Accessing London for commercial advantage
– a retail broker’s perspective
Accessing London for commercial advantage
– a retail broker’s perspective
As part of a new series of articles focusing on the commercial advantages for accessing London, we reached out to Sarah Lambert, Partner and Account Executive at Conner Strong & Buckelew, to understand from a retail broker’s perspective how they benefit commercially from accessing the London market.
Please introduce yourself and your business.
My name is Sarah Lambert, and I am a Partner and Account Executive at Conner Strong & Buckelew (CSB), a retail broker headquartered in Camden, NJ U.S. I have been with CSB for nine years. In my time, our organization has rapidly grown, more than doubling organically to just north of 550 team members along the east coast.
I hold a few different responsibilities at CSB. Outside of my direct client services, I co-manage our healthcare practice, lead our Innovation Challenge, and assist in training and education activities.
My primary role as an Account Executive is managing a service team. We handle all day-to-day client requests, provide insurance and risk management guidance like contract reviews and M&A evaluations, contemplate program design, and market all renewals and new lines for existing customers. I also oversee and collaborate with our internal risk control and claim services teams as their work heavily informs how my team services our clients. My book of business profile includes a wide range of healthcare and higher-education clients with similarly wide-ranging insurance program structures including first-dollar and loss-sensitive coverages, shared limits and layered programs, and self-insurance including single parent captives or trusts. I also work with real estate and construction clients which complements many of the development initiatives of my healthcare and higher-education clients.
How does your business currently use London?
CSB is most successful with clients who represent unique and/or difficult to place risks. Given this dynamic, and our geographic location on the east coast, our heaviest utilization of the London marketplace has been for property insurance. Our clients with large real estate portfolios, especially those with coastal or habitational exposures, have effectively integrated London insurance products into their property insurance programs.
We also commonly access the London marketplace for areas such as public directors & officers and cyber, transportation and marine coverages, complex construction liability or builders’ risk, and medical professional liability.
How did you first learn about accessing London?
At the beginning of my time at CSB, I was quickly introduced to London insurance solutions through my daily work. I am fortunate to have started on a team led by one of the smartest and most creative individuals in our industry, so it was natural that we accessed London for coverage, or at least informed our clients of the utility of the London marketplace.
Being a retail broker though, we are sometimes at arms-length from the London marketplace. I had the opportunity to attend the Lloyd’s Broker Academy in 2022, which enhanced my understanding of the marketplace tenfold. Not only that, but the experience also helped launch even more relationships with London based brokers and markets, especially Miller as one of the lead sponsors of the program. During that week we were able to meet people from all parts of the London insurance ecosystem – underwriters, brokers, Lloyd’s representatives, innovators, and senior leadership. This gave me and the other attendees a well-rounded understanding of the culture, market mechanics, and appetite.
What do you see as the advantages of accessing London?
The most obvious advantage is the additional capacity. This can be used either as a strategic method to diversify the tools used to support an insurance program or as coverage security when a risk might not fit well into our U.S. domestic markets.
Another advantage that the London marketplace brings is the flexibility and ingenuity to manage new or unique risks. For example, the London marketplace was one of the first, well before 2020, to embrace telemedicine exposure and some of the unique crossovers of medical professional liability and technology errors & omissions in that industry. As our economy and way of life continuously evolves, London seems to stay in step with providing insurance solutions for emerging risks. This is an area some of our domestic carriers struggle with as they want to have a concrete understanding of something before creating new products of their own.
How do you maintain momentum and relationships with London?
Finding touchpoints with our brokers and underwriters is just as important as finding touchpoints with our clients. We have very collaborative relationships with our domestic wholesalers who help navigate the London marketplace for us sometimes, so we continue to develop relationships through that avenue.
However, for a “super-regional” broker like CSB, myself and the others from my organization who have attended the Lloyd’s Broker Academy, forged many new relationships directly in London with whom we have continued to keep touch. This has been extremely beneficial as our organization continues to grow and has already proven to be fruitful, helping us reconfigure insurance programs for new and existing clients. The Miller team has been particularly engaging on many lines of coverage, which has kickstarted a new prosperous relationship for CSB. Cheers to John and Jamie for leading the charge!