Issues & Answers Special Advertising Section:
July 2021

Issues & Answers: Specialty Leader

As Head of North America Specialty and Global Head of Energy and Construction for AIG, Gordon Browne leads the company’s Specialty franchise in the U.S., Canada and Bermuda. This includes Energy, Marine, Aerospace and Credit Lines. Gordon also oversees the company’s Energy and Construction Property practices, globally. “It’s an exciting time to be a partner of AIG,” Gordon says. “We have strong economics that position us well to be the sustainable solution-provider our clients and brokers need as the risk landscape evolves.” Following are excerpts of an interview with Mr. Browne.

Gordon Browne
Head of North America Specialty, Global Head of Energy & Construction
American International Group

“Our goal is to bring the consistency, simplicity, solution-oriented mindset and technical underwriting acumen clients and their brokers need when navigating the evolving risk landscape.”

What are some emerging risks or trends that clients should be concerned about?

There are a number of topics clients should have top of mind when formulating their risk management strategies and insurance programs. For starters, we have increasing complexity around insurable risk. By this I mean the potential impacts of: Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) considerations, climate change and the higher propensity for natural catastrophes, as well as the rise of the activist investor and shareholder activism. Our clients’ supply chains are becoming ever more complex, complicated by the continuing global pandemic and geopolitical instability. Macroeconomic factors are also at play such as the increase in inflationary pressures driven in part by the current degree of global financial stimuli. This is all happening at the same time of rapid technological advancements and digitalization bringing with it heightened cyber security risks.

North America Specialty includes a diverse set of business lines. Why bring them together under the Specialty umbrella?

Energy, Marine, Aerospace, and Credit Lines tend to be complex classes of business that by their very nature are accessed and distributed globally. Our goal is to bring the consistency, simplicity, solution-oriented mindset and technical underwriting acumen clients and their brokers need when navigating the evolving risk landscape. This starts at the beginning of our relationship with our brokers by clearly articulating our risk appetite and continues on with our clients, whether it’s building out a compliant multinational program structure, proactively addressing potential claim exposures by suggesting proven risk engineering practices, efficiently handling a claim or sharing insights otherwise not available through our data and analytical capabilities. A great example of this coming together is how we can support our clients in developing alternative risk solutions, either from the fronting or captive management perspective, which is becoming an ever-important characteristic of risk management.

Can you speak to the broader commitment AIG is making across Specialty to help clients and broker partners address these evolving risks?

Given the importance of an underwriter’s technical expertise when working through such complex risks, we’re investing in our people. We’ve attracted and have retained some of the industry’s leading talent. Our 600+ Specialty Underwriters are locally available on a global scale with over 200 underwriters based here in North America. In addition to our people, we’re also investing in technology so we can continue to use data and analytics to further improve the deep technical capability of our underwriters. To learn more, visit www.aig.com/whyaig.