 This episode of the podcast is supported by Audible. You can download and listen to the world's best storytelling. I use it all the time to and from work. You can listen to audiobooks, original series and more on their free app. To get your free 30 day subscription, which includes a free book, click on the link in our show notes and enjoy. Hey folks, welcome to the podcast. Today I had a great conversation with Steven Catlin. Steven is a major player in the insurance market and he set up a business, grew it internationally, ultimately sold it. And we hear about his story, journey and all the different challenges he faced during that time. And why on earth he's decided to start it all over again with his new business called Convex. Hope you enjoy the podcast. Hey, it's Lewis. Welcome to the podcast. Enjoy our conversations any time, anywhere. Done my life. Steven, thanks for coming in. How's it going? It didn't take us too long, surprisingly. It was great. You're busy asking me to do it quickly. Definitely. No, definitely. Definitely. I appreciate you coming in. Yeah, really interesting to hear about how your career all began and why you got into insurance and why such a business. I think like many people in insurance, particularly in noise, I got there by mistake. My father was a doctor. He wanted me to go into medicine. I didn't want to do that. One of the reasons was I thought he worked too hard, which was a completely joke. So I agreed to go to private dental school. Oh, okay. Which I did. So you went to university first? No, I didn't. Because I found my own levels. I didn't do any work. Oh, fuck. And I got a place to go in the second year and still didn't get in. So I thought, right, I'd better get a job. And I actually, that stage in my life had very little interest in academia. I've changed a lot over the years. And I just couldn't see any point in going to a red brick university doing something I wasn't interested in. Yeah. So I thought, I'm going to get myself a job. And had many of your kind of peers at school gone to university at that time or they also went to work? Well, I landed at the Comprehensive School. I went to prep school and the money ran out. So I went to Comprehensive School. So it was a complete cross-session to society. So I would guess all my contemporaries went to university. I was about the only one that didn't. Right. So that would probably go about 25% of the population of the school. And I met a guy through sailing who said, are we on a boat in the box at Lloyd's? Well, I had no clue what that meant. No idea whatsoever. I didn't know whether to bank or insurance or anything. So I did a bit of research and, OK, fine. So I went for an interview. I took my hair cut off because I was on my shoulders. I wore a bright blue suit. She didn't want to go with wide lapels and a winged collar and a kippet eye. The only pair of leather shoes I had was brown with stacked heels. I didn't think I was conforming. How was everyone dressed then? Oh, it was pinstripe. A lot of people were still wearing a stiff white collar, was actually. And they let you through the door? Just. And so you interviewed with an insurance company? A lawy's managing agency. And I was told that I'd probably get off at about 1250. So I got off at 900. Oh, yeah? Yeah. So I rang up and said, I was dead for me. I'm, like, a little bit more than that. Oh, sorry, oh, sorry, oh, sorry. And they offered me 950. I took a job. And is it what you thought it would be like? No. But I didn't really know what it was going to be like. Lawy's in those days was very much public school. Male. No women allowed in the room in those days when I started. It was amazing, isn't it? It was like a jungle. It was a little bit like going back to prep school in some ways. We used to flip paper pellets at each other and stuff like that. And this was early to mid-70s? 73, that one. 73. October 1st, 1973. What was it actually like working back in those days? What's in it? How do you mean by that? It was like the culture, the environment. You called everybody, sir. My boss, I called, sir, for the first seven years. And then after a negotiation with a rich ol' broker, who was my age, or two of them, my age, who were calling him right on his name, after I said, would you mind having me, sir, if, under certain circumstances, when we were negotiating, would it be awfully rude of me to call you by your Christian name? Oh, oh, oh, oh. He says, I'll think about it. I'll sleep on it. So he came back next morning and said, well, if you really think it's important, I guess you probably could do that. Three months later, I plucked up courage to call him Brad. And that was quite typical of the time. Amazing. Amazing. It's changed quickly. Yeah. Well, my telepathy was to 17 couples with Stephen. I actually make a point of saying to people, call me Stephen. Some people say, Mr. Catlin. I've got some people say, my name's Stephen. Yes, Mr. Catlin. But by and by. I refuse to. I just can't cope with it. It's a hierarchical thing. Right. But I actually, I think, I've never believed you gain respect by being called a mister. You gain respect by how you behave. Yes, definitely. Yeah. How long did you work there for before you decided you wanted to start your own frat company? Well, I started there in 73. And we formed a new company in September 84. So it's 11 years. Almost to the day, actually. I became deputy underwriter after about eight years there. Okay. Which was pretty unheard of, because I jumped through everybody else in the firm. But I had been de facto deputy for a bit before that. And then I had to ask to have it formalized. So I said, look, you look to me if something goes wrong, but you haven't given me the appointment to stop it getting wrong. Oh, do you think so? And he came back and said, okay, done. He didn't the next day, actually, fine enough. But we were, the thing called divestment in Lloyd's, which they did, a broker and an underwriter couldn't be owned by the same holding company. I worked for what was originally entity and gives them much of a bank. They're separately called Anton, underwriting agency's limited. And that stage, the bank decided when divestment came along that they sell the underwriting to the broker for the more compatible business. Even though we made a lot more money than the broker did. So there was a lot of movement because of the divestment that came on the Lloyd's Act and I reckon that we're gonna be bought by either Sturge or Merritt. And I didn't want to work for either. I didn't fancy it at all. Didn't like the culture or anything. And I was at the time that secretary of the Lloyd's Yacht Club and Commodore ran an agency and he said to me one day, why don't you come have your own agency and come work with us. So he owned 35%. I had 65%. I gave five to my mom at two and then about two and a half years later we did an MBO. So we had a paid up capital of 25,000 pounds, 25,000 pounds of automated loans from him upon which we paid a commercial rate of interest, paid that off within the year. And then we paid them on the valuation of a million pounds to buy them out, which was over value by a bit, actually, but it meant that we were free. Amazing. Yeah. Crazy. What was the biggest challenge in those days? Well, like any, I don't care what startup business to do, wherever it is, whatever sector, cash flow is key. 85% of all startups go under through lack of cash flow. So you've got to be on top of that. I was lucky because in our old firm they started a subsidiary company with a new syndicate and I ended up taking responsibility for it. So I learned about cash flow at somebody else's expense. So when I went in myself, I knew what I was walking into. I would do deals with people and give them a discount on the premium to make certain that the premium was paid to me within 15 days of inception. Normal credit terms are 90. Okay. And basically use that as my sort of way of keeping on top of the cash flow, but we had to borrow the money for the buyout. And I went to Barclays Bank, actually. I went in with cash flow projections and the whole nine yards of thread sheets, all written by hand by me. That's the only way I know how to do a spreadsheet. I've never learned how to do a spreadsheet with a machine. I don't think I use that. It's funny, I mostly use my iPad and stuff now. Let me take it back on the pencil. Yeah. And I spent an hour and a half with them. Yeah. And he said, well, there's some questions you're gonna have to go away and look at. I said, well, fine, ask them. And I could answer every single question on the spot. Partly because I'd done the spreadsheet by hand. So I knew the derivation of every single number on that spreadsheet. And I went to lunch with the maid of mine four o'clock in the afternoon. I had a letter on my desk with a 250,000 mile overdraft unsecured, two and a half above base. Wow. Can you imagine that happening today? Absolutely impossible. Takes about two months just to get an appointment with the bank now. And then the other 100 came. Two of my colleagues, I said, you get the loan on the back of your house and I'll increase your salary to cover the interest cost. But the capital is up to you. Down to you. Right. So that's how we raised 350. Corporate law, overdraft went up to about 500 before we got it back down again. It's quite stressful that it's like until you. Yeah. I can imagine like owing money, making the payments, starting the business. At what point did it then start to really like kind of turn and become profitable? We made money as a syndicate level from the get-go even in the first year. In those days, you could buy a lot of reinsurance or you could arbitrage. So I basically played an arbitrage game. Right. You can't do that today. That's probably as well actually. On the corporate level, it took us about trying to think down probably about five years. The first major thing we did was 10 years and that's when we raised our first capital raise. And that's when I lost control of the business in terms of percentage holding. It took 18 months to raise 21 million pounds in the first year, nine in the second. I mean, so that's a long time. Wow. But one of the things I've learned actually is funnily enough, the less you want to raise, almost the longer it takes. The last big raise I did at Catlin was when we bought Wellington, which then in 2006. I went over to New York in January to do a tier one preferred, which is basically it's nearly capital. Yeah. It's under the cost of capital too because it was with three rate plus, three and a half percent I think it was. So that was about seven and a quarter percent in those days. Right. In perpetuity with 100 basis point uplifts after 10 years. And I went out and I get 300 million and then I go to Europe and get the other 300. And it was, if there's a time when there's a lot of cash in people's backs pocket so there's nothing to do. And after about half a day, I think maybe we can get 600 here. Half a day? Yeah, just by watching it. So at the end of the second day, we had a dinner and one of the bank had said to me, you need to wind these guys up. And I said, okay, there were two banks involved. They were both 40 year olds, Italian Americans, competitive as hell with each other, but God parents to each other's children. I mean, it's just unbelievable. And I said to them, I said, look, just so we understand each other, if we don't raise $300 million, ultimately that's my risk. I'm the one who's running the risk. And if we don't raise 600 million, I thought we try. That's also my risk. And by the way, the word Wimp comes to mind. So they got all wound up. On the Wednesday morning, about mid-morning, I rang up both trading floors and said, could I please speak to Mr. Wimp? Which went flying around those floors and the testosterone was even higher. And by the end of, but I think we went to market at about, it may be midday or four o'clock. I can't now remember. We were covered to the tune of $5.8 billion for 600 million. What? And I went home to my wife and I said, there's something terribly wrong because we should not be able to raise that kind of money at that price. No governments at all. Nothing? Nothing. And the cash was in my bank account within 10 working days of the Monday. Unbelievable. I know. But that was interesting enough. That was January 2007. And I said, that's when I said, well, something's gonna go wrong here. And you're on off later on that year. And the crisis. The crisis. Unbelievable. What was it like to going from getting the overdraft and managing the finances carefully, which I'm sure you did the whole way through, to running a big international business? Because a lot of founders, they often find it hard to let go, to delegate and all of those things. Yeah, I think that's true actually. I also think a lot of founders are not interested really in running the business. They just want to create a concept. I'd always wanted to run a business actually. More than I actually realised. But to put the thing in context, at 9-11, we were writing 430 million dollars with the premium and we had 92 employees. When we sold, which was about five years ago, 2015, we had 2,500 employees and we were top line of 6 billion. So it had been the period between 9-11 and then had been the period where we had huge growth. At that stage, we only had one office in London, that was it. Right. Sold, we had 57 offices in 22 countries. Wow. And the evolution of infrastructure that you have to build with that kind of growth going on is monumental. And clearly, I didn't do all my own and people said, you've done terribly well, so I said, well, actually, that's kind of what you say there, but actually, we've done terribly well. It's a team effort. Yeah. Well, they couldn't have done it without you. I said, well, maybe. I will admit to being a team leader, but I won't accept any more accolade than that because the reality of it is, you can only do that with a really good, strong team of people, different skill sets working together. Many of those people still work with them. So they've rejoined you. Yeah, yeah. Amazing. We can talk about that in a little bit. Did you have support as you were going through that growth phase? So any kind of mentors or anyone you kind of looked to for advice? I was woefully lacking mentors. I had been since school because I went to a brand new conference school and we were in the top year all the way through. So I kind of lived my life for quite a long time without the benefit of being mentored, which I look back on and think, well, how did I get away with that? I regret it, actually. I was fortunate in the end. The last two chairman we had were absolutely brilliant, Segraam Hearn and John Barton. Segraam Hearn was a chairman, CEO of Enterprise Oil. John Barton, more recently was chairman of Next and also EasyJet. And they were very seasoned, experienced people. They had very different personalities, but they were quite capable of pulling up and saying, oh, you've got that right. And I think in some ways that was the best time because I did feel then that it was somebody being my minder who was genuinely trying to help me do the right thing. I wasn't scared to tell me when they thought I was doing the wrong thing. Yeah, very interesting. I mean, there's a lot on mentorship at the moment. I do it with young people. It's really useful to have someone to advise and guide. Yeah, and we now, and we did at Catholic, actually, put quite a lot of it into mentoring, actually. Partly because of my experience because I hadn't had it and I realized the loss. I mean, I was the oldest person in my company for the first 10 years and I started at 30. Oh, yeah, yeah, young bunch. Yeah, a bunch of kids, honestly. I think it's great to speak to people that have been through some things from a slightly different perspective because perspective is everything. And I think it's really useful. It's good to see more people doing work around that. How do you find that the culture in the city has changed since you started to now? It's changed quite a lot, by and large, for the better. In fact, there weren't any women in Lloyd's in 73s. You just can't contemplate that now, today. They weren't allowed at all. No, they were bad. I think they were let in in about 1975 and the men couldn't handle it. It was... Well, there was a backlash to... Well, no, you just wouldn't look. They were just gawking at the girls. It was unbelievable. I think, obviously, regulation increased hugely. Transparency and accountability has increased hugely. I think the level of integrity and the disciplines have increased a lot. The use of technology has obviously hugely increased in the last 15 years. I think we're in a better environment. There's work to do on diversity without any question at all. But Rome wasn't built on a day on these things and it has to be worked through carefully. I don't agree with quotas. I do agree with meritocracy. I do absolutely agree with the quality of opportunity. Absolutely. And that was lacking in the city without doubt when I started. Has it changed a lot since then? Did you find now that you can... It's changed a lot. There's still work to do in my opinion. And in terms of attracting young talent, because the insurance industry has always had a problem attracting like the best, brightest, most innovative, and maybe partly due to the lack of marketing at universities or at schools and so forth. Yeah, I don't actually agree with that. A lot of people say that and a lot of people didn't really try hard. We did a graduate trainee scheme for the last 15 years of Catlin. We had about, we can't remember now, we started at 10 entrance and we went up to about 30 by the end. At the level of 30, we had 10,000 applications for 30 positions. So it's actually not quite true to say you can't get talent. But if you don't make the effort to get it, you won't get it. It is true to say that people don't think of insurance as being the first port of call. As you said earlier on before we started talking, so few people actually understand what insurance is, what it does, how it works. The truth of the matter is though, the insurance industry, the wholesale industry, I'm not talking about personalised, but the big stuff is what we do. It's an extraordinary market where it's still face to face. It's a friendly market. You can be friends with your competitors in insurance. You don't see that in banks, for example. So I think when people get in, they suddenly realise, gosh, this is great. You're not having to work the huge young social hours as a youngster that you do in banking or accountancy or law. When you get more from M&A and you're working all out, it's God said, yeah, I've done that four or five times in my life and it's a finite period of time while you're doing a transaction. But people doing transactions the whole day long do get burnt out very quickly and only about 10% survive, actually, the whole process which is set it all, doesn't it? You won't find many people in insurance who say, they don't like it. Most people say, actually, I really enjoy this. A lot of people love it. I think the issue often I find is you speak to young grads, people at school, and unless they've had a family member that's writing insurance and you say Lloyds, they always think Lloyds Bank, not Lloyds of London. And then you tend to find that graduates want to work for the sexiest industries with the biggest problems to solve. I think insurance has big problems to solve. It's key to the economy and all of those things. But often the perception isn't like you're going to go work for Google. One of the problems of the industry, and it's been there all the time I've been in it, is that we're very bad at selling our value proposition. We're bad at selling it to governments. We're bad at selling it to businesses, to the man on the street. And, de facto, almost bad at selling it to potential employees. Part of what we've been writing in that book, actually, was to try and demystify insurance and speak in plain English so somebody could get their minds around it and find out what it is. And so many people are getting involved. I know lots of people who've joined the industry, often from one of the other professions, say in their 40s, who say, gosh, I wish I'd known. I wish I'd done this for longer. And I can lift a whole ton of people in that position. It's a great industry. Once you're in, I just think more can be done. And as time goes on, more has been done. I completely agree with you. I have made speeches on some calculations. We've got to learn to sell our value proposition. Because we do add value. I mean, societal value is added by insurance, it's huge. And how many people know that? Maybe 5% of the population. Probably there are one, actually. Yeah, that's true. And what do you think of the recent articles in Bloomberg and, again, touching on culture again? Is it still as bad as it's been portrayed, or has it got, I don't know? Well, interesting. I watched yesterday with a female insurance journalist. I asked her the same question, rather than she asking me. Because I'm trying to understand, actually, what is going on. I think the source of that article was fairly vindictive as it happens. And I don't think it's reflective across the board. I certainly don't think the insurance industry was anywhere outside any kind of banking behavior that was going on in those net years. Some of that behavior was clearly egregious, and it shouldn't be able to happen. And I asked her the question, because I first said, have you spoken to people where you think there's a case? And she says yes. Women often, they bottle out having it reported at the last minute for family reasons, or for job reasons, or whatever. And you can see why that happened, but in a sense it's a shame. So I said to her, have you ever had somebody from Canada? She said, don't be so ridiculous. I think the thing is, if it's not going in your own business, and we have a zero tolerance, and always have, I have one regret, actually, when I caught somebody doing something, I gave them a warning, and I should have let them go. And I wanted to, actually, but my management team was with me otherwise, and actually I regret that now. It was probably 15, 20 years ago. Today I wouldn't even think about it, that would be out. I think some of the older, more chauvinistic, big companies probably have a bigger problem than some of the smaller, younger companies, because we've always not been part of it, so it's a good place to be. Yeah, definitely. But if it's crept in over the years, I think some companies are finding it hard to eradicate it. It needs to be eradicated. I think it's an issue. I don't think it's a common place as it was portrayed. It's definitely there in part, but I think it's a small part. It's certainly not a majority. Yeah. Do you think it's gone down also with the, I'd say the alcohol consumption has gone down, but it feels like a lot of people now in the city are drinking less, certainly at lunchtimes. They're thinking more about their health and fitness and well-being. Yeah, I think attitudes to drinking have alcohol has changed over the years. I mean, frankly, when I was building a reinsurance account with my old firm, and then if I didn't have a drink at lunchtime, I was out, you know? Really? You had to have a drink? Oh, yeah, yeah. And not just one, you know? And you were working out the end of the week, and then working the afternoon, such a pain. So that was the kind of like almost peer pressure that you had to go out and have a long lunch and a drink. So I decided when we set up Cap in 84 that I would only drink wine at lunchtime, and I would limit it to hopefully half a glass of wine. And I did that for about six months, and I'd stop completely. I'd have a glass of wine poured. I never, I'd pick it up, put it in the drink, and I found in the next six months, I caught doing that once. Oh, they called you up on it? Yeah, that was the only once. And after that, I thought, I'm just not going to drink at all. I didn't. So now for, I've never said to you, you can't drink at lunchtime. I have said, if you have a bit to drink more than you should, go home, don't come back to work. I don't expect you to do it every day. Actually, the pockets of drinking that still go on in certain areas of the insurance sector, rather than like the pockets of drinking that go on in certain parts of the banking sector, but it's a lot less than it used to be. And I think it leads to, I mean, a lot of bad things happen because of drink. I'm not just talking. Underwriting, bad risks, bad behavior, and those things. It's everything. And I mean, some companies, I think Lloyds of London have banned drinking during the day. They have it for the corporation itself. Yeah, for the corporation itself. I personally wouldn't do that. I think if you treat a person like a child, they behave like a child who treats me like an adult, it's like they behave like an adult in Austria. And you just set standards and say, look, this is what we've lifted the standards. Yeah, that's definitely true. How did you feel? So just finishing your journey. So you sold to Excel, then it all got sold to AXA. How did you feel about selling the company that you created? I actually found that emoji much more difficult, I thought. I thought I had my duct in a row and self-sorted out. I was quite clear on my mind as to why we should do it. As with the board, it was in the interest of our shareholders, as a public company. It was the right thing. We did our shareholders proud. And as I'd actually include a very large percentage of employees with shares, they did well too. So everybody got looked after. In whatever shape and form they were. And I went through stages of emotion, actually. The emotion of when it was announced, emails coming in, flooding in. And then when we actually closed the traction, another wave of emails came in. I was actually in Vimula. And after I got to the 47th one, I was in tears. I had to sit back at the house for two hours just to get myself back together again, it was that bad. And then when I actually stepped down, which is in May 2017, I had another wave of emails. And I did stay on to actually help. We were sponsoring the America's Cup in Vimula. So I spent that month really doing that. My wife came out, I think, the third weekend. And she said to me, you okay? So I said, no, I'm not, actually, but I will be. The truthful part of that answer was the first bit. The second bit was aspirational. And it's the first time in my life that I've actually experienced any form of meaningful depression or whatever you want to call it. I'm talking to you about it now, because I've realized, actually, it is helpful to explain that it's quite normal for these things to happen. But I actually slid down to the end of September and called my wife back up again by the end of December. But it was a difficult time. I didn't get outside help. I probably should have done, but I didn't. I just don't know how to sort this. But no, the... And how did you identify what you were going through? The mojo has gone completely. Right. You're thinking negatively the whole time. And it was like giving, as my wife said, it's giving me a baby. So it was difficult. I stayed for two years before I stepped down out of a duty of care, actually, to my staff, to the shareholders, to clients' distribution. It got more difficult during that two years, but I'm looking back and now I did it. I did the right thing. I knew day one that what I thought I was going to be doing, I wasn't going to be doing. So I had to cope with that as well. Oh, it's put in the new forms? Yeah, you know, if you're taking over it, you're taking over. Yeah. And you have to accept it. Whatever sets you on the way through, you're taking over. And even though you know that's going to happen, or you think it might happen, as you win it happens, it's quite tough. And I've spoken to other people in my situation, and I don't know anybody who hasn't suffered the same emotional type reaction. Well, how they cope with it is done through individual personality. But it is tough. How did you, like, what did you do to kind of pull yourself out of it? Well, the first thing you would do is get on the front foot in anything you were doing, both work-wise and socially. I actually, during that six months, was not doing, that's probably the least amount of work I've done since 1973, I think. But even then I still had things going on. And somebody said, I thought you were stopping working. I thought, well, I am. Well, no, you're not. And I had lots of things to do within the industry. I was involved in other things like flinchery and stuff like that. So I always had enough to keep my brain going. It was then, really, when we started thinking about what next, Paul Brandt, who was my number two, was my number two. He was nine years younger than me. It must be now three years ago or so. We were having a beer one evening. And one of the companies which once had it now wouldn't be fun to work together again. It was almost a de facto statement. And we moved on. We didn't go any further than that. It was just a recognition. And we started talking in life. I've been very fortunate. And Paul's been very fortunate, because twice in our careers, the stars have become aligned. Once we were supposed to post 9-11, then we raised 500 million equity, which nobody else does in the under market. At that stage, we were half the size of the big syndicates. Within two and a half years, we caught up. And then we bought one of the largest noise syndicates all the way through thereafter. And it was a combination of circumstances that allowed that to happen. Had we done some good foundational work, I think we had. But did we get on the front foot and go for it? Take the opportunity? Yeah, we did. And it paid off. And this time round, again, string of set of circumstances. I mean, I had no idea that acts were going to buy Excel. That happened in a year or two, right? It happened, what did that happen? 2018, I think. Right, it was very quickly. No, no, no, before then. May 2016, maybe. 16 or 17. And it was a fantastic deal for the Excel show, which was a massive cash transaction. One of the effects of that acquisition was London started to go downhill. And largely, this is a cultural difference between America and the UK. And America just didn't understand how different London is, and particularly in shorts, where it's far more relationship than anywhere else in the world. So a lot of my colleagues were moving on. What I hadn't realized was that we wouldn't actually have bought Excel Catlin. That released me. I couldn't have competed against Excel Catlin because of the names on the door. I just couldn't bring myself. I was allowed to contractually, but I couldn't do it emotionally and morally. I got the call on Sunday morning about 10 o'clock. After lunch, my wife said to me, Sunday lunch, she said, I detected a bounce in the air. And I looked at her, because I actually hadn't joined up the dots. And I thought of it. I said, yeah, you're all right. She said, well, what is it? I said, I've just got my get out of jail card for free. And that's how that felt. Amazing. I didn't realize it. It was like having an 80-pound rock stuck to your back, which I didn't even know was carrying. So that freed me up. And then other things happened, like Lloyd's Losses. That year, every single product line in Lloyd's Loss Money bar energy, and that was luck. Then two days later. This is 2018, 2019. 2018. Yeah, 2018. And that's when Evan made their 500 million pound loss. That came about two days later. And both of those two things happened immediately after the last month and a lot of people were saying to me and to Brandy, I did collectively or individually, get back in the market in these leadership. But when some one person said to you, you just put it back in your brain, and then you look two or three in the back of your brain. When he gets to about 10, you say, well, maybe, and there's some different parts of the market. Right. Maybe we should think about this. Seriously, we did. And I rang Brandy up and said, do you think we'll have a chat? He said, yes. I said, when? He said, now. So we had a conversation for Friday. He said, look, let's not do it over the weekend. Think of an independent weekend on Monday. On Monday, we decided to go for it. And on the Tuesday, I got a banker who'd been telling me we should do it anyway and said, OK, you're right. I'm wrong. Let's see what we can do. Wow. And how long did it take you to raise the money this time? Amazing, really. We started, had some preliminary conversations on the June. We started in our list raising the money right at the end of September. And when they had the money raised by up and running first of May, it says 10 months for $1.7 billion. Yeah, it was not a significant amount of money. Had you asked me before, I would have said, don't be silly. Not a chance. And see, it's called Convex. How did that come about? That's a good question. It obviously couldn't be called Catlin, because I have known my name for years. When people buy your company, your name's on the door, you've lost ownership of your name, actually. So we couldn't use it. And indeed, we didn't. I think others did want to use it. I wasn't that keen. I thought it was time to move on from there. Funny enough, having started starting with C gives a link. We did want two syllables, and we wanted something which is easy to say in 6-8. And Paul came up with Convex as a pro 10. We then wasted hours and hours and hours trying to find a name. And by that stage, we knew it was Convex. We'd done some branding without even realizing it. So it's dead. Perfect. Do you think the challenges now are going to be the same you've gone through already? Or are we looking at a completely different market environment, and so forth? It's different for a number of reasons. In starting with that, we had 130 people on board by the end of this year. There's another 13 in the pipeline. So if you go back to what I said about line number, we only had 92 people. That was after 15 years of building the business. So to start is very different. The one thing that we have learned, which I think we knew that I say this to anybody, reputation, relationships, and trust build up over years has got almost enormous value. And it's humbling to experience that, actually. And it manifests itself in a whole tonne of different ways. 75% of our employees approached us for a job, which is a good interest to see. That's brilliant. We used a headhunter for one role alone. Picking up from where we left off with relationships has been easy. We didn't make that much noise about it, but at the end, before we sold to Excel, Catlin led half of the business it wrote in Lloyd's, and that by country mile with bigger than anybody else. And those leadership on... The main insurer. Yeah, well, the syndicated bank, the lead bank, lead insurer, this person who sets the table has a relationship with the client and the distribution. We kept those leads over time. We got trusted. And people there for know us. And people want to do business with us again. So, in terms of the... I always said this is not a start-up, actually. It's a green field. And I think that's fair, because it's hardly a start-up when you're bringing culture, reputation, trust, distribution, relationships, staff with you. Yeah. And therefore, you're in a very... It's much less risky than when we started at Catlin. Starting with two people and nothing. That was much, much more frightening. It must also be great now, starting a business of this size with no legacy, no old systems. You know, you can build it culturally, you know, how you want and all of those things. Well, it's a wonderful privilege. And we're again humbled by that. To have a blank sheet of paper, to have no legacy of liability, to have no legacy of process is just magic. I've had a number of people come up to you, competing to see it at the moment, and just say, oh, I wish I had that. And one person I was going to, he said, you have to stop talking now. He's halfway through explaining it. I said, why is that? He said, you make me envious. So, yeah, we are blessed from that point of view. It has its challenges, though. You know, you still got to work out, set up new systems, you're going to make use of new technology, all that stuff. We're helped as it happens by, you know, there's any tailwinds in the market now, not headwinds. Yeah. And there is going to be some, a lot of people have got a lot of tail on the book, they'd rather not have. So, you know, it does give us a fantastic opportunity. And having no legacy of process also means it's easier to get better use of technology quickly. Yes, 100%. So, yeah, it's a great opportunity. And you're focusing on that heavily? Yeah. One interesting thing I noticed when I went to your office a few weeks ago was how people were dressed. Going back to, you know, your first, how you described your first boss, I was surprised to see people in jeans, T-shirts. It was quite interesting. Yeah, it's interesting. When we were in sort of, before we actually raised the capital, we had a wee work office. Oh, right. And everybody wore jeans and T-shirts there. Yeah. I hated it first. I had a bit of office in London Street. So, it was pretty casual before we got going. You can see I'm wearing a suit and a dime, I always do when I'm in the city. I've done it all my life. I can't help it. I kind of feel undressed if I'm not wearing a suit and tie. I've got a suit and no tie, don't I? By and large, outward facing, do wear suits and ties. And certainly they don't seem clans. Although, you can see the clans. Yeah, absolutely. And my thing is, when you do what Rome does, it's easy to go into the office and take your tie off than to go into the office and put your tie on. True. So, I don't mind down-dressing if it makes somebody else feel comfortable. Yeah. But I always start where I am. That's my age. And then in the office, you don't mind what? If you're going to wear jeans, they're going to be smart jeans. And we don't want people going around in flip-flops and things like that. Generally speaking, you don't see people in T-shirts. You might see them everywhere. Normally a collared shirt is not a prescription. But we haven't laid down hard and fast rules. We essentially lead by example. Now, some of the group executives are like me and pretty much always wear a tie. Others pretty much don't. And some are half and half. I don't think it really matters. No, no. It's interesting that some of the tech firms are so casual. You go to some inshore techs and they don't let you in in a suit and tie. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I know. And so, you know, for us, trying to represent them in the market and stuff, you know, you're interested. So, you have to, again, when in Rome, do you want Rome to do it? We used to do it at a catnip, you know, say in Singapore, you never wore a jacket unless you would see the regulator, but you did wear a tie. Right. Increasingly in the States, other than New York, I think in New York now, you probably want 50% wear a tie, but it doesn't actually don't. They're always used to be like ties, like in London. In Bermuda, well, it's just anything you could say. And in Europe, often you don't wear a tie. It just, it does. But when we had all the officers, I used to work out how they dressed. Yeah. And then we dressed according to them. I did dress, yeah, yeah. What do you think the, what's your outlook for this year? We're out of Europe now. We've got a majority conservative government. Obviously, all the kind of the challenges with Lloyds and all of that stuff. How do you think this year will pan out? Where we are, we think about that and we think about convex, then trying to bring the two together, inevitably. We had a much better start than we thought we're going to have, which is nice, which means that we're on track, we're ahead of being on track. I don't think these outside events are going to affect that. So that's a relief. Bigger picture, I think there are a number of concerns that are out there, which affect convex, affect the whole insurance industry. The world is not as stable as it has been. I think anybody who's been right with their brain in their head is going to be one of the most in China and the States. Somebody just said to me, just rather than me yesterday, breakfast at the XMP actually said, well, of course, Russia is a parish council with a bomb. Bomb capability. Brilliant. But you've obviously got this still a lot of disruption in the Middle East. Yeah. Which is not good. I wonder if we're walking towards another banking crisis. I don't think it would be, I think banks are better capitalised than they were. But some of the old practices are coming back in again, you know, concepts of subprimes back. You know, the hand of it. People learn from that. So I don't know how stable that situation is. Brexit is, as I was saying, the breakfast at the XMP after all. Honestly, Brexit is more of an issue for the government that is for the city, because the city can cope with it. But what you need to understand is, if, most people have got global businesses in some shape or form, so if you have to move part of your business over to Europe, OK, so be it. Where governments should worry about this is if the heart of a business starts moving away from the city, whether it be in short with the bank, whatever it is, then there is some significant impact to UK Limited. And the city, whether you like it or not, is 25% of the GDP for the country and in terms of that 25% of that 25%. So it's a chunk of change. And I think the 10-year outlook is something that we should all worry about. You look around the city and all these new goths are going up. It's a massive amount of new buildings. We're on the run, you will. And you think, well, you know, if... Are they full or they full of these new buildings? All ours is, just about, but it's in the prime location, so it went. If you're looking for subprime location or you're looking at older buildings, they are struggling, if they're not eco-friendly, they struggle, for example. But you can see a situation, potentially, where if the workforce in the city drops by Brexit by 15%, if it drops because of technology by another, what shall we say, 25% to 50%? If they say more jobs will be created from technology, but I'm not sure I buy that. I'm not in the city's zone rate. So you could see the city's property market and retail market going to deep recession, if we're not careful. I mean, there's a lot to do with Brexit yet, and we'll have to see what Boris Johnson does, as opposed to what he says he's going to do. I also think it's going to take a lot longer than people think. I mean, the amount of legislation that has to be changed is mind-boggling. And it's still being on news from today, actually, just because of the quantum of it. There's the risk that the city is appalled on the negotiation. Why wouldn't they? At 25% of GDP. So maybe we get in the next suit on a lot of people to get more affected by Brexit. I think, corporately, we can work our way around it. I just worry about UK limited. I always have to. There's always going to be a short-term economic consequence of what's happened. Now, the train left the station some time ago, we need to go and do what we need to do. There's no point, in my view, going backwards. That's history. We are now in post-Brexit mode, and we've got to deal with it accordingly. It's going to be something we've talked about for the next five years at least. What also feels a lot of this thing, a lot of this is sentiment as well. You know, a lot of people I speak to, people who aren't from the UK, love living in, certainly in London when I go around the city, they want to stay here. It's the most diverse city that I've been to in the world. I mean, you can be from anywhere, be anything, and, you know, live and work well. And, yeah, it's quite sticky, you know? Like, it's... You make a very good point, actually, because you're absolutely right. Doesn't matter. From whatever other country, if people have a choice of city, which city would you choose to live in? 95% of people would say London, in the round. And look, we're very lucky over here because we're the only country that speaks the common language of the world. We have a good legal system. Our regulatory system is tough and cumbersome, but it works by and large. You can speak to every time zone in the world in your working day. Yeah. We are blessed with a lot of advantages in London, plus its history. I think this is raising an interesting point because I can't see Paris or Munich or France, any of these places taking over. Nobody wants to live there. And their populations are tiny, three, four million. Obviously, Paris is a lot bigger. There's a lot of people going on. I mean, it's going to get unpleasant again, I suspect, until the negotiations are over. But bottom line of it is, actually, you don't need to ask just as much if we need them. You've just got to anybody's advantage to fall out. The separation of controlling your own destiny is what's happened. Now we have to find a way of working through it. And, you know, the best negotiations are when everyone wins. So, hopefully, we do that. And hopefully, the government puts some good policies in place that we can do stuff. There's lots to play for. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Thank you so much. Great to speak to you. Appreciate you coming in. And good luck with building another business. Thank you so much. 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