Trisura Guarantee Insurance Company (Trisura Guarantee) has a new president and chief executive officer. Chris Sekine has been tapped for the role after leading Trisura Guarantee’s surety group since its inception. Sekine takes the reins from company founder Mike George, who will continue to work with Trisura Guarantee on a consulting basis.
“I’m very excited about taking on the CEO position,” said Sekine. “This is an exciting time for Trisura Guarantee. We’re coming off one of our best years ever in 2018. The company performed extremely well, with almost 13% business growth and a very strong underwriting profit. From that standpoint, the company’s in fantastic shape, so in terms of our direction moving forward, there’s no change from where I’m sitting. We’re going to continue with a strategy that has created success for Trisura, a lot of which is around creating exceptional experiences for our broker partners.”
Sekine has been with Trisura Guarantee since it was founded in 2006. He’s a familiar face to the company’s employees, brokers and reinsurance partners. As part of the Trisura Guarantee leadership team, Sekine has been helping to set the specialty insurer’s executive and strategic direction for over a decade. That includes the firm’s broker strategic initiative, reinsurance placement and overseeing underwriting decisions.
“I’m intimately familiar with Trisura Guarantee’s business strategy, our growth strategy and our success strategy,” Sekine told Insurance Business. “As CEO, I plan to continue moving that forward because it has worked very well for us in the past. We have three major lines of business – surety, specialty insurance, and risk solutions – and we’re going to continue focusing on those existing lines. We’re always looking for ways to broaden our appetite and capacity in those areas, while also looking for ways that we can introduce digital solutions [that will] bring efficiencies and streamline how business is done – but only in the appropriate areas.”
Trisura Guarantee has been quite successful in its digital strategy so far, according to the new CEO. In 2018, the company transacted about $18 million in premium through digital channels, translating to roughly 30,000 insurance transactions. Sekine hopes to continue investing in digital capabilities and look for ways to help Trisura Guarantee’s broker partners distribute their products and services. He said: “We’re always looking for ways to provide our brokers with advantages, especially against direct writers and all the disruption that’s going on in the industry.”
Ex-CEO Mike George (pictured at a charity sleep out event below) is staying with Trisura Guarantee on a consulting basis to facilitate the leadership transition. Sekine and George have known each other and worked together for over 25-years, and both give glowing reports of each other.
Sekine commented: “Mike has been a friend and mentor of mine for a long time. He’s really helping me with the transition into my new role and assisting me with areas that I’m less familiar with. He built Trisura from the ground up, and it has been a great success story. I want to thank Mike for that. At the end of the day, what Mike can be proud of is that he’s left Trisura in fantastic shape and in very good hands. From a company perspective, our responsibility now is to continue down that journey and make Trisura even stronger and more successful.”
One of the standout highlights under George’s leadership, aside from operational performance, was Trisura Guarantee’s strong community presence. It has been an integral part of the Trisura Guarantee culture since its inception, Sekine explained, and that won’t change under his leadership. “We’ve always felt we have an obligation to give back to the communities where we conduct business,” he said. “In those communities, that has become a really important factor in the strength of our brand.”
