“Canopius is in the top five syndicates in Lloyd’s in terms of size,” said Claudio Saita (pictured above), his firm’s Sydney-based head of Australia and Pacific. “We underwrote close to US$2.5 billion in 2022 and we’re growing significantly.”
According to its website, the specialty insurer Canopius Group underwrites policies in 150 countries and has three regional business units: the UK, the US / Bermuda and Asia-Pacific. In recent years, the firm has placed more of a focus on Australia and in March opened a new office in Melbourne.
“We identified an opportunity to expand geographically,” said Saita. “We always do so with concrete focus on growth in a certain product line and, in this case, it’s really casualty.”
Saita credited David Mutton with providing this opportunity. Mutton was appointed to lead the underwriting operation in Melbourne. However, Saita himself is also a key part of the firm’s expansion plans Down Under.
“It had always been in the plan that Australia would be a significant contribution to that growth, being one of the largest insurance markets in the region,” he said.
That plan, according to Saita, originated with Mark Newman who is CEO for Canopius in the Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa. Newman used to work with the Catlin Group but left after its acquisition by the XL Group in 2016 and moved to Canopius.
“He [Mark Newman] presented to the independent owners and the management team a five-year plan for growth in this region and it was approved,” said Saita. “This plan was for us to grow from 2018 to 2022 to beyond just the reinsurance entity that we were for many, many years in Singapore, much like he had done it at Catlin in fact.”
Newman approached Saita in 2018 who joined Canopius in 2019. Saita’s executive experience includes a decade with Tokio Marine Worldwide. He’s also Paris and Harvard Business School educated, proficient in Japanese and fluent in English, French and Italian. The pair launched the Sydney branch in June that year.
“We are a Lloyd’s syndicate and what we decided in Australia - and the plan that I put to Mark when he hired me - was to really keep the essence of what makes Lloyd’s great, which is the underwriting expertise and the actuarial expertise, but localize a team here of knowledgeable, expert underwriters,” said Saita.
He said as the business grows, the aim is to offer the full range of “functionalities” needed to be a genuine risk partner for clients. Saita emphasized his firm’s “consulting approach.”
“We aim to bring our chosen partners, on a regular basis, the view on performance, profitability, growth and how we can help them grow their portfolios and be integral to the success of the intermediates that we engage with, brokers and coverholders,” he said.
2019 was a quiet year but Saita said he started hiring underwriters with an eye on the opportunities in property, casualty and accident and health insurance lines.
“We just finalized our third full year of operation in 2022 and saw tremendous growth,” said Saita.
The firm now has 30 staff in Australia, he said, most of them in Sydney and just hired a senior marine underwriter.
“We have virtually all of the functions of an insurance entity here,” said Saita. “We have that actuarial team, the underwriting team, the claims team, the finance team, the operations team with data engineers, visualization people and data stewards.”
He credits the firm’s “very fast growth” in Australia partly to its consultative approach to business engagement and “very favourable” timing.
“Lloyd’s were going through Decile 10 and lots of Lloyd’s players were coming out or restricting capacity but we were coming in,” said Saita. “It was also a time when the big four general insurance industry players in Australia were focusing more on their core and de-risking.”
At that time, he said, the Hayne Royal Commission was also causing uncertainty around risk implications in terms of the changing regulatory landscape.
“We were a sort of breath of fresh air providing more capacity and a different way to engage with our clients,” he said. “We resolved and committed to never be in a position where we’d just pull up and say, ‘Sorry, we’re not renewing,’ three months before a binder.”
After starting with casualty, marine is now the fourth local product offered by Canopius.
“But we are definitely looking at professional indemnity and other lines of business that we traditionally write in the company but don’t yet have local authority and locally empowered underwriters for yet,” said Saita.
Lloyd’s and Canopius are connected by more than the London insurance market. According to the Canopius website, these London-born industry stakeholders share a coffee heritage.
Nathaniel Canopius, the inspiration for the firm’s name, was a Cretan scholar studying at Oxford who, according to the website, is thought to have brewed the first cup of coffee in England in 1637. Lloyd’s origins date to roughly the same time when Edward Lloyd’s coffee house was a place for obtaining marine insurance in London.
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