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Reinsurance: Analytics
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Paul Budde
Executive Vice President
Leader of Product Development & Applied Research team
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Steve Goldberg
Executive Vice President
Leader of Actuarial Consulting team
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Wendy Hayes
Senior Vice President
Leader of Catastrophe Modeling team
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James Pogorzelski
Executive Vice President
Leader of Financial Consulting team
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Benfield ReMetrics---Minneapolis
Despite a sophisticated array of products, the service at Minneapolis-based Benfield ReMetrics is down-home Midwestern.
"Our day-to-day contact at Benfield is great--intelligent and has a good grasp of all our lines of business," said one insurance client. "They are invaluable resources. Also, we're Midwesterners and they are too. We understand each other."
Added this client: "The portfolio of products they offer and the analytic tools are excellent. They compare with Aon Re and Guy Carpenter."
Benfield is this client's broker for property-catastrophe reinsurance, for its working layer program and for casualty, workers' comp excess and surety.
"They are excellent in negotiations," said the client. "We have built a long-term relationship based on quality and service."
But the house of Benfield is also built on some state-of-the-art products, supported by approximately 150 actuaries, catastrophe modelers, mathematicians, accountants, engineers and financial consultants. The U.S. ReMetrics team is led by Kevin Campion and lieutenants Paul Budde, Steve Goldberg, Wendy Hayes and Jim Pogorzelski.
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RISK MAPPING
One of the group's key accomplishments in the past year was releasing the latest version of ExposureView, the next generation of Benfield's risk mapping and exposure management tool, which was named as a finalist in the 2007 A.M. Best e-Fusion Awards.
Other major accomplishments in the past year included launching a single risk modeling program that enables clients to obtain modeled loss results for individual location policies before they are bound. Single risk modeling is integrated with ExposureView, allowing Benfield to use the actual street address to geocode the risk, not a ZIP code or grid approximation.
The company also debuted modeling on demand, which provides clients with supplemental catastrophe modeling results quickly and often within one or two business days delivering interim portfolio analysis.
In addition, the company expanded its servicing capabilities with the launch of an automated reinsurer ratings change notification service through agreements with A.M. Best and Standard & Poor's. Benfield is the first reinsurance intermediary to notify its clients about reinsurer rating changes in real-time and correlate the impact to their specific reinsurance contracts.
Using live data from A.M. Best and Standard & Poor's, and adding that to the firm's proprietary global reinsurance distribution system, Benfield delivers immediate notifications to clients affected by reinsurer ratings changes. The automated notifications detail the impact on the reinsurance contracts that are serviced by Benfield.
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Paul Schultz
President
Aon Capital Markets
Chicago
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Jason Bolding
Director
Aon Capital Markets
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Bill Delaney
President
Aon Securities Corp.
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Chris Lefferdink
Vice President and Director
Aon Capital Markets
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Sean McCarty
Senior Vice President Aon Re Services
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Aon Re Capital Markets Team--Chicago
The Aon Re Capital Markets team is the master of researching and presenting the upside and downside of a situation.
Said an insurance company client: "With all their analysis, we really understood all the pros and cons of the deal." It was a catastrophe bond deal that the client didn't place because of market conditions. "But despite that," said the client, "the Aon team treated us like we were their only client. Aon went well beyond what was required to understand the different models, how the models looked against our book of business, and raised the issues managing our capital in an effective and creative way."
In short, the client said, "Aon provided us with amazing analytics for our capital management effort. They are technically great."
Aon Capital Markets is an integral part of Aon Re Global's integrated capital solutions platform. The company has been a leading innovator in the capital markets, with practices in insurance-linked securities, exposure swaps, financial advising and capital raising.
"As president of Aon Capital Markets, I had the opportunity to oversee and lead several unique projects in 2007," noted Paul Schultz. "We served as the sole structuring agent, as well as a joint placement agent, for the largest catastrophe bond in history."
As the first completed investment-grade-rated catastrophe bond of any significant size (all tranches were investment-grade rated), the $1.18 billion deal was market changing.
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NOTEWORTHY
"We were able to bring new investors into the deal, thereby broadening the investor market and creating new funding sources for the industry moving forward," observed Schultz.
This deal also was noteworthy because it included nontraditional perils, as well as U.S. earthquake and wind.
All in all, 2007 was a good year for the Aon Capital Markets team. Additional accomplishments included being responsible for bringing a corporate client into the catastrophe bond market, the first to enter in some time. Overall, the Aon Capital Markets team was seventh in the M&A league tables in 2007.
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Jennifer Johnson
Senior Vice President
Principal
Towers Perrin Analytics Team
Philadelphia
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David Homer
Vice President
Principal
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«Return to the 2008 Power Broker® Page
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