Christian Stobbs

speaker

364 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 21 Jul

Christian Stobbs’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Making Risk Flow | The Future of Insurance · [Greatest Hits] The Speed Advantage: How AI and Customer Obsession Are Reshaping Specialty Insurance | Christian Stobbs · 21 Jul 2026 podcast

And there were those what I called tourists.

And the tourists were there because, oh, hang on, this interesting thing going on in Asia.

We ought to have an office there.

And in 2018 to 2020, the tourists

Went home.

That left 12 of our syndicates there who were sort of there for the long journey.

And what Markel did, and what we sort of sort of identified, is that the need to be local and the need to scale up with local talent.

So my sort of view at the time, it wasn't a very particularly sophisticated strategy, was that let's hire good people who speak the local languages, who understand the local cultures, who understand the local risk nuances.

Because by the way, if you speak the language,

Language and you've lived and breathed that country all your life, you're going to have a much better understanding of the risk environment, the risk dynamic of local businesses than somebody sitting on a box in London.

So we started to scale up by quite aggressively growing our headcounts in areas of the market where we saw profits to be made.

And it was initially a lot in the financial lines, professional lines, and then in portions of the marine business, and then growing that out in credit insurance.

In the various different forms of energy insurance and started to get to a critical mass.

So being at the sort of helm of that business, having the support of the Markel group, who the great advantage of Markel in so many things is we think long term.

It wasn't about making a quick buck today.

It was about doing the right thing for the long term.

Because the way insurance PL works, as we all know, is you hire people day one, they don't really start to pay for them.

themselves until years two, year three.

So we were willing to ride that out.

And if I'm being honest and candid with you, we were hugely helped by the fact it was a hard market as well.

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