Meet the MGA: Corin Underwriting

What was the thinking behind the formation of Corin Underwriting?

I was working for Casualty & General Insurance which was one of the first markets offshore that gained a reputation of rated prices for unrated paper which was great for us as a board; but to capitalise on the opportunities in the liability market was a struggle. 

So it was decided that 2016 would be the last underwriting year [for my book] as UK and Irish construction was probably not the right footprint [for Casualty & General]. A number of unrated failings had damaged the reputation so it decided to stop writing that business and I set up Corin as a managing general agent. 

I did not want it to be an AR or incubator, so it took nine months to get fully authorised in our own right and secure capacity et cetera and we went live in 2017. 

So what did that mean for brokers? Not much really, we acquired the account from CGI and that rated price for unrated paper became a rated price for rated paper. That was the transition. 2017 was about onboarding brokers and establishing Corin as an MGA. 

We pride ourselves on being a virtual insurer - an agent of the insurer not an agent of the insured - and that is important. It is our wording, our rates, our actuarial numbers and our claims service. Fast forward seven years we are doing the same thing now in the same market and trying to organically grow and grab market share. 

How important was it to transfer the Casualty & General liability book to start Corin?

It was very amicable; it was my account and it needed a home - ideally a rated home - so I set up the vehicle and moved it across. 

We had capacity with Aspen to start with but then in early 2018 its CEO came out and said the MGA model was dead. That was not great for us as we had a long-term agreement and did want to move capacity so early on having gone through the pain of doing the deal. But we read the signs and moved early - after just 18 months - from Aspen to Transatlantic Re who we knew well. 

If you had to single out one or two things, what is the USP of Corin?

The main thing is that we are a virtual insurer, and being the agent of the insurer is a big thing for us. Having full delegated authority on everything from underwriting to claims. We are not a wholesaler. We are an MGA. 

We would like to be a recognised MGA too, but the market is not there yet which is why we went for the AM Best performance assessment as we thought that was a way for us to get that recognition. So our USP is that we are a true MGA, providing back office support, acting as an underwriting hub for an insurer on a niche class of business.

We don’t tend to follow the market, we are not price driven. There is a price for everything. We are in a cycle of business and we know how it goes; but we don’t want to follow those cycles. We might not be the cheapest but we are an organisation that is here for the long term and worth backing.

Can you expand on the reasons why Corin sought to get a performance assessment from AM Best?

We only deal with rated paper, so why would someone else not only deal with a rated MGA? The difference between a performance rating and a security rating is that we are not being assessed on our ability to pay long term liabilities, that is the capacity provider. But everything else is very similar so why not have a like-for-like corporate governance, succession planning, everything that is considered appropriate for running a good insurance business. 

We felt it put us on a level playing field [with insurers] and pulled us away from an over-saturated [delegated authority] market by emphasising what our ambitions are as an MGA. 

We got a PA3 after a long six months in terms of the assessment and we enjoyed it. It was also an external reckoning of our seven years as a privately owned MGA. Coming from an insurer background there are a lot of people looking at you. It is not the same as an MGA; there is the Financial Conduct Authority regulating us as an intermediary - which I think is confusing anyway, we should be regulated as an MGA - but it was a good way for someone to assess whether we are as good as we think we are internally. 

In terms of the other people who have [had their performance assessments] published, we are a lot smaller, but we are there with a good score and we are focused on now getting that PA2 [assessment] and growing with it.

In terms of your core markets how would you describe the rating environment? 

From our point of view it is holding up and is quite stable. We often discuss how big our potential marketplace is. We think the UK and Irish construction-led market is probably worth £2.5bn. We are writing £30m so we have gone a long way to go to make our mark on that. 

We are able to be quite selective and thus it is quite stable for us. Traditionally high risk construction does attract a premium so sometimes markets come in and write for price, but we are quite insulated in terms of our market.

We are able to be quite selective and thus it is quite stable for us. Traditionally high risk construction does attract a premium so sometimes markets come in and write for price, but we are quite insulated in terms of our market.

Especially as we have exclusive capacity unlike some of our rivals that all use the same paper, which I can’t work out. As that just triggers a race to the bottom where you are competing with each other with the same market.

Claims is often described as the moment of truth in insurance; why did you bring this inhouse? 

Again I come back that MGA model. It is hard for you to say you are an MGA if don’t have claims authority. That is what drove that [inhouse decision]. We have control, our claims team work with the underwriters, it is all on the same system, and insurers love that approach and are happy to support it. We have seven years behind us now so we have a track record of handling claims on behalf of brokers, policyholders and insurers.

How would you describe someone who might be a good fit as an Corin employee?

We try and get a balance, so half of our staff have been employed from outside insurance with good skillsets they have brought to the table and the other half have insurance backgrounds. But they both need to understand what Corin is all about. If they fit the brand, strategy and the culture then that’s great as we want to keep that ethos going. 

You have run a number of apprenticeship schemes, how successful have they been?

We can teach a lot at Corin with the experience that we have. But when it comes to the wider technical understanding of the market we lean on the Chartered Insurance Institute to educate them on things such as personal lines and motor so they get a broader knowledge.

We have had two [apprentices] just achieve their dip CII and will continue to encourage them. We started with five employees and seven years on we are only 18 so two at a time is a good number. We’ve also had people do work experience here, go to university and then come back and decide to give insurance a go.

On your website you talk about experience administering schemes, how many do you currently run?

It is a developing part of the business and an area in which we feel a lot of our growth is going to come. We have our organic open market growth which involves an underwriting portal  - with underwriters sitting behind it – that allows us to transact with brokers with a 24 hour turnaround, a service we are proud of.

But going forward - and we are now getting some good feedback from our brokers on this - that consolidated scheme business is going to be important.

So we have four at the moment that are working well but my two-to-three year growth plan is to do more. 

While we are not going to be able to compete with the Gallaghers of the world and Pen Underwriting, if there is a broker that might have £10m turnover and 20% of that is potentially scheme business we think we could help by pulling it together with a bespoke wording, claims handling and exclusive capacity. And moving forward that is where a lot of potential new business could come from.

How important is digital technology to the future of Corin?

We have a bespoke underwriting system which is very important to us; we are only 18 staff and have 8000 policyholders so if we were to go back and start printing documents with all the admin that involves it would not work. 

But you cannot lose track of the fact insurance is a people industry and you need to be able to pick up the phone to an underwriter so I don’t want to go down the AI route. I want a human at the end of the line. 

A lot of our underwriting principles are born out from my experience and one of the best ways to make sure these are communicated to the wider team is to put them onto a system so everyone has access to them and each presentation is consistent.

We have developed rules and strategies around that. I don’t think we are going AI any time soon, especially as our business focuses on severity and niche. I can see many other parts of the market like travel, household et cetera, going that way, but not us. This is open market facultative business.

You opened a regional office in Leigh-on-Sea, why did you do that?

That was a post-Covid move. Our model worked very well during Covid; it was not because we had a Covid strategy, we had to deal with as it happened like most people. But it did test our business continuity plan and we were able to unplug and the then plug back in again the next day. 

We actually started working from home a couple of weeks before the government set the lockdown and as I have a young family I ended up renting an office myself and we did not end up going back [to London].

As things started to unlock we liked the idea of being local and most of us are on the C2C [train] line so instead of commuting one way [to London] they did it the other to Leigh, or Lloyd’s-on-Sea as we call it.

There is a great spirit in the Square Mile including lots of good charity stuff and we thought if we are going to move out of London why don’t we do it right and proper; and so we are now doing the same things you’d expect us to do if we were in the City but in Leigh-on-Sea. There are plenty of MGAs, brokers and insurers in that area too, so it feels like an insurance community.

Can you expand on how you help the local community?

We used to love the Lloyd’s five-a-side football tournament and so we now support [local football club] Leigh Ramblers. It was about replicating that locally, with a team we could support.

There has to be a business element and they have such a wide following which helps when we are looking for staff and apprentices by getting our name out there. It is also run by Matthew Southgate who is a professional golfer and so from the top down it is very performance driven and that is similar to how we run Corin, and so there is a mutual benefit.

We also support I Fight For James, a charity whose story touched my heart based around a lovely family with a son who has muscular dystrophy which is a degenerative muscular disorder which has no cure. We are part of the efforts to raise money to find that cure - but also to support the family fund for the three boys. There is no link to say it is hereditary but their eldest son and both the twins have the same disease and so anything we can do to support that charity is good.

How important was it to plant a flag in Hamburg - and what future plans do you have for international expansion?

Post-Brexit we decided to follow the likes of Lloyd’s, Gallagher, Aon, Marsh and a lot of the London market by setting up a permanent establishment in Europe. To house the [non-UK] insurance business and use that MGU model on the continent to expand our footprint across Europe with the underwriting discipline and systems we have devised.

Do you have any plans to diversify and add new lines?

I think about that a lot. We have seen some good organic growth and there is plenty left, so we will stick to what we do best for now. [If we were to diversify] we would be more inclined to acquire a like-minded teams rather than try and break into a new class of business ourselves because UK and Irish construction is what we know best.

How many brokers do you deal with and what would your message be to brokers who have not reached out to you yet?

Of course there have been plenty of mergers, but we have roughly 300 brokers. Our demographic is usually brokers with £5m-£10m GWP that are mostly privately owned.

We do have some umbrella TOBAs with the big groups because they have acquired three or four of our brokers. But we tend to give a partner service to brokers that aren’t big enough to have a partner arrangement. 

We are more focused on brokers outside London than inside; we do have a few TOBAs with London market brokers - but we are more about servicing the regions.

Corin is known for having a price and therefore you can gain a reputation for being uncompetitive. But you cannot get to the size we have in this market by not being competitive. We started with £7m and are now at £30m GWP, and 35% of the business from year one has stayed with us.

[For brokers reading this who don’t use us] it is about looking at the complete package we offer from the in-house claims to the wording to the AM Best assessment. So I’d say give us a go and I am sure there are things we could support them on.

Finally, what is the genesis of the name Corin?

We worked with a branding company from the outset and we liked the idea of having  a name that reflected our strategy. It comes from ‘Cor[e]’ being the heart and ‘in[s]’ being insurance. We are the heart of insurance which is where we sit as an MGA. We also liked the fact it was a name and it sounded Irish - and we do a lot of business in Ireland.

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