About John Mullen
John Mullen, President of Guidewire Software, spoke at the 2024 Monte Carlo Rendez-Vous conference about the pressure on reinsurers to earn their cost of capital. He stated that this pressure drives a focus on risk selection, pricing, and operational excellence, and that the industry must refine its criteria to deploy capital more efficiently. Mullen also discussed the evolving reinsurance landscape, saying that "unknown unknowns" are amplifying and that a collaborative portfolio management approach between primary insurers and reinsurers is needed. He argued that insurance professionals can no longer separate business expertise from technology expertise, and that successful leaders must embrace both.
In a September 2024 interview, Mullen said that the "winners of tomorrow" must think about the convergence of operational excellence and speed to market. He noted that Guidewire is focused on its cloud platform and that over 100 customers are moving toward or are in the process of going live on the cloud. At the Guidewire Connections conference, Mullen thanked customers for their trust and said the company's strategic focus remains on delivering a platform to support the complete insurance life cycle. He stated that generative AI is not a new strategy for Guidewire but an opportunity to further its mission, and that the company expects "mostly human-in-the-loop productivity improvement."
Source: AI-verified profile updated from John Mullen's recent appearances.
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Transcript (11 segments)
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Meg Green0:14
I'm Meg Green with Insurance Insider and we are coming to you from the very warm Score Lounge at Monte Carlo for the annual Rendez-Vous de Septembre conference. Joining me now is John Mullen, he is the President of Guidewire Software. John, thanks for speaking with me today.
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John Mullen0:27
Thank you for having me.
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Meg Green0:29
So a hot topic here at the conference is the need for reinsurers to earn their cost of capital. What are your thoughts around that?
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John Mullen0:35
I think so, first in the current macroeconomic condition, certainly this is under tight scrutiny and should be a topic of conversation because what it does is that pressure drives us to look at how we're solving insurance problems and industry problems and how we're making sure that the maximum amount of capital is getting to the risk. So there's a tremendous focus on risk selection and pricing, but there's also got to be a strong focus on operational excellence, not just within the transaction between the carrier and the reinsurance broker and the reinsurer, but also really the transference of risk throughout the value chain. And I think as an industry we have a real opportunity to think about, no matter what the macroeconomic condition is, we have to be continually refining our criteria to make sure that we're more efficient in deploying that capital to the actual risk rather than the friction that exists to write that risk.
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Meg Green1:24
How will the evolving risk landscape impact that?
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John Mullen1:28
Yeah, it's the unknowns, the unknown unknowns are amplifying tremendously. And so as we think about that risk selection and pricing and underwriting decision, certainly there's a portfolio management conversation between primary insurer and reinsurer that is evolving rapidly. You see more and more companies being both reinsurer and primary insurer, and I think that's really just a precursor to the idea of portfolio management. Back to the macroeconomic condition, some of the historical context over the last say 10, 15 years has created an environment where portfolio management principles maybe have skewed a bit and been protected by the macroeconomic condition. Those results now, I think we really have to tighten down on what risk should be retained, what risk should be reinsured, and that collaborative portfolio management conversation really for the known risks, yes, for the outlying events within those known risks, but really to create the kind of agility that as the unknown unknowns evolve, we really can be much faster as an industry in understanding where and how that risk should sit, where it should sit.
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Meg Green2:31
So can we talk about the role of technology? Is that a problem or the solution, or a little bit of both?
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John Mullen2:38
Good question. As a lifetime technologist, it's a great question. So I think definitively, the industry has historically looked at, okay, technology is an opportunity to solve and retire historical problems. And so from that standpoint, I think technology can get in the way. What we really have to be thinking about is how will we evolve as an industry to kind of shape and drive innovation for the future of the industry. So if it's solving historical problems, it can get a little muddled. But if we have the clarity of purpose around how we make decisions, how we transfer risk through the industry, and how really that friction is removed, we certainly have an opportunity to make it be part of the solution. Longstanding, I think one thing that's materially different now, and maybe insurance is behind some other industries, materially different now is no longer can a professional be an insurance professional cannot say I am a business insurance, I'm not a technology professional. Insurance, those are coming together so rapidly that successful leaders really have to understand that, and the curiosity behind that, and the solution orientation behind that. And I think insurance is probably behind consumer product and retail, and behind maybe even life sciences and some of that. But as we bring these solutions together, solving business problems rather than solving transactional problems, I think we really can, it really can be part of the solution going forward.
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Meg Green4:00
John, thank you for speaking with me today.
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John Mullen4:02
Thank you, I appreciate the time.
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Meg Green4:05
We've been speaking with John Mullen, he is the President of Guidewire Software, for Insurance Insider. I'm Meg Green.
