If you listen to enough conference panels, you’d think the future of commercial insurance belongs entirely to portals, APIs and AI. Ask Graeme Finnell (pictured), and you get a very different answer.
For the vice president, casualty/broker relations at ABEX, insurance is – and always has been – a people business. Technology may have changed the tools. It hasn’t changed what moves tougher risk placements over the line.
“When I started in 1995, I was taught very early on that insurance is all about relationships,” he says. “My client is the broker. If I don’t have a relationship with the broker – if I don’t understand their business, their challenges, their needs – how am I going to help them?”
That philosophy underpins how Finnell works today. At ABEX, he helped launch a Priority Broker Initiative built around a simple reality that’s barely changed in three decades: roughly 80% of the business tends to come from 20% of the brokers.
“You can’t be everything to everybody,” he says. ABEX deals with hundreds of brokers, but he refuses to live in a reactive mode. Instead, he wants to be more proactive and surgical – to pick broker partners whose values align with ABEX, then get out to see them, understand their business and their people, and identify the specific needs they have. With growth as a long‑term priority, he wants to put plans in place to help those brokers grow and retain their client base, while also putting ABEX in a position where it can win.
The logic is straightforward. When a tough risk comes along, relationships are the only real currency.
“If you’re an underwriter and I’ve got a relationship with you, I’m going to call and say: I’ve got a tough one here, can you help me?” he explains. “You’re far more likely to say: OK, let’s see what we can do – if I’ve been supporting you all along.”
That kind of trading relationship is hard to build over email and portal submissions. It typically starts with something much more old‑fashioned: coffees, broker visits, short “elevator pitch” conversations that put a face to the name.
And that, in Finnell’s view, is exactly what a generation raised on screens is at risk of losing.
He hears it from veterans across the industry: some younger brokers and underwriters avoid picking up the phone. They are comfortable at the keyboard and less comfortable in a boardroom – happy to push submissions through a portal, but more reluctant to sit across from a broker or client and talk through a risk.
“It’s not that they have no sales skills,” he says. “It’s that they’ve never been put in a position where they had to develop them.” If you’ve spent your early career being told to sit at a desk and just punch out quotes, being suddenly asked to go visit brokers or present in person can feel like a threatening change.
Finnell pushes back hard against that drift. In his world, brokers need to be seeing and speaking with their clients more than once a year. Things change – operations, exposures, priorities. If a broker only shows up at renewal, he argues, they’re not really managing risk; they’re just transacting it.
On the carrier side, he also warns brokers to think twice before shopping risks year after year just to shave a few premium dollars, at the cost of jeopardizing a long‑term relationship with a market. He’s seen what happens when a long‑standing client with a solid track record has a borderline claim.
“If you’ve been with an insurer for multiple years, built up a relationship and loyalty with that market, and you have that claim that sits on the fence – covered, not covered – that history can help tip the decision,” he says. “But when you jump year after year into different markets for cheaper premiums, that loyalty is gone. Sometimes loyalty can go a long way.”
None of this is a plea to abandon technology. Finnell readily acknowledges the efficiency benefits of portals and data. His argument is about hierarchy, not nostalgia: technology should support relationships, not replace them.
For him personally, that’s the only reason to stay in the game.
“Insurance is such a people‑centric business and what makes it unique is the humanity of it, and the connection that occurs to help drive business,” he says. “From a pure marketing and business development view, human connections matter more than ever.”
“The business has been very good to me,” he adds. “But it’s the relationships that keep me in it and keep me going.” In a market increasingly tempted to treat insurance as a commodity, that might be the most contrarian – and valuable – view of all.
