Celebrating success

As Hiscox News marks its tenth birthday, Hiscox CEO Bronek Masojada talks to James de Mellow about a period of change for the business

A lot can happen in a decade. Ten years ago, an MP3 player known as the iPod was just about to hit the market, only birds tweeted and the current prime minister was yet to become an MP.
Hiscox News has come a long way from its first incarnation in 2001 – as has Hiscox itself. Bronek Masojada, Chief Executive of Hiscox, has been with the company since 1993 and remembers broker communication before the launch of the magazine as a much less sophisticated operation.
“There was a quarterly publication called Hullo,” he recalls, “which was quite dry and fact-based. That was the only form of marketing communication we had with our broker partners. The best part was a column on the last page by Robert Hiscox called ‘Goodbye’. We have become richer in terms of email communication and publications like this one, but also through conferences and expert workshops.”
The Hiscox Group has also expanded dramatically since 1999, when it had a total premium income of £500m. “To get to where we are now, we have more than trebled in size,” Bronek says. “Growth has been fantastic in Europe and the UK, and in 2005 we extended the business to Bermuda and the United States. The retail business alone is the size of the whole group ten years ago.”
But Hiscox did not achieve this growth by jumping into new sectors and chasing the mass market. The high net worth products that the company had always been known for have been expanded in terms of coverage, but are still offered to a limited number of brokers.
“We’ve been true to the original aim of the company: to be the top specialist provider to a select group of brokers,” Bronek says. “We don’t want to deal with every broker, just the ones who are specialists in their field. We only deal with a few more brokers than before, but we have a bigger relationship with them.”
For Hiscox, says Bronek, growing professionalism – which includes product knowledge and customer service – both on the broking and underwriting side has been essential to the group’s expansion. “We always say that good brokers attract good clients,” he explains, “and we want to deal with good brokers.”
The past ten years have seen conditions change for those brokers, too, especially since the economy took a turn for the worse in 2008. There has been a consolidation in the UK insurance market, giving brokers less choice, and information technology has affected the entire industry.
“Clients are also ever more demanding,” Bronek says. “Whether it’s the coverage, service or price that they want, all those things have put margins under pressure.”
Bronek believes, however, that the UK broker market has the resilience to adapt and see the tough market through. “I think that the brokers who survive will be the ones who can persuade their clients to see them in the same light as they do their lawyer and accountant,” he says, “rather than just being paid a commission for placing business.”
The UK broker market is central to where Hiscox is going and where it has come from. Indeed, Bronek’s proudest moment of the past decade was when the chairman of a major brokerage firm in Birmingham told him that Hiscox had really ‘got’ the UK regional market and was no longer seen primarily as a Lloyd’s-based insurer. “It’s very easy to think that, because you have done something well at Lloyd’s, the rest of the UK is just the same,” he says. “I’m proud that we were able to make that transition successfully.”  
Bronek thinks that leap could have come earlier had a few things been done differently, however. “I regret opening an office in Paris before we opened one in Birmingham,” he says. “We thought you could serve the whole of the UK from London, and we were wrong. If we had moved earlier, I think Hiscox would have got to where it is today many years ago.”
He is still setting his sights high, though. “I want Hiscox to be the pre-eminent specialist insurer in the UK in ten years’ time,” he says. “Today, we are a market leader, but we want to be recognised further. At the moment, the UK team is planning for the future, asking how we can make brokers’ lives even easier and differentiate Hiscox further from other insurers.
“If we get service right – keeping good products and fair prices – then the brokers we deal with will blow past the competition.”