Ep234 Distribution & Expertise: Walking the City with David Howden

Today’s podcast is a first for The Voice of Insurance. It’s the first time I’ve done an outside broadcast.

And the reason is a special one. David Howden started what was then Howden Pangbourne just over thirty years ago with two others and, famously, a dog, in a tiny office on St Dunstan’s Hill in London.

Now that business is around six thousand three hundred times bigger in terms of staff numbers and infinitely larger in terms of revenue and has become a major global insurance and reinsurance operator working all over the world.

I had been trying to get David back on the show for a while as it had already been 2 years since his last appearance alongside Rod Fox after the acquisition of reinsurance broker TigerRisk.

The message came back that he might be tempted to do it as long as we could do something different.

So this is indeed completely different.

David and I met up at St Dunstan’s one morning two weeks ago and went for a walk around the Insurance district of London we both know so well, taking in the sights, but also all of Howden’s five London head offices past and present along the way.

Inevitably we get a bit of a history lesson and hear lots of insightful stories and some fun anecdotes from along the amazing Howden entrepreneurial journey of the last three decades amid a fast-changing London and international insurance market.

But far more importantly we also discuss the core issues affecting the present and the future of that market and how Howden is positioning itself within it.

Howden Re, Dual and the MGA boom, the big question over whether Howden might enter US retail broking, ongoing broking consolidation, big capital questions around what structures make the most sense as Howden continues to scale, the firm’s latest 30/30 strategic plan and other key decisions facing the Howden Group now and over the decades to come all get comprehensively dealt with.

There’s nothing like a good walk for opening up a better quality of conversation.

David’s passion and enthusiasm are fizzling through every second of this fun and all-encompassing discussion.

If you want to know how David got this far do listen on, you’ll learn an awful lot.

But I think a better reason to carry on listening will be to hear where he is heading in the next few years and how he plans to get there.

By the time we close our conversation in Dave’s Wine Bar at the foot of Howden’s current HQ, you’ll be much wiser, but probably needing a sit down and a cup of coffee as much as I was.

NOTES:

If this has piqued your interest, there are some handy highlights of the Howden story here:

https://www.howdengroupholdings.com/about-us/our-story

The other broking firms that get the most mentions in this Episode are Spear Gulland, acquired by Howden in 1997 and major Spanish intermediary Gil y Carvajal, bought by Aon in 1998.

I worked at Gil y Carvajal’s London office from 1992-95 and again 1997-98, hence my extra inside knowledge of St Dunstan’s.

LINKS:
We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com

We also thank audio advertiser, The Insurance Network (TIN), organiser of the highly-successful TINtech events series. This week they are advertising their successful TINtech London Market event, which will be happening on 4th February 2025.