Wrapping up the Internship of a Lifetime - Closing out week 4

From Wednesday to Friday, Tom and I had one assignment left on our plates at BMS. Our powerpoint presentation. Our new employees to shadow were the two members of the BMS Marketing Department. They overviewed our powerpoint slides and worked with us to perfect our oral presentation skills in the BMS corporate boardroom (awesome view of London - made me feel like a rockstar looking out the window). Our topic for presentation could be anything. Tom chose to present what he had learned at BMS as his topic, I chose to explain the Marketing aspects of the Lloyds Broking Market. Needless to say in comparison to Tom, I certainly had my work cut out for me.

On Friday, Tom and I gave our presentations to several of the people we had shadowed over the course of the month as well as a few members from HR. I highlighted marketing in Lloyd's by reviewing current employees that were brokers with Marketing backgrounds, comparing the Lloyd's marketing to the 4 Ps, and breaking down the channels and relationships that a Lloyd's broker typicaly engages in. My main focus was to explain how the London Financial District is the biggest social network of insurnace and thus requires marketing at its very core since building personal relationships generates business long term.

We ended our last day early with a long round of goodbyes and ate our last lunch with James Adley, our mentor's partner, since our mentor was on holiday. James and others hoped to see us again one day and upon turning in our security passes to the front desk and leaving One America Square we took the bus back to the flat and ended what had been one of the most intense fun learning experiences in my life.

Monday and Tuesday - Week 4

Week 4 went so fast and I was so busy working out my final presentation that I was unable to have much time to make several posts so I summarized the week in a few late posts.

Monday and Tuesday I began working with my mentor's team - Casualty Risks.  Matthew had me look at a slip regarding a renewal for a risk medical malpractice coverage for Puerto Rican doctors that was getting a slow start.  The slip when created in 2007 was expected to insure a risk of 100 doctors on the new plan.  Only 31 had signed on board and the object to hit 100 doctors on the island was pushed to 2009.  Matthew had drafted a 2008 renewal slip with this information and the both of us went to Lloyds to get the slip signed off by the re-insurers for another year.  Matthew threw the same pitch to each underwriter on the Lloyds floor and we got the renewal approved by all the syndicates that had originally signed on.  The only complaint we come from the Beasley box that had a 50% line and they stated they were going to sign on again but if the 100 doctors quota was not met in 2009 then he would no longer waste his time with such a slip.  

From a Marketing standpoint Matthew did an excellent job of portraying his company.  He had a good grasp of knowledge regarding the slip which allowed him to answer any questions the underwriters had for him.  He told me that BMS has an excellent reputation and portfolio in Lloyds and that comes from employees and brokers putting lots of effort learning and studying the cases they present to Lloyds in their slips. 

Tuesday we ate lunch with a  Lloyd's underwriter and got to sit at the box and see how busy Lloyd's can get in a matter of seconds.  We learned about the liabilities associated with Lloyds underwriters and the vigorous training associated with underwriting.  It wasn't really my cup of tea but the underwriter we met was Canadian! - his english sounded American which helped me in my dream of perhaps some day working in Lloyds.  

Much more to come soon... 

Wednesday thru Friday @ BMS - Week 3

Soooo Wednesday... spent the day with Paul Clephane updating some accounts, basicly more number crunching. Really nothing to talk about but I talked to Paul a bit about the office life, ethics, and overall corporate culture of BMS in the Lloyds Market. BMS apparently for an indermediary pays about average. It has a good growing reputation and is known as a company that lets its employees embrace their career dreams whenever possible while making sure there is good self motivation amongst those whom want to rise the ranks in the company. Anyways in a nutshell, Paul is a cool guy, Insurance Accounting is not for me.

Thursday was me back in Technical Claims on Zoe Deeks Team whom operates next to Andy Scales Team, where I started. Thursday and Friday were spent collecting claims for Hurricane Katrina from a few Lloyds Syndicates. The Properties Brokering Team took us out for drinks after work Thursday which was fun... same guys from Rudgy, Peaches and Nash, plus bosses. One of the bosses they call Fox... probably my dad's age and then there is Jenkins, who looks like Tommy Flanagan from Gladiator and Braveheart. All fun guys.

Friday was much of the same... Went to Beazley Syndicate offices to settle a few claims payments from Katrina which were still in runoff. So yeah... Tom being Tom was able to somehow randomly bump into Hugo Crawley himself during one of his many cigarette office breaks and what I thought would be a dinner on Friday after work turned into a personal invitation to come to his house for the weekend and relax. Most people in the office have only said hi to Hugo. He's like thee #1 of the Group. Hoog has a cig with him and now we are off to Petersfield for the weekend. So much for Bristol City... good times to come.

Monday and Tuesday - Insurance Accounts! Woot.

Okay so Monday thru Wednesday was rather different at best. Worked with Paul Clephane, the Insurance Accounts Div Director - real cool guy. He was keen on making sure I learned what his team did and got a good idea of what him and his staff did day-in and out. In a nutshell - number crunching. Paul is incharge of making sure BMS cash flow is up to date... he monitors all transactions and works to fix unallocated expenses.

Monday, I got the team introduction and overview then spent the afternoon on the first floor in the training room doing E-Learning courses - fun fun... got finished an hour early so Matt Searby gave us the rest of the day off.

Tuesday, I met Abu... this guy was machine... he could crunch numbers on the keyboard at lighting speed as he was facing me an explaining what he does everyday. Abu literally updates and allocates all the transactions of the previous day on the computer that have to go to the Llyods account which is an set up to basicly dump money into so a company called X-Changing can figure out which syndicates in Lloyds gets the money. It took him about 2 hours to do at his pace.. would have taken me all day... and he does this everyday... started 8 years ago. I told him he deserves a medal.

He asked me if I had any questions at the end of our session... I asked him if hhis job ever involved dealing with Lloyds directly from an accounting side... he said no - if there is a problem is goes up to Paul... guy has been doing this for 8 years!!! Props but its certainly something I would never want to do.

Wednesday thru Friday to be continued...

Friday with Matt Searby and the Weekend.

So Friday was fun in the office.

Matt Searby is on a fun broking team that does primarily liablity insurance. The case we worked on was interesting: Medical Malpractice Coverage Renewal for doctors in Puerto Rico. Hit home a bit there for me. It was an interesting program renewal in the sense that it was a 1 year old program that had only placed business covering 20 doctors on the island and had a start up goal of 100. So Matt and I had to convince underwriters that the policy would reach its 100 doctor target goal in year two and that well the time invested by the underwriters would be worth the risk.

Bit of negotiating and marketing there no doubt.

In the afternoon we call the office in Miami to speak to the policy lead to tell him we had gotten the renewal approved and to sort of push him into realizing he needed to meet that goal of getting 100 doctors if the insurance was to be successful in the long run.

So on to the weekend... Tom and I went out with Jamie Pooley, one of the graduate trainees. Really cool guy about 3 years older than us. Met up with his uni mates (friends from college) and watched Euro Cup and the England - New Zealand Cricket Match - spent some time learning how cricket is played and enjoyed the rather male dominated atmosphere of the Sports Pub. I left early on my own leaving Tom with Jamie to go to the flat and rest up from the work week and I caught up with a few people from home before getting a call from Jamie to meet him back out in City at a club/bar that cost me 10 quid (20 US) to get into and was full of people on the dance floor with Disco playing... London pop culture is hilarious from a music standpoint... but I kinda fit in hahahaha... Spent the rest of the night there dancing the night away... nobody grinds like in the states so it was like middle school circle dancing all night.

Tom and I took Saturday off and began working on our final presentations and Sunday we shopped in Picadilly Circus and found a really cool whole in the wall Italian place to eat in Oxford Circus.

Quite a light weekend but good for the much need rest to prep for another week at the office. Its already half way over! Time flies.

Tuesday and Wednesday - Property and Casualty Ballers.

Its now Thursday morning and I just had my two hour overview of the Wordings side of risk policies. Basicly wordings is an extention of a slip that acts as a reference when claims need to be made by the insured/reinsured. BMS has two wordings employees that cover 3 teams. Basicly I spent the morning reviewing a policy renewal wordings contract for the 2008-2009 year and was given a manual to clarify any questions I had. Most interesting thing noted is most property risks exclude terrorism in their policies and to include it usually means a much higher premium.

Anyways Tuesday and Wednesday I spent with the Property and Casualty brokers aka Alex Bridges ('Nash' - total warrior) and Alastiar Rykens (Peaches) aka the guys from the rugby match.

To be honest they have been quite busy this week so I did some minor Excel work for them both and on Wednesday go the chance to shadow Peaches around the market. It was fun to watch him sell a renewal to all the underwriters using pretty much the same pitch and dealing with the same questions being fielded regarding the risk associated with the policy. At the end of the morning Peaches, whom like I said has been rather busy, decided to send me to Lloyds BY MYSELF!!!... to get a slip signed off by an underwriter that had already been placed. So yeah, I was a Lloyds broker for about 15 minutes. Good times.

Not much to say beyond that other than so far i have enjoyed working at BMS and have learned that Insurance is a very work hard play harder industry... most of the brokers tend to be very social and its an environment that to some degree resembles aspects of college life. The market in London is like a campus... very lively when business is in session, lunch hour, and just after work but totally dead on weekends (thats when film companies shoot). Other than that, I on the mission to get into the Swiss Re Tower which is like the coolest looking building in the market and has a restaurant at the top that is kind of open to the market if you know somebody.

After work Tom and I have been watching Euro Cup pretty much everyday since the games start pretty much right after work. Holland played Italy (last cups champions) the other day and totally upset them 3-0. Fun times to say the least. We went out on Tuesday with some of the interns out to an Americana style bar/club called Sports Cafe in Picadilly Circus. It was great to walk in and hang out with college kids from back home... place was kind of like Halftimes back in Deland only 3 times the size. Found a red sox fan and got to chat up the Celtics whom are dominating the NBA finals. Best part of the night tho came when the MC announced a free pitcher to the best dancer on the dance floor so i ran out and went old school and smoked the competion which isnt saying much because there really wasn't any. Tom kept yelling that British can't dance and caused a bit of trouble :)... fun times tho and I think Tom and I will go back there again next week on college night.

Thats about it. Met up with Paul Dire, a friend in reinsurance of Mike Rogers yesterday and well he took out for a few drinks and we had a few laughs.

Its about lunch time so I'm in the mood for curry! Next post will be soon probably about my experience shadowing a Lloyds underwriter this Friday!

Friday in Claims and Monday's E-Learning

Friday was the most uneventful day yet. After doing some claims data entries the department didn't have much for me to do so I dove into the online Insurance Learning System called E-learning and continued to study the London Market.

Lunch for the past four days has been quite fun... Hit up an Italian sandwich shop on Tuesday... so good that I went back Wednesday. Thursday, Tom and I went into a fancy pub-style place called Abbey and I got some curry there which was hot but delicious and Friday I took some sushi from a deli back to the office and watched BBC coverage of Hillary Clinton exiting the White House race. Good times.

As for the weekend. I hit up two nightclubs: Pacha and Ministry of Sound both were fun but overpriced. I did the London bus tour of the city which was really fun and educational. I feel much more oriented in the city now. And Sunday Tom and I saw the crown jewels in the Tower of London which is only a 20 minute walk from the flat! Beyond that been watching alot of soccer ( or football here ) since the EuroCup has begun.

Monday I was introduced to Chris Willis' Property and Casualties Broking Team and he wasn't quite ready for me so I spent the morning helping out Nash, a junior broker whom I saw the Rugby Match with on Sunday. He was doing some excel work and handling ahuge renewal for a large farm property account and was annoyed because he 'hates deskwork'. So I asked him how much of it does his job entail? He said not alot and that minus reviewing large accounts like the one infront of him he goes into the field quite frequently. I shadow him Wednesday: he's a baller so I can't wait.

Spent the afternoon here in the E-Learning room doing two modules on Financial Crime and Insurance Environments but now its time to go and watch a huge game tonight in EuroCup: Italy vs Holland! Ohh good times.

Thursday in Claims

Bus to work... definately the way to go... there is a guy whom works at BMS next to us who takes the bus as well... havent met him yet...

Anyways, spent the morning working on a 3rd narrative for Gene whom was out sick. After that I took an online learning course to get the most I could about the London Lloyds Markt and how risks are written on a universally known document called a slip and used by brokers to get syndicates from Lloyds to sign on to them an cover a percentage of risk (broker does this until 100 percent of the risk is covered.). From there a claims broker, Vincent Page, introduced me to the claims and technical side of slips which basically involves proof reading a slip so that it can get the final seal of approval from Lloyds and go into effect. While proof reading the document with Vincent, he explained to me the specific clauses and what the risk was for as well as how long it applied and how the coverage worked. We had to make sure the slip we were submitting to Lloyds which is a paper document, matched the information BMS had in its system. If the policy has but the slightest error, Lloyds could reject it outright and the insured would hold BMS at fault.

Hearing Vincent's story really opened another door about insurance as a business, its not a highly sought out profession... it just happens to pay bill quite well. Vincent too didn't go to university (what we call college) before coming to BMS. It made me wonder what having a degree ment in the industry... considering the chairman of BMS owns a chatteau in South France.

Vincent took me to the Advent offices where we had to pick up a few documents in need of their approval. Advent is one of the syndicates with a box in the Lloyds building...

I'll breakdown Lloyds for those who don't know. Its basicly a really crazy looking building... very industrial. Inside there are two primary floors: Ground Floor and Lvl 1. Theremany different syndicates have boxes where underwriters sit and handle risks and claims that brokers bring in. So say BMS wants to reinsure a risk, they send a broker with a slip and he/she gets as many syndicate underwriters as it takes to get it 100 percent reinsured (sometimes it can only take one although I saw one slip with 15 different syndicates on it.). Lloyds has 2 sessions: a morning (11 - 1pm) and afternoon (2:30 - 4pm).

Anyways this company Advent, their offices were nicer than BMS which is saying alot since the BMS offices are quite modern and new. Upon further research I learned that a syndicate underwriter in the Lloyds box can make around £500,000 a year... thats a million US.

Needless to say it was an eye opening day.

Day 3 - Wednesday in Claims

Well Wednesday was the first morning we decided to use the bus system that has a stop right next to the flat. For less than a pound a day we have a bus route that goes to work in the City District and loops over to St. Pauls Catherdral and Ministry of Sound.

I started working with the lady next to me called Gene, she had entered BMS after high school, which is called college in England. She introduced me to claims narratives and my job for the rest of the day was to read off narrative entries from specific claims and compile them into a master narrative to send off to the Lloyd's reinsurers.

In the middle of that was another Lloyds trip, this time with a claims broker by the name of Joe. It was here that I really understood that broking was about maintaining good relations with the people whom you place business to in other companies. While it was hard to follow the conversation between Joe and the claims underwriter, at the end there was a few minutes of personal discussion ranging from problems with specific policies to what the latest futball news was.

The rest of the day was dull... caught a bus home, was tired and crashed early.

First Full Day of Work in the Office! and a Trip to Lloyds!!!

Well its Tuesday Afternoon here on a typical London day, rainy...



Tom and I live in London E1 on the outskirt of London Zone 1 (CITY) $$$. So our Tube line is under repairs for awhile so we have a bus that is 1.5 quid to the office or if need be a cab for 5.



Monday was spent with HR doing generic employee introduction work. Reviewing company policy and medical history and safety code as well as what our health benefits were while we stayed. Lunch was with Matt Searby, our mentor, Hoog, and a new intern. We had amazing curry all compliments to Matt. We discusses how Lloyds market operates and what jobs we would be undertaking when working on his team particular - BMS Intermediaries. After lunch we went to the classroom and learned about Insurance Principles and FSA rules and regulation and were tested on our knowledge.



Tuesday Tom and I were split into our individual job shadows. I started in Technical Claims and after 20 minutes of training I was login in Claims adjustments into accounts from my computer desk! After a stack of those I followed a Claims Broker to the Lloyds building to deal with a Claims underwriter at a syndicate called FARADAY. I got issued a two-week temp Lloyds pass and with that I checked through the security point and was in the Lloyds syndicate floor full of brokers walking around to talk to one of the 6o+ underwriter offices open for business. It was intimidating, its an industry that revolves around relationships. There is serious business all over but its the relationships built between brokers and underwriters that really can help in the broking process for a claim or risk product.

The claims broker I shadowed had a 4 minute conversation with the Lloyds underwriter about his family after they did business. It was a rather interesting first trip and well as that was happening guess who roled up accross the room with another BMS broker, Young Hoog! Good times. I'm sneaking in my camera to take pics next trip so you all can see how amazing it is on the Lloyds floor (no public allowed).

Back at the office, I helped Andy Scales, my Claims Director wrap up some more claims data entries and Tom and I made the walk home to the flat only to eat dinner check our mail and pass out until the next morning for work...

Roll out the Red Carpet.

6:45 am London Time... Young Hoog, the Shoog, Rog, T-Money, or simply Tom and myself of course roll up dead to the UK customs border where we stand in a huge line watching people with UK passports breeze by us rentering their home country.

Well I was nevous to say the least so I let Hoog talk as much as possible... after showing a Eurail pass and chatting up the customs lady we were in!

Then came the limo service... and right as we pulled out I remember my dad discussing how crazy rotaries are in the UK since everyone drives on the opposite side of the road.

The drive was right thru the town west to our flat in the east... we saw it all on the drive, the palace, the guard changing, the huge churchs and museums, the tower and I knew we were close when we reached the financial district. It's like a campus of men in suites and boy was I glad not to have bought that brown suite in Men's Wear house... it was a sea of blue, black and grey.

We checked into the flat sleepless but excited. See the pictures, has a million dollar view of the Thames and is well above what I was expecting. Its fit for royalty.

Matt Searby called around noon as we had just about settled in. So we caught a cab for 5 quid as they say here and we were at One America Square. It was surreal. We were in the middle of London's financial superstars. Once we got thru building secruity BMS was quite stunning inside. We checked in and before we knew it we were sitting down with Matt over lunch discussing the town and the weekend. Matt was nice enough to help us get Oyster Cards for travel as well as introduce us to some of the boys at the office whom we are spending time with. He took us to one glass office and before we knew it I was shaking hands with the top of the department, Hugo Crawley himself.

So far its all gone so fast but our first day was quite productive. Miss home a bit but excited to explore this rich city so its im off for a walk with Tom!