RB Jones’ Engel: New and existing products driving MGU’s growth

It is now just over five years since RB Jones was rebooted under Mark Engel’s leadership. The historically marine-focused MGU has already extended into new lines, and is now looking to further build on its existing programs and enter additional classes like transportation.

Engel joined RB Jones in 2019 from ProSight Specialty Insurance, where he had led the firm’s marine and energy business. His ProSight colleagues Tracy Markowski and Leandro Sosa also moved to RB Jones at the same time.

At RB Jones, Engel, whose career also includes stints at AIG and Marsh, was tasked with building out the MGU’s offerings beyond marine.

Talking to Program Manager in the lead-up to the Target Markets Program Administrators Association’s Annual Summit, Engel said RB Jones now has 13 programs on its books across the property, marine and energy, professional and specialty markets.

Those programs include a property and liability offering targeted at the cannabis industry, launched earlier this year and written on the AM Best A rated capacity of fellow HW Kaufman subsidiary Atain Insurance Companies.

That offering’s launch came after RB Jones’ professional lines platform secured A rated non-Lloyd’s London-based capacity to support the underwriting of an allied healthcare book.

RB Jones has also added property business to its platform following the move to bring fellow HW Kaufman-owned platform Global Excess Partners under its umbrella. Global Excess Partners, led by Brendan Cook, was then rebranded to RB Jones Property.

The MGU also launched a new solar underwriting facility, while the business strengthened its ocean cargo capabilities with the acquisition of Corvus Insurance’s Smart Cargo Insurance business.

And RB Jones formed a professional liability division after it brought over four staff from wholesaler Burns & Wilcox.

New capacity partners

Alongside broadening its product base, Engel and his RB Jones colleagues have over the past five years broadened the panel of capacity providers that support its underwriting.

RB Jones writes its portfolio of programs on behalf of capacity providers that, other than Atain, include CoAction, Axis and HDI, along with various Lloyd’s syndicates and London company market firms.

Engel said as RB Jones has grown with consistent branding across its larger property and marine offerings, the MGU has been able to get its name out to a greater number of potential capacity providers.

“We have also developed strategic relationships with reinsurers as well, and that's really key when in the program business,” noted Engel.

Looking ahead, Engel said there is plenty of opportunity to build on those (re)insurer relationships to support the build-out of its existing programs, along with adding new ones to its roster.

“We've added a number of programs in a short order, and so our ability to scale those and to expand those is definitely the first priority,” he said.

But the business is also looking to enter into new areas of the market – potentially transportation – while it sees an opportunity to extend its reach into the property sector, with Engel confirming that RB Jones is in discussions with several partners to expand that offering.

“It's about leaning into what we have already, applying the technology, seeing where a team can get involved, and then become even more meaningful in those spaces,” he said.

“We think about who we're competing against in some of the spaces that we operate in – it’s the multinational carriers. So we have to have the capacity, the product, the differentiation, the service – all those things – to make sure that we can continue to lean into those rather than losing our edge.”

Property expansion

To that end, Carolyn Reiter, associate vice president and associate managing director at RB Jones, said the MGU is seeing plenty of opportunity to grow its portfolio of property business, notably in the Midwest and the southeast.

“Overall, we play in the middle-market space, and TIVs around $500mn and lower for the most part is where we see the opportunities,” she said.

“We see hardening out in California, where some of the admitted carriers are pulling out of the homeowners space. And we still see a lot of those lighter E&S occupancies being still an opportunity for us,” Reiter noted.

RB Jones’ appetite for property is strictly limited to commercial business, and includes residential apartment buildings, light manufacturing risks, warehousing and distribution.

“We are seeing more of the harder occupancies coming toward to us. We're not necessarily looking to write them, except for maybe in smaller amounts, in excess layers. [With] those harder occupancies – the industrial risks, the heavy warehousing – we're pretty particular in how we write them.”

“We're definitely looking to grow in property, and we're looking to take on new business. We're looking for additional carrier support on the back end as well, to expand our limits that we're able to offer, but we're also looking to grow with our current partners,” Reiter added.

That growth bid comes with property pricing expected to settle and the rate reductions that had been a theme of this year slowing as the market responds to losses from Hurricanes Helene and Milton.

“It was interesting at WSIA [in September] and seeing all the brokers who were pleased because the property market had turned in their favor,” said Reiter.

“But that’s started to change, with some upset from Hurricane Helene, and [losses from Hurricane Milton] could start to change it back towards a more stressed market with some hardening,” she said.

Innovative approaches

New products are being worked on by Engel and his colleagues, notably via the RB Jones Innovates platform launched this year following the hire of Tim Crowe from Eigen Technologies.

RB Jones Innovates is focused on building innovative insurance solutions that directly address product and coverage gaps in the marketplace, with the nascent platform harnessing technology such as AI and machine learning to build “breakthrough insurance solutions”.

Work is now well underway on developing new programs that will harness RB Jones’ existing knowledge base along with the technologically forward-thinking approach of RB Jones Innovate, with the offerings backed by capacity from Atain.

“We’re excited to put together our underwriting expertise and our existing knowledge of marine with the technology that's out there today like AI, and partner with Atain to build a product which is truly unique,” said Engel.

Crowe said RB Jones Innovates is taking “a ground-up perspective of launching products”, asking: “What does a product need to be the best version of itself?”

Utilizing technology along with all of the insight that can be harnessed from being part of HW Kaufman, Crowe said RB Jones Innovates is working on various products that will provide forward-thinking solutions to clients.

But he was keen to point out that the platform is designed to help underwriters, not to replace them.

“It’s using technology to speed up things,” said Crowe. “Risk selection and pricing are still king, and they’re still the purview of humans. I haven't seen any system, at least to this point, that can come close to the human brain. To me, the combination of human plus machine is the way to go,” he added.