The AIRROC NextGen Task Force is gearing up for a busy year. On March 30th, NextGen member Jessica Groenewegen participated in a panel discussion at the AIRROC Spring Membership Meeting. The session was a collaboration among Jessica and Anna Dill from TigerRisk Partners, as well as Dan Gerber from Gerber Ciano Kelly Brady LLP, on the “Basics of Legacy Transactions – LPT’s and ADC’s.” The session introduced various transaction structures, considerations under each structure from a legal and claims perspectives, associated capital reliefs, and how various structures address different clients’ needs. The presentation incorporated real transactions brokered by TigerRisk Partners to illustrate the creative solutions available in the legacy space – it’s certainly a lot more than “runoff” or “legacy”!
Season 2 of AIRROC’s The Legacy Life released two new episodes in March. Unlike prior episodes where we invite seasoned, well-established professionals in the legacy space, Episode 2 turns the spotlight on Oumou Tounkara, AIRROC’s 2021 Trish Getty Scholarship winner. She is a student at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, majoring in Risk Management and Business Intelligence and Analytics and minoring in Data Science. Part of what motivated Oumou to learn about risk management and insurance was an incident that happened to her father’s business when she was growing up in Guinea. “I come from a country where insurance… is not seen as an important expense,” she says. “People are just self-insuring most of the time and when there’s a loss they pay out of pocket and if there’s no money, well, they will have to deal with the consequences.” When she started studying in the United States and realized that insurance might have been able to help her family and others, she decided to make expanded insurance access in Guinea a priority. So far Oumou has completed internships in insurance and is active with promoting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) and advising small NGOs in Guinea. Expect big things from Oumou in the future. We’re confident she has a bright career ahead of her!
We are honored to have two guests in Episode 3: Marty Rosemann, Head of Transaction and Legacy Management, and David Presley, Senior Legacy Origination Manager, both from Swiss Re. Like many of our guests, both started their careers as lawyers and through pure happenstance shifted into legacy reinsurance over time. “We all start there,” David says of the legal profession, “but we end in legacy.”
Working in insurance and reinsurance has led them to different places and exposed them to other cultures they would not have experienced in other careers. “[W]e need to brand ourselves as an industry better, so that people see this as a ‘glamor’ career, not a ‘sit in your cube’ kind of career,” Marty says after reflecting on his time in London and working with his team in South Africa. “I think we do need to be more present as an industry at college campuses, talking about what we do…”
But getting the next generation interested in insurance and reinsurance careers in college might not be enough. “I think we’ve got to think about retention, right? So now, once we get the young people in, how to we keep them?” David asks, noting that there are a lot of opportunities out there for young people today. “[T]he bottom line is, when we go to things like conferences or we’re having these meetings… It’s incumbent upon us to actually bring along the next generation.”
