Ep187 Alistair Wood CEO Hampden Capital: Selling an improved Lloyd’s product

The Voice of Insurance

Today’s guest runs a business that has been a cornerstone of the Lloyd’s market for a generation and has a pedigree that stretches a long way further back than that.
Alistair Wood is the CEO of Hampden Capital and also Hampden Agencies, the largest of the Lloyd’s Members’ Agents, with over £2 billion in funds under management.
Because Hampden is a dedicated investor into Lloyd’s there is no-one better to talk to if you are trying to understand the best opportunities and the most pressing threats affecting the 300-plus year old marketplace today.
This is a really enjoyable conversation, not just because Alistair is one of the Lloyd’s Market’s best analysts whose insights are highly valuable, but more because of the progressive and dynamic nature of the business he is running.
A Lloyd’s Members’ Agent is an incredibly traditional business in many ways, but that doesn’t mean Hampden is standing still.
Hampden has long been a sought-after adviser to corporate, as well as private capital and its efforts to hep build and promote entirely new routes for investors into the Lloyd’s market are highly innovative and encouraging.
In the past Lloyd’s has sometimes been perceived as slow to react to new forms of capital, but now that couldn’t be further from the truth.
With listed vehicles, cells in London Bridge 2, Syndicates in boxes, follow Syndicate capacity, or innumerable other structures, wherever there is an opportunity it seems that Hampden and the wider Lloyd’s ecosystem is seeking to make the most of it.
Alistair is also a great guest – intelligent and completely on top of his brief but unfailingly polite and good-humoured and completely transparent and direct with his answers.
He’s a great blend of all the virtues of the traditional Lloyd’s market with something a little more contemporary.
Listen on for valuable tips and nuances and a strong idea of where the market is heading.
From our encounter Lloyd’s and the wider wholesale specialty and reinsurance markets seem to be in rude good health.
NOTES:
With hindsight Alistair felt he had slightly oversimplified Lloyd’s London Bridge 2 structure while trying to explain it in plain English to me.
Here’s a link to a fully comprehensive presentation about London Bridge 2 from Lloyd’s itself, so use this for hard reference:
https://assets.lloyds.com/media/70d4d759-2ade-4569-b804-d7dcc9fd39b2/An-Introduction-to-London-Bridge-2-PCC-FINAL.pdf
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