2023 started on a strong footing for Tristan Sargeaunt (pictured) and the specialist financial and commercial lines MGA, Spring Insure, which welcomed him as its new group CEO. Sharing his route to the role with Insurance Business UK, the newly appointed chief executive highlighted why after years in insurance broking, he’s looking forward to replicating his experience in helping build a successful brokerage in the MGA sphere.
It was in his former role as managing director of Protean Risk, a boutique financial lines insurance broker, that he first started working with Nathan Sewell and Jason Edwards who had established the brokerage in 2008. The duo left Protean to launch Spring in November 2020, he said, and later reached out as the MGA developed and it became clear that his unique blend of skills and experience could help take the business to the next level.
“It’s nice to keep working with people that you know very well and get on with,” he said. “And so, it was a natural progression for me to move from Protean and follow Nathan and Jason on their journey with Spring – and to try to replicate a lot of what we did with Protean to build out a successful MGA business.”
Sargeaunt emphasised the experience of the Spring Insure team as a key driver of why he was keen to take on his new role. Spring has attracted so many senior insurance professionals with a wealth of knowledge and so many great relationships in the market, he said, and the recent moves made by the MGA are a strong forecaster of the growth that is to come.
“Having worked on the broker side for so long and having worked with a number of MGAs, I think there is a gap in the market for someone to offer what Spring is bringing to the table,” he said. “[And] that’s the levels of service that Spring can offer and has been offering. It’s that accuracy and speed of response and relationship-building with brokers.
“We know what brokers are looking for and that helps us build relationships with those brokers. Brokers want to work with MGAs that they can trust, where there’s consistency in the delivery of quotes and the binding of policies. They want consistent service, consistent messaging and trustworthy individuals. We know that having been on the broker side and that’s what we’re trying to create at Spring.”
Looking to the year ahead, Sargeaunt noted that three key pillars are setting the direction for the group’s growth journey – developing its team, supporting new and existing broker partners, and working closely with its capacity providers.
“We want to grow the underwriting team in 2023,” he said. “We need to bring in more resources which comes back [to our focus] on the consistency of our service delivery, meeting broker expectations around timescales of responses, and getting quotes back to brokers. We’re looking to grow the underwriting team to make sure we can continue to deliver those levels of service.”
As to what makes a great Spring colleague, he emphasised the need for new hires to have a strong personality fit with the group. Spring is looking for people who will embrace its culture, he said, and who want to be part of building a group that has a special and different feel to it. The right person for Spring will embrace the wider team ethos of the group which is centred around collaboration and working together for the good of the business.
“Of course, we would love them to have the technical ability,” Sargeaunt said, “but we also back ourselves depending on the level that we’re looking to recruit, to train people with those technical capabilities. But we really need to make sure that whoever comes into the business is going to be a great fit with the team and add something to that culture and embrace it first and foremost. Because that’s what we’re trying to build and I think if we get that right, the business will be a massive success going forward.”
Spring’s second area of focus for 2023 is on continuing to build its relationships with its brokers and expanding its broker distribution network. Getting out into the market to further evolve existing broker partnerships will be critical, as will reaching out to brokers the team is not yet working with. This broker development angle will be critical in 2023, he said, as that’s where the group’s growth comes from.
“And the third pillar is the managing of our key capacity providers,” he said. “We’ve got seven as it stands and we’ll be continuing to work with our capacity providers to make sure they’re happy with what Spring is doing, and making sure we’re filling our premium targets with our capacity.”
Essential to Spring’s continued success is balancing the tripartite connection between these three areas of strategic growth and for Sargeaunt and his team, the trick is being disciplined in making those relationships work. It’s about being available and responsible, he said, and it’s about always being on the front foot when dealing with brokers or capacity providers. That means contacting them regularly to make sure you’re dealing with any queries or handling any of their concerns.
“It also means understanding where their business is going and the types of inquiries that they’re seeing, and whether we need to change our business model to meet those types of inquiries,” he said. “And that comes through regular dialogue, the old-fashioned ‘pressing the flesh’ and getting out to meet and talk to people. It comes through making sure you’re present and available to respond to them.”
On the capacity side, it’s slightly more technical, he said, as healthy communication is centred around regulator reporting on what the business is going, how the numbers are looking, what Spring is underwriting and whether it’s continuing to work in accordance with its underwriting parameters. Great communication with capacity providers means that they have access to the management information that they need to get comfortable with what Spring is doing.
With such an emphasis on traditional relationship-building, it’s unsurprising that Saegeaunt has such a packed 2023 diary, but he’s looking forward to everything the year ahead looks set to bring.
“What I’m really excited about is building a team and a culture of success and high performance within Spring,” he said. “That’s what I’m looking forward to doing with our internal team, getting to know the individuals we work with. Because insurance is a people industry. In every transaction we do, there’s a conversation, there’s an interaction between an underwriter and broker, or between an underwriter and a capacity provider.
“We are in an industry where that relationship piece is so integral. But if we can build a team, a collective team, all working in the same direction, with consistent goals and ambitions to be successful, then we’re going to be hugely successful. So, that’s what excites me about the role of CEO – getting in meetings with individuals, starting to really get that culture going and making sure that we’re all pulling in the same direction.”
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