Occam Underwriting hails its progress in 2019

2019 has been a successful year for Occam Underwriting, chief executive officer Lance Gibbins told Monte Carlo Today, with the company growing organically and more than doubling premium income compared with 2018.

Gibbins said that in its role as an independent, London-based managing general agent (MGA) and Lloyd’s coverholder, Occam’s focus has been on building out its capabilities in providing cover for complex risks in space, cyber and energy, and to develop a culture throughout the company to successfully manage a platform that is fit to scale.

“Our approach to underwriting risk is different from that of other MGAs and carriers,” said Gibbins.

“We take specialists and experts in each technical risk class and train them to be underwriters, rather than taking underwriters and trying to teach them about the product line.”

According to Gibbins, the risk characteristics in these classes are too complex to commoditise through technology alone, so Occam needs the human intervention of experts, particularly in cyber which is a mixture of technology embedded in a complex social system.

In this way, Gibbins said, Occam can harness the specialised knowledge required to understand the risk properly and write it profitably.

“At Occam we have a historical loss ratio in cyber of 10 percent. I’m very pleased with those numbers and so are our investors.”

Gibbins said that current and prospective terms and conditions are different for each of the classes in which Occam Underwriting operates. The space market is readjusting to the two large losses this summer and Gibbins expects to see considerable increases in rate.

It is seeing opportunities in energy thanks to dislocation in the market, and its power portfolio is enjoying a much more attractive environment. The cyber market, where he said there is tremendous opportunity from growth, is broadly flat, but Occam sees this improving in the coming year.

“Occam is preparing for its next stage of development over the coming 12 months. Our growth will be through a continued scaling of business written in the current lines, but also through establishing alternative capital and capacity structures next year,” Gibbins concluded.