might seem to be relatively minor at first can change and grow into something major.

ESG was another issue raised by the panel that ‘is shifting all the time’, as Dunseath put it, and which remains a challenge as companies get to grips with it at the same time as meeting increasing expectations.

The panel also agreed that other key elements to dealing with the challenges posed by compliance and regulation was to embrace technology as much as possible and to also focus on attracting talent that can cope with the changes that lie ahead, such as insurtech, cryptocurrencies and socio-political issues.

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