Gallagher's Alexandra Glickman on the Role of People in the Future of Insurance

In Episode 5 of the Building Potential series, the Senior Managing Director of Gallagher's Real Estate and Hospitality Practice, Alexandra Glickman, joins Archipelago's Founder & Chairman, Hemant Shah, to discuss:

• Insurance capacity and rates, with an emphasis on how they're influenced by asset class, loss history, and geography.
• Enhanced data quality and its ability to streamline underwriting processes by improving terms for clients and prioritizing submissions in a competitive market.
• Diversity, inclusion, and human interaction in insurance, especially in the age of AI.

Watch, listen, or read along to the full episode below:

Hemant Shah: Welcome to Episode 5 of Building Potential, the series in which we explore new frontiers of capability in the risk management and insurance ecosystem.

I'm your host, Hemant Shah, Founder and Chairman of Archipelago, and I'm thrilled today to be joined by Alexandra Glickman, the Senior Managing Director of Gallagher's Real Estate and Hospitality Practice. Alex, welcome to Building Potential.

Alexandra Glickman: Thank you very much. It's an honor to be here.

Hemant: Well, it's a thrill to be talking to you in lovely Los Angeles.

Alexandra: Well, come down to the craziest place on Earth. We're glad to have you here.

Hemant: So first off, congratulations on being recognized, I believe yet again, as one of the hundred most influential people in the insurance profession in North America. Congratulations.

Alexandra: Well, thank you. It's just proof positive that after forty years, you could be an overnight success.

Hemant: And speaking of recognition, I also read that several of your colleagues in the real estate and hospitality practice were also recognized as 2024 power brokers by Risk and Insurance. So, Gallagher is being widely recognized for your talent.

Alexandra: Thank you. And it is really a group effort. I think the hallmark of this organization is that we actually respect each other. We're very nerdy. It's not just a let's go sell something. It's understand what the clients want and need and try to stay abreast of the macroeconomics of our clients' business.

Hemant: Well, a key theme I'd love to dig into with you today is human capital, talent, and diversity in this industry. But, before we go there in a few minutes, maybe we can start with just the view from the market. I believe you've been on the road for several weeks with many of your customers in Europe. What are you seeing out there? How is this market evolving in 2024?

Alexandra: Well, mercifully, on the property market side, it's getting much better.

Last year was a disaster. I think it's fair to say that everybody suffered mightily. There was a twenty-two percent drop in reinsurance capacity, and there had been six years of bad results, to be perfectly honest. So this year, fortunately, there was new capacity that came back in the reinsurance side. And the message, not just from the London markets, and I've been to London twice so far this year. And we've had senior meetings meetings with very senior people on the domestic side. Everybody wants market share. 

So in typical insurance feast and famine fashion, we are seeing a mad dash to try to grab market share. So there has been stabilization in terms of capacity.

There is stabilization in terms of rate. If you have superior risk, you are very likely to receive a mid-single-digit rate increase, if not less.

Hemant: So you're still seeing increases, but the level of increases are moderated significantly.

Alexandra: That's right. And it's really a function too of the asset class. It's a function of the loss history. It's a function of geography.

So if you are a hundred percent in tier one wind, it's unlikely you're going to get a flat renewal. But it could happen because, again, everybody is looking for market share. So you have to be very judicious about not chasing the brightest, shiniest thing du jour.

Hemant: So how fast have things been changing in the market? This is you know, right now, we're at the cusp of the 4/1's. Well, they just, they’ll happen any day now.

And some of the clients you were traveling with were in anticipation of the coming 6/1's and 7/1's. 

Alexandra: Right. So the 4/1 renewals, those clients actually came to London in January. And so this last magical mystery tour was for those renewals that are 5/1, 6/1, 7/1. And it's really accelerating.

At the beginning of the year, there were a number of very large domestic areas were pushing right. And they then found that they weren't getting renewals. And I'm not gonna name names, but I talked to someone very senior who said that – I can't say it. I will get shot. But suffice to say, one of them said that they had a seventy percent renewal rate, and they were shocked.

Seventy. Seventy.

Hemant: Thirty percent leakage.

Alexandra: That's right. 

Hemant: The other direction. 

Alexandra: So, guess what? Everybody found the lord, and now the pencils are sharpened.

Hemant: Well, that, must be a refreshing change because this has been, what, seven years of a pretty hard market?

Alexandra: It is. And the prism through which I view life are real estate clients. And commercial real estate, particularly commercial office, has been really hammered. And I just forget today in Real Deal that triple seven, which, on South Figueroa, was an asset that I did the course of construction for thirty-five years ago, something like that. And it just sold for $145 a square foot.

So you have the disconnect of the valuations. And yet the replacement cost is likely to be two and a half times. So if you have debt on an asset, you still have to insure the replacement cost, but the fair market is a fraction.

Hemant: So there's a decoupling of the two. 

Alexandra: Complete decoupling. Complete decoupling. 

Hemant:  So one thing that we've been doing a lot together, Alex, has been working on validating and enriching your customers' data. In this current market, does great data move the needle with the underwriters? 

Alexandra: A thousand percent.

Hemant: Really? 

Alexandra: Thousand percent. Because if you think about it, the insurance market is very whipsawy. And I think, was it day before yesterday? There was an article that State Farm, for example, is now pulling out of multifamily in California. Now I don't know if that's today, tomorrow, next month, or they're just gonna have a natural attrition of of clients.

But what that's going to do is it's going to force buyers into the London market, the excess and surplus markets, markets that they root for, had never thought about. So the underwriters are inundated with submissions.

Your question about the data is the better the data, the faster it rises to the top, and the more likely you will have a positive outcome relative to capacity and relative to underwriting finesse when it comes to premiums.

Hemant: So there's more shopping of submissions to more markets to look for capacity. And in that day huge of submissions, the underwriters turn their attention to ones that have quality that they easily can process, they can trust. They don't have to triple-check it themselves.

Alexandra: That's right. And it's interesting too. The younger underwriters, the ones who grew up on iPads and devices, love Archipelago, and that's a shameless plug for your organization. 

Hemant: Thank you, Alex. 

Alexandra: Anytime. Don't worry about the check. They really love it because they can get the gestalt. They can understand the entirety of an account versus getting a spreadsheet that has an address, a ZIP code, and, you know, seven lines of data. That means nothing. So the more enhanced the data, the better the outcome.

Hemant: Not to mention that some of these spreadsheets can have multiple tabs and there's multiple spreadsheets, and there's a lot of blanks in the columns and –

Alexandra: That's right. Partial. My reaction's partial. 

Hemant: We'd like to come back to that with the lens of human capital in a few minutes. But maybe before we go to human capital, it's now, as we discussed, been years of, let's call it a challenging market 

 Alexandra: Right. 

Hemant: Where rates have been increasing, capacity has been dear.

Stepping back from just any one year's renewal, like, what you were experiencing now, how has the arc of that experience affected how your commercial real estate clients fundamentally think about the insurance proposition, how they think about insurance buying. Are their behaviors and strategies changing? Did you look back over the last decade, over the arc of this marketplace? Are they shifting their strategies at all in any sort of fundamentals? Because I've noticed that you've been putting on some new, webinars about captives.

Alexandra: Tomorrow, join them. We'll talk about shameless plugs. I'll send you the link. We have 246 people joining a webinar tomorrow morning on captive feasibility for the real estate industry. Mhmm. Yes.

Our clients, particularly the larger, more sophisticated, are investigating the use of captives. They are looking at it from a standpoint of taking higher deductibles and using them for buy downs to satisfy lenders.

If there is not a requirement for, let's just say, earthquake, but they think it's prudent to purchase it, they may, in fact, use their captive to take different tranches where that tranche may be more expensive if you have a layer and you have a carrier who's an outlier. They may look at their balance sheet and say, you know what? We'll take that risk, or we'll use reinsurance to backstop it.

They're also pushing back on lenders, which is the most interesting part.

Hemant: Because a lot of the drive for insurance comes from the lenders' requirements.

Alexandra: A hundred percent. Hundred percent. And it's this weird catch twenty two because the the owners and managers and the buyers need the the lenders. Right? They have obligations. They need the they need their debt.

So they don't wanna push back too hard because it is a seller's market when it comes to debt.

But when we give them the data of, you know, what the PMLs are, when we give them the methodology, and we show them the science that it's not okay to say, I want a hundred percent replacement cost for win. Well, your PML is twenty-two percent. So why, in fact, are you buying an extra seventy-eight percent on a total insurable value? Right? I believe in science. I know you do too.

So they're pushing back. They're trying to get people dispensation in terms of PMLs. You know, is it a 250-year return? Is it a 450-year return? This is particularly true in the securitized world, where some rating agencies were pressing for a ten thousand-year return.

Hemant: I heard a bit about that.

Alexandra: Oh, yeah. It's yeah, well, as Bonnie Raitt saying, that very good thing is about to come to an end.

Hemant: Because that's an exceedance probability of .0001.

Alexandra: That's right.

Hemant: Yeah.

Alexandra: That's right. I went to a public school. Even I knew that.

Hemant: You went to Cal.

Alexandra: Oh, you went to Stanford. I still love you for that.

Hemant: We're still rivals now.

Alexandra: We still. All good ones. But, anyhow, once they're endless, it is, as the securitizations burn off, the clients are becoming much more savvy and pushing back and saying, no. I'm not gonna go with that. It just doesn't make any economic sense.

Hemant: So they're pushing back on their lenders' requirements. They're taking more risk, not only deductibles, retention, but structuring captives, essentially becoming their own insurer, buying reinsurance directly into the market.

How has the perspective of the buyer changed about the fundamental proposition of insurance? I'm sure you're gotten in the last few years much more involved with senior financial executives asking kind of fundamental questions. Why are we buying insurance?

What's the proposition? You know, five, six, seven years ago was kinda maybe a rounding error in their PML, and now it's more material. Are they rethinking the basic proposition of insurance?

Alexandra: Oh, I think they are. I think they are. And I think those who have really fortress balance sheets are saying, I'll take the risk.

And that's interesting, and that has actually put fear of God into a lot of the underwriters. Because once a client leaves the market, they don't come back. So we're talking more and more to our clients, primarily REIT and large PE firms, about the utilization of their captives for insurance-linked securities. Because if you're big enough, I mean, there is certain companies who have already tapped the ILS market, and you don't have to be a Fortune 100 company to do that.

So we have a wonderful group of people on Gallagher Reside and Gallagher Securities, and we work very collectively. And we look at the client, we look at their balance sheet, we look at their exposures, and then we line it out for them. And they can make a more informed decision. It's not like, you know, you're a parent. I'm a parent. You're doing it because I said you should. Right? They are coming to their own conclusions.

Hemant: Sort of shifting from we reflexively buy insurance to we wanna understand our risk, manage our risk, and maybe we'll sell some risk to the market if the economics make sense. So it's not a reflexive decision. So, yeah, years of the market actually can change, you know, buyer behavior. 

Alexandra: Right. 

Hemant: And, change the relationship between the buyers and the sellers. We should come back to that even in the coming year or two.

Alexandra: I think that's a great idea. I think you're gonna see a lot of dislocation of conventional insurance.

 Hemant: So, if we can shift gears to a topic that I really have been looking forward to double-clicking with you on, and that's about human capital. I know you're passionate about that topic. 

Alexandra: Very much.

Hemant: At the risk of maybe sounding a bit old school myself, you know, the industry, you know, in our generation, the bedrock of capability, has been people. 

Alexandra: Right. 

Hemant: And talent. You know, now the market, like every industry, is abuzz about technology and AI. Let me just start. Do people still matter, or will people still matter?

Alexandra: I think people will matter even more. I mean, you can have Phat GBT, and you can use AI for mundane processes.

But if you asked AI to negotiate various layers and tranches of capacity and asked – and maybe AI can do this, but I haven't seen it so far. There is a finesse. Because what we do... a great insurance broker is half architect and half artist. It has to be these programs have to be timely. They have to be sustainable. They have to have the underpinnings of really strong financial wherewithal.

We were laughing when I was in London. We were talking about the bright shiny things. And there was a wild – probably about ten years ago – the, PICC, People's Insurance Company of China. Oh my goodness. People couldn't fly to it fast enough, and they were selling cheap insurance. And that was fine until someone had a loss, and they couldn't get it paid.

So I remember – 

Hemant: Just kind of an important detail.

Alexandra: Details. Details. So that's where I think AI, it's great. I mean, if we can give a stack of binders and policies and have, you know, machine learning go through, check it, and look for the, you know, for the exceptions, not the rule, that's perfect. That makes life faster and better. But the negotiation, that's where the talent comes in, and that's where the people strength comes in.

Hemant: And this market, this industry, you know, very much has been talent built through an apprenticeship model. I know that you're a big proponent of internship programs. And when you and I spoke, I guess it was a couple of years ago we spoke at Sys when we did the Proust interview a couple years ago, you flagged that one of the most rewarding parts of your profession, your career has been nurturing, mentoring youth talent into this industry.

Alexandra: It's still my number one passion. And what's interesting to me is that and I have four children ranging in age from 24 to 34.

The 34 and the 30 olds still know how to have a conversation with the human voice and not do it on Snapchat or send a text. The younger ones are very generally very uncomfortable, actually, as we used to say back in the old days, picking up a phone. Right? But tone is the audible emotion that your audience feels. It's audible emotion. 

Hemant: Well, it's an emotional response. 

Alexandra: Well, and if you call someone up, if you send a text that says, thanks. I appreciate it.

Okay. You do that a thousand. You don't even have to do it. You just press the button.

But if something really good happened and I called you up and I said thank you, I so appreciated that, you have no idea what an impact it made. That's a little bit different. So part of what we're striving to do is to help our younger colleagues learn to be more social.  

Hemant: Mhmm. Interesting.

Alexandra: Yes. And we have an, I wouldn't say it's an edict, but I'll say it's an edict. We're in the office at least three days a week. And you walk through Yeah.

Hemant: I came through here. 

Alexandra: Yeah. It's through this. 

Hemant: It's refreshing. 

Alexandra: It's mobbed. And the range in age is probably 23 to 64.

And so I am a big believer in generational experience, thought. I hate the concept of groupthink. And if you look at our team in here, it is like the UN. So important to me that we have people with diverse experiences, LGBT. We have folks on the spectrum who are who are self-avowed.

We have people who I mean, every possible iteration, everyone is welcome if they add value.

And I think that's very powerful because the insurance industry has been exceedingly white and male for a really long time, and neither you nor I are white males.

Hemant: I'd like to come to that because your voice has been important on that topic. So let's go there now. I mean, you've been, you've been a critic of what you've characterized as the endemic sexism, racism, and homophobia in this industry. Jeez is that changing?

Alexandra: In a glacial way, I think it is. As more people mature in this industry in their thirties and forties, that generation saw their mothers work outside of the home. They saw their fathers be more engaged when it came to raising children. It wasn't the, you know, Ozzie and Harriet lifestyle that people in my generation – it was a rare person whose mother worked outside the house. 

You know, we have a number of my colleagues. The husbands stay home and rear the children. Right? And so we don't believe, on our team, that you should stereotype anybody. That's absolutely not how we roll. So I do think as more people become aware and comfortable and engaged, it will change.

And then people, you know, the old guard will die off. 

Hemant: That's glacial change. 

Alexandra: I know. I know. Trust me.

Hemant: So you've been a big proponent of talent development and diversity within Gallagher. How is the rest of the industry at attracting new fresh talent and developing it productively?

I mean, I know that's a discussion that happens in many forms in our in our market where there's need for almost generational renewal and how good is the industry when you look around the ecosystem, whether it's the underwriters or your peers or even your customers and attracting new talent to the risk management insurance vertical?

Alexandra: I don't think, generally speaking, our industry does a very good job of attracting people who were not born and bred into this business. And I think that goes back to the issue of identity.

If you know, back in the day, you were recruited because someone knew your daddy, someone knew, you know, your mommy, you were the kid of a client or something like that.

We've changed that entirely. I mean, if you walk around, as I said before, our demographics are incredible.

And we have really – and I look around other companies. I mean, you'll go to these events where it'll be different brokers. We categorically have the most diverse group of people.

Hemant: It's self-evident.

Alexandra: It's self-evident. I mean, you've got it, it looks like a fraternity party, you know, from the Sigma Nus. No disrespect to the Sigma Nus. But, you know, all the bros are standing around with their beers, and I look around my colleagues, and I'm so proud of them because half of our team is either first-generation or immigrants themselves.

I mean, the languages that we speak on our team, I think they're we've got seven, eight, something like that. And it's not groupthink. It can't be groupthink by definition.

So you end up with this wonderful Venn diagram of all these different cultures and all these different experiences, and then it allows us when we look at our clients. This is all about the client. Right? We're not some noble experiment.

What is it that we can do better for the client? But when – and we've talked about this. When your parent's an immigrant, right, it gets literally and figuratively beaten into you that they came to this country for a better life and don't screw it up. Right?

Hemant: Yeah. You'd have spoken about that.

Alexandra: That's right. So we tend to recruit people who share that same vision, and we don't wanna disappoint our clients.

In the same way as I didn't wanna disappoint my immigrant mother, and I'm sure you didn't wanna disappoint anybody. And so it's not that you're operating on this fear factor. It's about making the family proud.

Hemant: Yeah. The motivation and the capability that is catalyzed by diversity is a pretty powerful it's been the engine for growth of this country over its history. This is not a new phenomenon.

And, you know, if we if we look at some of the talent challenges you're flagging, I'm sure that some of these sort of embedded prejudices that you call out probably don't really help the industry recruit some of the rising generation because they are particularly not comfortable, and they record these prejudices more so than ever. And so they may not see themselves 

Alexandra: Right. 

Hemant: You know, regardless of their of their ethnicity or their preferences. They don't see themselves in the value system in the industry, you think that's an impediment that we're gonna be doing?

Alexandra: Huge. So back in the day, when I started, there was, this was absurd. I mean, I could I could regale you with horror stories. But I'm not going to.

But back in the day, all you needed was one smart woman. Right? You go into a room, and if you were fortunate, you were the smart woman. And then that somehow, in the minds of the management, all white males, ticked the box.

Like, oh, we got her gal. There she is. You know? Wow. Hell of a gal. Until she gets pregnant, then we'll, you know, we'll never see her again. Trust me. In my first interview, I was asked when I was gonna have children. 

Hemant: In the interview?

Alexandra: Uh-huh. True. He's dead now. But I digress. So when you create an when you create an ecosystem, I love this concept. When you create an ecosystem, where you have multiple people who share a fictive kinship, then nobody feels alone.

This is a team sport. And I was on a on a call today, and it was interesting. Of the people in the room, there were five of us, two people were immigrants. This, these were the boxes. There were four gay people, one of whom is an immigrant and gay, and another young man who is an immigrant.

By the way, everyone's a really smart insurance broker too, and the young one is watching all this. And it's reflected in, I didn't have to come from money to do well. That's really the American dream.

Hemant: Another, I think it's fair to say, another impediment towards recruiting new talent in this industry is that the rising generation, they're digital natives. 

Alexandra: Yes. 

Hemant: And they take for granted certain seamless, you know, technology-mediated experiences in their personal lives. And, I imagine when they show up in the insurance industry, they notice the dissonance between the lived experience in the insurance industry and the antiquated processes and some of the toil, and don't get me started about spreadsheets.

Do you think – and that actually, not only perhaps impedes talent, it's often the very talent you wanna draw on to drive more innovation because they're the ones who adopt it. Is this a problem for the industry as well? You've experienced this yourself in trying to attract new talent where they maybe bounce off the atmosphere in part because they don't see this industry as embracing digital.

Alexandra: Well, it's not sexy. I mean, but it certainly pays the bills. And I think that we've seen as the economy has gone through fits and starts and people thought, oh, I'm gonna work remotely and I'm gonna be a tech entrepreneur and I'm gonna make a gazillion dollars and I'm gonna buy a bunch of Bitcoin. It doesn't always work out that perfectly.

When we bring people in, our thesis is if you can come up with a better idea, a better process, a better way to do it, bring it up. And so we just hired this wonderful young man. He's about to graduate from UC Santa Barbara, and he's a business science major. And Charlie knows more. 

He's learned more in four years than I probably in forty. But where I can help him is to teach him how to be a human. Right?

Being a human is something that not everybody can do.

Hemant: That's ironic. In the age of AI, we have to teach people how to be human.

Alexandra: That's the paradox. Isn't that? Isn't that? So you defer to you defer to this this, you know, amorphous AI thing, and you think I don't have to think anymore. I'll just put in a ChatGPT, and I'll come up with my answer to everything. But did you internalize it? Because people learn by internalizing things.

And it's not just written. It's oral and it's being engulfed by it.

Hemant: It sounds like the rising generation is already starting to influence how business gets done. You mentioned just a few minutes ago that some of the next generation of underwriters are much more digitally fluent, appreciate digital interactions more. And expect more digital experiences from their partners.

Alexandra: And that's great. That's progress.

People and organizations who don't want to embrace that, I'm sad for them. I really am. This is not the buggy whip anymore. But you know, the buggy whip changes every year and a half. What is obsolete? Goes so quickly. We were talking about Blackberries, and we were talking about PalmPilots, and we were talking about Wang Word processors, and we were talking about all these fantastic machines, they were all machines, that became obsolete. Why? Why do you think they all became obsolete?

Hemant: Because they they couldn't keep pace with the imagination and, experiencing the future. 

Alexandra: Yeah. They couldn't see the future, and they were so narcissistic to think that they knew what the customer wanted.

They failed by not asking what did the market need and want. Because need and want are two entirely different concepts.

Hemant: Well, things go slowly and then they go very quickly, and I think we're gonna see that with people and talent and diversity in this industry. Hopefully, it's not glacial. Hopefully, the pace of change is increasing, and I think in the adoption of the more digital human mediated, but digital technology experiences.

Maybe, Alex, what maybe for our last question, go back to the market for a couple minutes. So, as we were talking earlier, lender requirements, how they impose, certain, maybe obsolete requirements on insurance buyers, like buyers are pushing back.

It got me thinking that you've got, what, over a hundred and fifty commercial real estate clients in your practice?

Alexandra: Just my oh, just mine. Just our own. Oh, yeah. Well over that.

Hemant: So you must have a pretty intriguing perspective, not just on the insurance market property insurance market, but the underlying and much more fundamental real estate market, which drives a big part of our economy.

And we're hearing a lot of, you know, concerns and headwinds, in the commercial real estate market, you know, interest rate environment, vacancy rates, you know, urban doom loop narratives.

And it's, you know, easy to be pessimistic. But what do you see from your vantage point, not about just the property insurance market, but your window into that segment of the economy?

And what's your outlook for the real estate economy and what that might mean then in turn for the insurance economy?

Alexandra: It's like explain religion, be specific, and use both sides of the paper if necessary.

So real estate is obviously broken into different food groups. Right? You have commercial, office, you have industrial flex.

You have a single-family rental. You have multifamily. You have mini-warehouse. You have hospitality, and then you have to have all the subgroups.

There's a lot of different food groups. That's what we call them.

They're not all tracking the same way.

There is clearly distress in commercial office, b and c class assets. The a class assets – and but every day, you read about keys being thrown back. And, again, in The Real Deal today, I read about triple seven and broke my heart. I mean, I still have a piece of that, you know, the granite from the monument that you get when you complete the deal.

So that's worth about a $145 a square foot now. But, I think I'm an optimist. I think we are I know we are under-housed. We have, I think, more than four million – So it gets more than four million. So I think that bodes well for continued growth in construction in the SFR industry. We have more than two hundred and fifty thousand SFR units of our clients, and we're thrilled. I think that's a really fabulous industry.

Multifamily, the good multifamily is doing fine. It's the stuff that is forty, fifty, sixty years old, which is decaying, and you have to put a lot of money into the CapEx to make it functional. Otherwise, it's obsolete. So you really have to look at every different asset class and every different geography. Right? Everybody would say, you know, California is closed. No one likes San Francisco. It's coming back, actually, it is, thanks to AI.

And you just, I hate painting with a broad brush, but I think my final comment, I am an optimist.

I will always be an optimist. And I and here's the point. You can't take it with you. Something has to be done with this real estate. And this is not the first time we've had a, you know, boom-bust.

Hemant: There's an opportunity for reinvention and reimagination of some of these asset classes and how they're used and incorporated into the fabric of our society. 

Alexandra: Completely. 

Hemant: And speaking of optimist, what – as we end – are you most optimistic about about our industry? What drives your optimism about this industry?

Alexandra: When I was a very young broker, I think I'd been in the business maybe a month. I was invited to a cocktail party at our managing partners. I was at the Johnson and Higgins. That's the name from the past. And Dick Ross, Dickinson C. Ross, got up and said, ladies and gentlemen, be proud of what you do because without insurance, there is no commerce.

And you think about the horrible disaster that took place in Baltimore. Right? And the shipping line that caused the damage, they have a three billion dollar limit, and they're talking about the impact on the PML market out of London.

Insurance is woven into the fabric of every activity, every transaction, everything.

So I think if we are smart in our industry, we will understand that there is, no organization's an island and that we have a moral obligation to bring in and up the best and the brightest and to be proud because without insurance, there is no commerce.

Hemant: I stand with you on that, Alex. I'm proud to serve this this market. I tell my friends in tech, you know, what industry gives you more of an opportunity to affect people's lives, their ability to recover when bad things happen?

Woven in the fabric of the resiliency of our economy is the viability of insurance, and it's an opportunity not only to create recovery when bad things happen, it builds in the very incentives to mitigate risk in the first place. And I think the flywheels of insurance are powerful, and it's good that the next generation is rising to meet this challenge as well. 

Alexandra: Agreed.

Hemant: Well, Alex, thank you. It's a pleasure to have you here with you. Thank you.

Alexandra: Thank you, my dear. Thank you.

Hemant: Welcome to the new office, and thank you for listening in to Episode 5 of Building Potential. Looking forward to our next conversations with Alex and other leaders in this industry.