FORTY under 40: Pierrick Livet
Pierrick Livet, Senior manager, advisory, KPMG
Pierrick Livet started his career in his hometown of Geneva, Switzerland, where he had his first job in the industry, working for a mid-sized domestic insurer named Vaudoise Assurances. After a few years, he specialised in commercial lines and got a role at domestic broker firm Kessler & Co (part of the Marsh McLennan network) where he started as a property broker and was then promoted to practice leader for the French-speaking region of Switzerland.
During this time he qualified as a Swiss insurer with the Federal Diploma (the Swiss equivalent of the CII or CPCU).
After just shy of 10 years in Switzerland, his career took a turn upon relocating to London, where he joined AIG’s Multinational and Global Fronting department where he was managing large multinational corporate accounts, dealing with all the complexities of fronting for facultative reinsurers and captive re/insurers. He held the role of senior multinational client executive and global fronting underwriter and split his time between his existing clients and leading the business development initiatives.
After five years in London, he moved to Bermuda where he joined KPMG as a senior manager within the Management Consulting practice. In this capacity, he provides strategic and regulatory counsel to corporations and their captives. Leveraging the KPMG network and experts, he and others help clients in reviewing their captives’ strategy and execution, review and understanding regulatory changes and assessing the captives’ performance.
Over the last two years, he has had the chance to work with captives of all sorts, from a single-parent corporate captive underwriting standard line of coverages to group captives providing niche coverages, or captives acting as affiliate reinsurers to support the capital efficiency of an insurance group.
How did you become involved in captive insurance?
My first involvement was while working for Kessler & Co in Switzerland. I was responsible for setting up the local insurance programme for a large corporation that had a captive in Dublin. It triggered my curiosity and made me realise the benefits and leverage a captive can provide when managing insurance risks.
What are the biggest challenges of working in this industry, and what do you find most rewarding?
A challenge I am facing is still how unknown or misunderstood captives can be, even to people within the re/insurance industry. In terms of rewards, I truly enjoy working with clients on complex problems and working together to create a unique solution when needed.
I particularly remember the early days of setting up large cyber programmes involving captive and facultative reinsurers: in the beginning, we were facing many “no’s” and “can’t do’s” and managed to adjust and agree on the proper structure to reach an agreement with all parties by thinking outside the box.
“It is a great long-term career path for young professionals and also allows for international career opportunities.”
Would you recommend the captive insurance industry to young people as a future career path?
Working with captives allows you to fully understand the end-to-end value chain of the insurance industry. It offers a fast track for learning development and great exposure to the complex situation the insurance industry is facing. With captives becoming more mainstream in all parts of the world it is a great long-term career path for young professionals and also allows for international career opportunities.
What developments do you see ahead for captives?
There is great momentum to support the development of the captive insurance industry and this is across the world. It is mainly driven by the simplification of the regulatory environment to support the need for risk managers and corporations to better manage their risks.
I believe we will see more new risks being underwritten by captives to respond to the need for an ever-evolving risk environment. We are already talking about intellectual property, stranded assets, and carbon credit insurance programmes being incubated in captives.
There is a renewed interest in group captives where like-minded corporations get together to design a solution for their co-owners and have a better handle of their risk with the benefit of risk mitigation.
Once the commercial rate adjustments are over, I expect to see more collaboration between the commercial market and captives to design sophisticated insurance solutions that need this partnership. If I had to give a forecast, I think we would see co-insurance and partnerships being set up to manage and insure AI-related risks.
Every new technology development requires some bespoke insurance coverage, and AI will impact many existing lines for users and providers. Captives could play an important role in filling coverage gaps, pooling/aggregating risks, or even be offered as extended warranty-like products as an additional selling point from the providers.
Do you think your long-term future remains in the captives market?
Captives are now a fully integrated part of the insurance industry. I strongly believe my long-term future will be linked with the captives market as I enjoy following the market development and seeing how creative captive owners can be.
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