30 years in specialty lines underwriting.
Originally an insurance broker, for 11 years. Chris became an underwriter in 2004, holding underwriting authority in classes ranging across property, liability and specialty lines, before being promoted into regional leadership at RSA Group in 2008. He held this role for 5 years before joining Lloyd’s of London in a market overseeing position.
Since leaving Lloyd’s in 2017, Chris has helped different market firms as a consultant and most recently was Head of Underwriting at the Medical Protection Society for two years, before devoting his energies to VUW from the start of 2022.
Interview with CHRIS LEGLU, February 2024
Interviews VUW.mov 04:31 – 06-17
I’ve had a broad ranging career. 30 years in the London and Lloyds market. Started as a broker for 11 years then an underwriter. Leadership roles within RSA and then worked at Lloyds for a time in the Performance Management Directorate. All of that blend of experience helps me to be able to shape and understand the distribution chain. And when I say shape, it means to extract the value that we believe lies there, by reducing expense, almost increasing the transparency across the distribution chain and the number of times a risk has to be rekeyed and re entered through the process.
What do you see as the future of virtual underwriting?
Virtual underwriting is absolutely here to stay. We’ve seen the growth of certain market entrants in the last two or three years and what we can see is that there is a tipping point in the near future, we would suggest in the next 24 months, where we will see behaviours changing and cultures changing across the market with the adoption of ever more amounts of algorithmic underwriting through the follow but also in the lean space as well, increasingly.
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A friendship spanning 30 years between co-founders Caspar Murphy and Christopher Leglu led them to explore an emerging business model for insurance in 2021. Insurance executives at the top of their game in London saw this as a long-awaited opportunity to change the insurance market for the better. Together, we created VUW: a market leading, virtual underwriting platform.
