Jill Husbands encourages young professionals seeking an insurance-sector career to consider beyond the big-name insurers and reinsurers. Why not check out opportunities in the “quiet industry” that being captive insurance, which was pioneered in Bermuda by the late Fred Reiss. With 100’s of captives, the Bermuda captive insurance markets continue to be of global significance.
Jill Husbands:
🏛️ Lloyds of London first female broker
🏝️ Green Island Treaty co-designer
🗓️ 30+ years in Captive Insurance
🏆 Inaugural Fred Reiss lifetime achievement award in 2016
About the Guest
Jill Husbands, the winner of the inaugural Fred Reiss Lifetime Achievement Award 2016 and 30+ year in the Captive Industry
About the Show
Podcast Host: Life & Leadership: A Conscious Journey with Dr. Michelle St Jane
A podcast for Global and Re-Emerging Leadership creating community/tribe, a circle of influence, transcendency of compassionate leadership in the world and wider universe. A unique destination for learning about Leadership + Conscious Stewardship + Legacy.
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Jill Husbands encourages young professionals seeking an insurance-sector career to consider beyond the big-name insurers and reinsurers. Why not check out opportunities in the “quiet industry” that being captive insurance, which was pioneered in Bermuda by the late Fred Reiss. With 100’s of captives, the Bermuda captive insurance markets continue to be of global significance.
Jill Husbands:
🏛️ Lloyds of London first female broker
🏝️ Green Island Treaty co-designer
🗓️ 30+ years in Captive Insurance
🏆 Inaugural Fred Reiss lifetime achievement award in 2016
About the Guest
Jill Husbands, the winner of the inaugural Fred Reiss Lifetime Achievement Award 2016 and 30+ year in the Captive Industry
About the Show
Podcast Host: Life & Leadership: A Conscious Journey with Dr. Michelle St Jane
A podcast for Global and Re-Emerging Leadership creating community/tribe, a circle of influence, transcendency of compassionate leadership in the world and wider universe. A unique destination for learning about Leadership + Conscious Stewardship + Legacy.
⬇️ Listen, Follow, Subscribe and Share ⬇️
Social Media Accounts
Intro: You're listening to Life and Leadership: A Conscious Journey. The podcast that shares wisdom and strength. Join your host, Dr. Michelle St Jane's weekly conversation on how to have a positive impact for people, planet, and the wider world. If you want to live a life of intention, to be proactive with your time and bring your vision for the future to live one today at a time, you’re in the right place at the right time. Let's get started.
Dr. Michelle St Jane: [00:00:39] engaging conversation around the business of insurance and receiving, you know, group Fred Reiss Lifetime Achievement Award. Trailblazer, Jill Husband joins me in this conversation to share her leadership philosophies, passion for diversity, and to inspire those who are coming up through the ranks.
She inspires young professionals, seeking an insurance, seek to career. She suggests you consider going beyond the big-name insurance reinsurance and check out opportunities and what she dubs the quiet industry🤫.
Dr. Michelle St Jane: [00:01:12] That's captive insurance. This was pioneered in Bermuda by the late Fred Reiss.
With hundreds of captives, the Bermuda captive insurance market continues to be of global significance. Jill's career encourages women leaders to believe in their opportunities and potential for success. We'll touch on Jill's career from Lloyd's of London and her entry into the Bermuda market.
Dr. Michelle St Jane: [00:01:36] Jill is an associate of the Chartered Insurance Institute of the United Kingdom. She said that gaining qualifications helped her to be taken seriously in an industry, that at that time, was dominated by men.
She was in Lloyd's of London first female broker in 1973, the UK Chartered Insurance Institute and the U S Chartered Property Casualty Underwriter courses were supported on the island by the Bermuda Insurance Institute.
Dr. Michelle St Jane: [00:02:03] The Bermuda Insurance Institute later became an onsite testing facility for the Insurance Institute of America and the CPCU.
The Bermuda Insurance Diploma enabled students to choose either the UK or the US CPCU as a route to their professional designation. The Bermuda Insurance Diploma was formed by 12 leading insurers to invest in future growth of the Bermuda market and recognize there was a need for a well-qualified workforce. They positioned the Bermuda Insurance Diploma for the evolving and expanding sectors. Executives from insurance and re-insurance encourage people to learn more about and get involved in the Bermuda market, encouraged into careers and insurance and opportunities to study locally.
Dr. Michelle St Jane: [00:02:54] Thanks to the dedication of the Bermuda insurance Institute, volunteers, teachers there is a 50-year legacy. The true excellence is seen to continue to evolve. The Bermuda Insurance Institute has merged operations with the Bermuda College, with a vision of consolidating the current offerings of both institutions and creating a future state of the art re-insurance tertiary education facility on islands.
Dr. Michelle St Jane: [00:03:22] The Bermuda College currently has more than 33 articulation agreements with various four-year institution. Graduates can transfer with advanced standing to complete their undergraduate degrees, specific to insurance re-insurance and actuarial science. This includes programs offered by Eastern Kentucky University, Georgia State University, St. Francis Xavier, St. John's University and Temple University.
The Bermuda insurance Institute’s seminars, workshops, and conferences, as far as possible, will be included on a consolidated platform that provides optimal access and support for local education for re-insurance and the supporting professions. Further information and links will be in the show notes.
Dr. Michelle St Jane: [00:04:07] Let's converse with Jill and learn more about past history and how it may affect your future potential and opportunity.
Jill Husbands: [00:04:17] I got a job with a much larger insurance venture, and they’d never had a female on the team before. Basically, they really wanted somebody to sort of just help out, just do a spreadsheet here or sort something out.
Jill Husbands: [00:04:35] It wasn't a particular role. From the very first day I absolutely loved the whole feel of the place. I love what I was doing.
Back then it was in aviation insurance. I mean, now of course it's really ages me. I was working in a building that I call Old Lloyds because it's not the current Lloyds or the Lloyd's before that.
Jill Husbands: [00:05:04] But the one before that. The writing room in old, old Lloyds. I was very, very fortunate enough to work for a gentleman, a true gentleman. His name was Rich Mills. I get a bit emotional when I think about him. He was so supportive and so encouraging that it just made everything so much easier really.
Jill Husbands: [00:05:30] Once I had sort of put my mind to, this was what I wanted to do, and because I wanted people to take me seriously as a woman, I straight away signed up to do the ACCI exams and got those out of the way very quickly. I went on from there, really.
I loved being in the London market. It's a very collaborative market, which suits my personality. All the different underwriting groups would discuss a certain risk to come up with a solution and things like that. It was a wonderful place to learn.
Frankly, I was given a lot of opportunities when I started. I wasn't actually allowed to go into Lloyd's itself because I was a woman. I mean, I could go in and visit, but I couldn't actually do any work in there. That changed pretty quickly thereafter, The small sort of underwriting group that I was with was part of Willis Faber.
Jill Husbands: [00:06:28] As soon as Lloyd's opened up to women, they got me a ticket and we went from there. So that's sort of how I fell into insurance. There was no plan. There was no degree in insurance.
Dr. Michelle St Jane: [00:06:44] Then you came to Bermuda. How did that come about?
Jill Husbands: [00:06:46] Okay. Well, that was another funny story.
Jill Husbands: [00:06:48] I took a year off from work in London and traveled. I backpacked around the world. That was a wonderful experience. I met an Australian girl who had actually come to Bermuda. She was a nurse. She had come to Bermuda to work. We were really good friends. She asked me, “Do you want to come for a holiday.”
Jill Husbands: [00:07:13] I said, “oh yes, that will be fantastic. I'll come for holiday.” So, I came to Bermuda on vacation, had two wonderful weeks here, then went back to London. That was the end of it.
By this stage, I'd actually moved from underwriting to broking. I was a reinsurance broker. I was sitting at my desk in 10 Trinity square, which is an iconic building in London. The phone rang. I guess one of the things is being a female in the market, especially in the aviation market back in those days, there were so few of us that, you know, the guys teased us. I mean, it was all sort of good fun. So, this gentleman was at the other end of the telephone and said, “oh, hello, Jill.”
And I'm thinking, gosh, I don't recognize this voice, but I didn't really want to say anything. I want to try and see if I could figure out who it was. He said, “would you be interested in a job in Bermuda?”
I thought, okay, this is just a big joke. They know I've just come back from two weeks’ vacation there.
Jill Husbands: [00:08:14] So I played along, and I said, “oh yes, yes, I'm interested. That will be fun.” He said, “oh, well, can you come to an interview?” Blah, blah, blah. So, I said, “absolutely sure,” because I thought, okay, I'm going to get my own back on you because I know this is just a joke. But of course, when I got there, it wasn't a joke. It was a real interview.
So, I started off by explaining that I thought it was a joke. I'm sure it's the person doing the interviewing must've thought was a bit odd. But anyway, at the end of the day, they offered me the job and I decided to take it for two years partly because I was fairly ambitious.
Jill Husbands: [00:08:52] More than that, I really wanted to be taken seriously. This was a promotion for me coming to Bermuda. I thought it would be good experience. I came over to Bermuda as it's still as an aviation underwriter in the aviation market for an insurer. I joined Johnson & Higgins (J&H). Then it turned into Marsh who bought it.
Jill Husbands: [00:09:14] So, from when I started at J&H until I retired, I was with the organization for an extremely long time. I enjoyed it. That was when I entered the captive insurance industry. So that was late in 1983, very late in the year, just after my son's first birthday. So, I joined as what was called an insurance officer, which really was the person that designs and organizes the insurance programs that clients put into their captives.
Jill Husbands: [00:09:44] I did that for several years. Then I became the manager of that department. Then I moved on to the sales side. I must say I really enjoyed as well.
I give Brian Hall and Roger Gillett credit for this because they gave me this time, we have been talking about trying to put a particular product together, a new product that hadn't sort of existed before. I kept talking about it because I believed in it. So, they said, “okay, take a year and see if you can actually get this.”
That was a bit of a risk because I didn't know what I would be doing at the end of the year if I didn't get it up and running.
I worked very closely with a gentleman, who's to this day a very good friend, Glen Weber. He was in our New York office. Glen and I worked for a year putting Green Island together.
And a lot of the U S technical knowledge came from Glenn. I supported him and helped him on the sales side. It's really just where people share risk with each other. That's sort of the easiest way to describe it. It’s based on the law of large numbers.
Huge insurance companies have large balance sheets so they're able to sustain the ups and downs of the small individual risks. Well, many large Fortune 500 companies have very large deductibles.
They have to have large deductibles they're imposed on them, but those deductibles can still create a significant amount of fluctuation from year to year in loss and companies don't want that. They want predictability. They don't want fluctuation for very obvious reasons.
Green Island brought stability to those low-end deductibles that the Fortune 5,000 companies have.
We went from there. I had two more sons along the way. The years sort of just went whizzing past. I have to say that.
Jill Husbands: [00:11:44] Eventually I became the head of the Bermuda office of Marsh Captive Management. Then I became the chair of Marsh McLennan companies in Bermuda just before I retired.
Dr. Michelle St Jane: [00:11:58] Before you go on, can you explain what a captive is and why it's so important in the market?
Jill Husbands: [00:12:03] Captive is an insurance company that's owned by a corporation. Owned by an airline or by a retail chain, whatever the corporation does, a steel manufacturer, car manufacturer.
It's principally to ensure their deductibles and also when there's a hard insurance market that's lacking in capacity. Like in 1985, 1986.
ACE and XL formed because of lack of capacity in the traditional market. And so, companies use captives, certainly back then when there was a huge lack of capacity. They use their captives to fill some of those holes so that they did actually have funding for those losses as well.
Also, captives can be groups of people in the same industry who come together because there's a particular need there's particular shortage of capacity in whatever industry they're in. They all come get together and ensure each other again, so that there's stability for the individual companies. They were actually just big captives when they fought.
Jill Husbands: [00:13:20] I'm sure, as you know, Marsh was very involved in the creation of both ACE and XL. They were just huge group captives, you know, to be able to buy insurance. You had to be an insured in the early days. You had to be a shareholder, but anyway, we've obviously gone a long way from those days.
Dr. Michelle St Jane: [00:13:38] I'm just going to pop one little fact and here, because we're talking about the 1980s. The Bermuda Monetary Authority, the regulator, in February 2021, released that as of December, it was approximately 40 billion in the Bermuda Captive Insurance Market. Significant because those are the global companies, right. Bermuda has 680 captives. So that's huge growth.
Jill Husbands: [00:14:08] Yes, it is. I mean, probably the numbers of captives may have come down. I mean, I don't know, I don't have the numbers in front of me. There've been a lot of mergers and acquisitions over the years of various companies.
Dr. Michelle St Jane: [00:14:34] The current status is there are 680 and US$40 billion.
So, that's your story.
Jill Husbands: [00:14:46] Oh, well, that that's really, I think it was a journey. I've always believed that when you get to a certain point or a certain position, I felt it was my job to ensure that I have people behind me who could take over.
Also, that I could step away so that they could still enjoy the career that I had enjoyed. I was very lucky in that regard as well. I had a great team behind me, a wonderful team. I just decided one morning I just woke up and said, “okay, now's the time to retire.”
Jill Husbands: [00:15:23] I called New York on that same day and told them I'd made the decision. We put a plan in place. The plan was actually 15 months in length, but it was a great plan. It was good for me. Good for them. That’s almost four years ago, I retired, and you move on to the next part of my life.
Dr. Michelle St Jane: [00:15:42] I want to just pause and recognize that you received the inaugural Fred Reiss lifetime achievement award in 2016.
Dr. Michelle St Jane: [00:15:50] I mean, that's the very first and as a woman, you stepped up for all of them. Showing us what a career journey could look like if you're courageous and stepping into it. I know you've been a conscious steward of this space, so I want to say, thank you.
Jill Husbands: [00:16:05] Thank you for that. I was shocked that I was the first recipient. Very proud though. It was a very humbling. For me to have my peers who were mostly men, recognize me and give that to me. Like the pinnacle really of my career because I have made the decision to retire. Marsh New York and I put this plan into place, but it hadn't been announced that I was going to retire, but it was a wonderful thing.
Jill Husbands: [00:16:32] I just want to end also by saying there's still a lot of work to be done in our industry, not just for women, but for all minorities. I do see that there’s definitely been huge strides, especially for women. I think that there is more work that the industry needs to do for minorities.
Jill Husbands: [00:16:52] I'm hoping very much that we see that in the years to come.
Dr. Michelle St Jane: [00:16:56] Absolutely, diversity and inclusion means more voices, more choices.
Jill Husbands: [00:17:05] Thank you so much. Take care.
Outro: Dr. Michelle St Jane is a conscious steward as meaningful leadership in the world and the wider cosmos. Tune in every Thursday for real talk around life, leadership, and your conscious journey. Be ready to create and cultivate your dreams and wholehearted desires. Your support is valued. Please follow, subscribe, leave a review and a rating. More importantly, share with your connections.
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