Building a Specialist Insurance Business

From climate change to cyberattacks to nuclear verdicts, emerging risks today present new challenges and new opportunities for the insurance industry.

But emerging risks themselves aren’t new. It’s just a matter of what is emerging. “I don’t know that [emerging risks] are new to 2025. There’s arguably been a need for tailored coverage for decades,” says Julie Wood, CEO of QBE North America. The real question is whether a carrier can tailor its coverage to meet those emerging risks head-on—also known as specialization.

Technology is a crucial tool to understanding emerging risks and customizing coverage, so Wood believes recent transformations in technology are driving industry change. Technological transformation has brought the industry, carriers in particular, to a cross roads, and the path taken will depend on how they approach taking on risk and providing coverage solutions: a broader, numbers-focused model that applies generic coverages to serve many clients more quickly, or a narrower approach based on crafting coverage solutions for unique emerging risks and using technology to empower expert employees.

Wood says these two paths are equally valid and offer opportunities for success. On the one hand, a carrier can rely on technology to create a one-size-fits-all solution for a range of smaller business risks. Carriers on this path can process huge volumes of this business in a cost effective, efficient way, but are less able to tailor bespoke coverage solutions if needed.

On the other hand, a carrier must take a different tack to pursue larger business. “What really is emerging is that we are being asked to solve business resiliency problems together,” Wood says.

To collaborate on business resiliency problems and provide the appropriate solutions for large clients—to be able to listen well, understand emerging risks, and tailor coverages for those risks appropriately—a carrier must specialize, Wood says. “The larger clients are expecting it; their investors are asking for it.”

The Growth Mindset

The first step toward specialization, where a carrier builds a talent and solution set able to tailor bespoke coverages for unique risks, is developing a culture that can sustain it. As Wood puts it, “People are our most powerful asset.” Employees need both experience and the skillset to not just understand how to create a unique solution for a unique risk but also if that solution will ultimately be worth the time and effort. Will that solution sell?

One pillar of QBE’s approach to building true specialist talent—senior employees with deep expertise in a technical area, such as a healthcare, captives, D&O, management liability, or cyber—is “bringing people along,” in Wood’s words. This starts with drawing people into the industry, whether fresh from university or elsewhere—“Our claims division has been a great new career beginning, or a new home for ex-lawyers,” Wood notes—and then devoting time and resources to crafting the new employee into a specialist.

Building talent from the ground up is key to this process at QBE. “The nice thing about having experts is that you can have a culture where new employees are learning under somebody who has a lot of experience, and they co-work together on certain projects—that can really enable a different way of thinking,” Wood explains. “We want to have a diverse talent base across the country.”

This expertise provides the understanding carrier employees need to innovate the tailored solutions large clients want, according to Wood. “Understanding needs drives effective innovation; if we don’t understand the need, we could ‘innovate’ and it never sells,” she says.

As Wood explains, this understanding comes partly through partnering with brokers and clients to track new or existing needs in the market, such as a shortage of capacity for a particular line of business. When that need is understood, the other pillar of a specialist culture comes into play: the growth mindset.

“I define this as being excited by a challenge,” Wood says. For her, that means a team that is motivated to collaborate to solve a problem or look at a risk differently. How can the team leverage in-house experts to assess the cover the carrier can provide? Can it partner with an actuary to properly price the coverage? Will the carrier need a partnership to fund capacity for the risk? What are the claims ramifications if the carrier decides to underwrite the risk?

“To me, innovation is exciting,” Wood says. Still, she cautions that “it’s a specialist strategy. You have to have people that understand what they’re doing. You have to have a collaborative environment.” If a carrier wants to introduce a new risk coverage but doesn’t have the talent it needs, talent that truly understands the risk the carrier intends to cover, it can be easy to price too low and start giving away coverage, Wood says.

Overall, according to Wood, a carrier that builds a specialist culture can maintain the consistent service that clients expect.

Using Tech to Digest Information and Accelerate Talent

Technology is also elemental to a successful specialist carrier. For Wood it’s a complicated issue, as it can be tempting to rely on technology as a “silver bullet” for any issue, she says. Carriers should focus on using technology so top talent can work more efficiently.

One use for technology is enhancing how employees review information. “We’re getting a 300-page submission—how are we digesting that information more effectively? The insurance industry is also filled with unstructured data. There’s lots of opportunities.”

QBE leverages generative AI to process risk submissions in the cyber line more efficiently. “The technology has made a significant difference in our ability to speed up intake and submission turnaround times, enabling our underwriters to get to a decision faster—giving brokers a yes or no answer quickly.”

Technology can also help “bring along” new talent even when a carrier does not have senior experts available for education through collaboration and apprenticeships, Wood believes.

“These are all things in which we’re looking to integrate technology with our team,” she says. “I’m excited to see how that’s going to translate. It’s early days for all of us.”

Brokers’ Key Role

A specialist carrier cannot be its best without strong broker partners, according to Wood. “Brokers are critical,” she says. “They have leading insight into where we need to innovate. They’re seeing a broad breadth of clients, they have an advanced appreciation for where client stress is, and they’re going to be aware of business challenges that are outside of just risk transfer issues—because a true broker partner is a trusted advisor to their clients.”

To illustrate her point, Wood highlights a recent expansion to QBE’s media liability coverage to protect companies from risks specifically associated with influencer-created content—such as how the use of unlicensed copyrighted material may result in legal action against the brand being represented, or other exposures related to trademark, defamation, and right of publicity. Once in force, the product protects both the company and the influencer.

This came to QBE through listening to broker partners and law firms, Wood says. By engaging with them, QBE identified the issue and determined what risks it should target when tailoring the new product.

Broker partners can also come to carriers, rather than carriers to brokers, Wood points out. Sometimes they come looking for and actively soliciting specific coverage for a client; that’s where the specialized team with the growth mindset comes in: taking on the challenge, applying its expertise, and possibly creating a new product.

For Wood, this gets to the heart of what it means to be a specialized insurer. It’s not passively responding to emerging risks but instead proactively collaborating with clients and broker partners to innovate and solve insureds’ business resiliency problems before the costs of those problems come due.