The insurers trying to get their heads around the new world of war
We knew what war was. Wars used to look like people dropping bombs and people with guns,” Tom Murray tells me from the distinctly unwarlike setting of an Aon meeting room.
“It was relatively easy to understand. Now we suddenly have this incredibly rapidly evolving field of cyber war – which could be a fundamental threat to a business, or a really detrimental impact to a country where a country shuts down. We’re trying to think about how to define that.”
Murray’s role as a broker at Aon forces him to confront questions like that just about every day.
At its heart, the insurance industry is about defining risk – what could happen, what the impact would be, and coming up with a policy that gives the insured the confidence to go ahead with an investment or a transaction and gives the insurer enough juice to make the policy worth the risk.
But as Murray notes, those risks are changing all the time – and, for him, that makes it a fascinating industry to work in.
Rewarding
Just like the risks he’s dealing with, the world of insurance has changed since Murray’s career began as a broker on the floor of ‘The Room’ at Lloyd’s.
“I probably joined at the end of the old world. When I joined, underwriting was occasionally done without Excel spreadsheets, and deals were down on pieces of paper, and information packs that were two sides of A4 did still just about exist,” he says.
“That’s 100 per cent gone now. It’s a complete revolution: everything about pricing and risk,” he reflects.
Analytics, and ‘talking numbers’, is now more important than ever. Reinsurance, Murray’s field, is particularly like that: effectively providing a backstop to insurers in the market, whilst also working with clients to ensure that their risk is minimised. That means modelling, balance sheet analysis and sophisticated, forward-looking analysis. But it maintains the fun of unpredictable demands.
“As a broker, you’re responding to client challenges. They can be quite” – he pauses, deliberately – “quite immediate.”
“You are straight into helping clients understand the best way of going about a problem: on a continuum from aggressively legal to doing a commercial deal,” he says. Working through Covid-19, he says, was the kind of “good pressure” that brings its own rewards.
“The market got itself locked up around contract language. And we managed to unpick that, gradually, and got the money flowing. We got money flowing right down through the market, to customers, and you say to yourself: that’s good, that’s what should be happening.”
An accidental career
Murray – who tells me he joined the insurance industry over other sectors as a graduate because the job interview was in the Lloyd’s marketplace itself, and the building was livelier and more interesting than the other corporate offices he had been heading to – is, like most at Aon, a real advocate of the sector. Colleagues of his have described it as “the best kept secret” in professional services due to the range of work done across the piece. He doesn’t disagree.
“You can have an exponentially successful career.
“I’ve done 16 or 17 years, and they’ve been very good to me. And there’s a huge runway of more – and that’s something I’ve found pretty cool about Aon. And I’d also say to people – and I’m just waking up to this fact – we need so many more people.
“As the game has changed, and it’s become more technical, we need more people. So it’s not saturated at all.”
Thinking Big
So, back to cyber war. “Are cyber hackers soldiers,” he asks me, thankfully rhetorically. It’s those sort of challenges that the insurance industry – and perhaps only the insurance industry – has to grapple with every day.
“This isn’t theory. It’s real. It’s happening right now.”