Aon Benfield Fac Team
China, the Capital Markets and Beyond
Everybody knows that China is difficult. But Singapore-based Stuart Beatty, an executive managing director for Asia Pacific, and his colleagues on the Aon Benfield facultative team were able to achieve two significant reinsurance partnerships in China within the past year.
"A most difficult task," is how the officer for the ceding insurer described the feat.
The Aon Benfield team has also proven masterful at using the capital markets to provide reinsurance solutions, according to another admiring cedent.
"They are very good at finding new capacity to bring to the market to provide solutions for buyers, there is no question," this executive said.
The team's FAConnect, a digital facultative quoting and binding tool, is an innovation that has really come into its own, according to sources.
One source credited Dawnmarie Black, a Boston-based senior managing director with Aon Benfield Fac Inc., with being a key player in that innovation.
"It saves a lot of time. It is almost a quasi-treaty kind of thing, but we do have right of first refusal. So any accounts that come through I could say 'yay' or 'nay' to," this source said.
Black also gets praise for being even-handed and consistent in her relationships with both the cedent and the reinsurer.
"I mean, the first thing that you always hear about is that a broker works for a company and that's fine. Most of them do. But at the end of the day, she needs to play both sides to make things work, and she does that very, very well," this source said.
Remember that Aon Benfield is the child of the Aon Re and Benfield merger of December 2008. And as such, is a company that is still integrating as it moves to innovate in facultative and other areas. Aon Benfield facultative placed $4 billion in client premiums in the global markets in the past year and also executed the first-ever facultative capital-markets transaction.
|
Stuart Beatty
Elliot Richardson
Dawnmarie E. Black
Paul Summers
Andrew Sims