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As Co-CEO, EMEA at Aon, I spend my time at the intersection of risk, capital and…
Articles by Tracy Lee
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Tracy Lee Kus shared thisNotification of circumstances: my legs. Today I completed 100 laps of Lord's with Chris Rash alongside me for every one of them. (Somewhere between 45-50 km before my watch and phone ran out of battery.) Tomorrow both legs are going into run-off. I'm treating them as a constructive total loss and reserving my position on who to subrogate against. The serious bit. The day raised £310,000 for Alzheimer's. Thank you to everyone who sponsored me. Your generosity was far more impressive than my stride. And I scored a century at Lords! Chris, I owe you a Red Bull. You'll have to bring it to me. https://lnkd.in/eHh3BPq2 Insurance United Against Dementia
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Tracy Lee Kus shared thisTomorrow, 100 laps of Lord's Tomorrow I will walk 100 laps of the outfield at Lord's. That's around 50km in a single day, alongside a 99 others, for Alzheimer's Society. It finishes with the walk up the Pavilion steps into the Long Room. Most people know the charity's name. Fewer know what it actually does. It is worth setting out, because the work is broader and more practical than the name suggests. It supports people now. Alzheimer's Society reports that 83,414 people received support from its services. Behind that number sit partners, carers and adult children trying to manage a disease that changes week to week. It answers the phone. More than 47,000 people used its Dementia Support Line. For many families, that call is the first time anyone has explained what is happening and what comes next. It works in communities. Its 600 Dementia Advisers supported more than 10,000 people across the UK. This is the unglamorous part: care decisions, paperwork, and the practical problems a diagnosis doesn't solve. It funds the science. The Society invests almost £5 million a year in research, funding 13 projects and more than 400 researchers working on ways to treat, slow or prevent Alzheimer's disease. Care for people living with dementia today, and research that may mean fewer people face it tomorrow. Both need money. I sit on the board of Insurance United Against Dementia, the Society's campaign in our industry. The walk is being organised by our sister organisation Sport United Against Dementia. Our market understands long-tail risk better than most. Dementia is as long a tail as any of us will see. I am doing it for my mum who suffers with the disease today and for my dad who carries most of the burden for caring for her. If you can give anything at all, I would be grateful. https://lnkd.in/ezDwk2uy
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Tracy Lee Kus shared thisRecently, our EMEA Living Our Values Award winners gathered in Monte Carlo to recognise colleagues who have made a difference to clients, colleagues and communities across our region. What really stands out are the brilliant moments behind the awards: The complex client challenge solved. The colleague who stepped in to help without being asked. The tough decision made. The extra effort, day in and day out. These moments don’t make the headlines, but they do shape what it feels like to work here and to work with our clients. That’s how culture is built, through thousands of everyday decisions and behaviours. Huge congratulations to all of you!
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Tracy Lee Kus shared thisThis feels like one of those visits that reminds you what makes our business special. Over the last two days in Dublin, I had the opportunity to spend time with colleagues from across the business, hearing first-hand about the work they do for clients, the challenges they’re tackling and the opportunities they see ahead. What really stood out was the collaboration. Not collaboration as a slogan, I mean genuine collaboration that happens when talented people with different perspectives come together around a shared goal. Whether I was speaking with brokers, actuaries, client leaders, operations teams, data experts or finance, the same theme came through again and again: a willingness to work across boundaries to solve increasingly complex problems for our clients. I was also privileged to join a town hall Q&A with Greg Case led by Peter Brady and Mairead O'Mahony. The brilliant contributions and openness of the discussion reflected a team that is not only ambitious about the future but deeply invested in helping shape it. Another big highlight was seeing the AI initiatives colleagues have developed themselves, even running an Aon Ireland AI World Cup competition to fix real business challenges. Too often we talk about AI as something that will happen to our industry. What Mindy Simon and I saw in Dublin was people making it happen. Practical solutions, built by teams who understand the work, identifying opportunities to improve how we serve clients, work with markets and support each another. Innovation feels very different when it comes from the ground up. I left with an even greater appreciation for the brilliant leadership of our Dublin business. Strong businesses are built over time by making the right decisions, guided by clear values and an unwavering focus on people. That was evident everywhere I went. Thank you to everyone who took the time to meet with me, to share your perspectives and challenge my thinking. I learned a great deal and am excited about what we will achieve together. And a special thank you to Rachael Ingle and the Ireland leadership team. You should be incredibly proud of what you have built. #Leadership #Collaboration #AI
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Tracy Lee Kus shared thisI am in the Middle East spending time with collegues in Riyadh and Dubai. I am not going to write about this region's growth without first saying what this year has been. At least twenty-one people have been killed in the Strait of Hormuz crisis since late February. Thirty-five injured. Hundreds of vessels have sat stranded in the Gulf with crews aboard. Civilian infrastructure across the region has been targeted. What has stayed with me is a professional question with a human centre. Our market exists to make risk bearable enough that people can keep operating. This year, in this region, it met the edge of what it can do. Before February, roughly 120 to 140 vessels transited the strait each day. At points this year it fell to single figures. War risk premiums moved from a fraction of a per cent of hull value into the multiples. Cover was available. It was priced differently, because the risk was different. The cancellation notices that made headlines are worth understanding properly. Notice of renegotiation is written into war contracts by design. It is the mechanism that allows war premiums to sit at a fraction of a per cent in peacetime. The LMA was right to correct the widespread claim that cover had become unavailable. It hadn't. Safety concerns, not insurance availability, kept ships alongside. That distinction got lost in most of the coverage and it matters. But something did change, and I think it is a significant development in specialty insurance this year. The US International Development Finance Corporation moved to establish a reinsurance facility of up to $40bn covering hull, cargo and liability through the strait. When a government becomes the reinsurer of a trade route, something structural has happened. It is the same pattern we are watching in climate and in cyber. When losses become correlated, concentrated and hard to model, private capacity does not disappear, it becomes disciplined, and the state moves towards the gap. That is not a failure of the system. It is the system reaching its limits. But limits are a design question, not a fact of nature, and I would rather we treated them that way. The part I would call resilience is not a premium figure. It is that in every room I have sat in across the UAE and the Kingdom, and talking to leaders across Qatar, Bahrain and Oman, people are still planning around growth. Not hoping for it. Planning around it, this year, with all of this going on out colleagues in the region came to work through all of it. I won't dress that up as anything other than what it was. Extraordinary resilence and that deserves a market that does the hard work of staying insurable throughout the uncertainty.
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Tracy Lee Kus shared thisA story that has stayed with me over the years was about Ron Fazio who was one of the 176 Aon colleagues we lost on 9/11. Ron urged his team to get out of the South Tower but he stayed at the door, helping others get out more quickly and he did not make it home that day. Ron loved Reece’s Peanut Butter Cup’s. He was only 57. His family later set up a charity in his name. They called it Hold The Door For Others. I kept thinking about that name at Lloyd's today. The worst of humanity cannot eclipse the best. Twenty-five years on, I can't think of a better definition of the best than holding the door for people you will never see again. Thank you to Lloyd's for bringing us together, and to Ambassador Stephens for standing with us.Tracy Lee Kus shared thisSeptember 11 was a quarter of a century ago – and it was yesterday. It was three and a half thousand miles away – and it was on our front doorstep. It happened to other people – and it affected us all. Twenty-five years on, the still inconceivable tragedy of 9/11 retains the power to collapse our sense of time and distance. Today we gathered at the Lloyd’s building to remember our friends, families, and colleagues who were tragically affected by the event. We were grateful to co-host the memorial service with Aon and Marsh and to welcome Ambassador Warren Stephens, US Ambassador to the United Kingdom. Thank you for joining us in honouring those whose lives were lost and standing in solidarity with those whose lives were changed forever. Today was an opportunity to remind those who come after us that the worst of humanity does not have the power to eclipse the best of humanity. Thank you for carrying that spirit forward.
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Tracy Lee Kus shared thisGraduate hiring fell 8% last year. Apprentice hiring rose 8%. Both numbers come from the same survey, of the same 155 employers. Almost everything written about AI and early careers treats the first number as the story. The door is closing, graduates are the canaries, and so on. The second number is more interesting, and hardly anyone mentions it. Employers are not withdrawing from early careers. They are changing the story. Among employers running both routes, the ratio went from 2.3 graduates per apprentice to 1.8, and is forecast to fall again. That should make the London Market proud. We never gave up earn-while-you-learn. While much of financial services professionalised into graduate-only pipelines, this market kept hiring people at 18 and sitting them next to someone who knew what they were doing. For years that was treated as slightly old-fashioned. A quirk of the box. It turns out to be the one pipeline structure AI does not undermine. Not for sentimental reasons. AI is genuinely good at the tasks juniors used to learn, whether its summarising, first-pass analysis, or boring administration. If your development model assumes someone does two years of that work in order to earn judgment, AI has removed the ladder and left the wall. Apprenticeship never depended on that. It builds judgment by proximity. You learn by sitting beside someone making decisions, watching which risks they walk away from, and asking why. That is tacit knowledge, and it transfers through presence rather than through volume of task. It is the one thing that has not got cheaper. I recently met a charismatic apprentice. 3 A*’s at A level, several good university offers but she chose the apprenticeship route to get closer to experts and in her words: ‘learn more quickly my industry of choice.’ Two things follow. For employers here, early careers has quietly become a model risk question rather than an HR one. In ten years somebody has to be able to look at what a model says about a complex risk and know, without being able to fully explain why, that it is wrong. That person is being hired, or not hired, this year. For anyone at 18 choosing between routes: in this market, the apprenticeship is not the fallback. It may even be the better option. The problem is that proximity does not scale. It cannot be bought in, and it does not survive a market that stops making time for it. That is a choice we make firm by firm, box by box, every year. Worth saying clearly: this is not a graduate jobs obituary. The same survey found 92% of graduate hiring carrying on as normal. The point is not that one route wins. It is that we should understand why the older one is holding up, before we assume it was ever the lesser option.
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Tracy Lee Kus shared thisIn the FT’s ‘The AI Shift’ with Sarah O'Connor and John Burn-Murdoch they reported this week that graduate vacancies at Oxford have fallen to their lowest level since the financial crisis and that students are responding the only way the system lets them. One described making 150 applications for an internship. On the other side of the wall, AI screens those applications faster than anyone can read them. So young people now use AI to apply for jobs, employers use AI to reject them, and everyone involved calls it efficiency. Nobody designed this. Nobody would. Insurance should read that story more carefully than most industries, because our version of it is sharper. A large share of our experienced professionals will retire over the next decade and the administrative work AI now absorbs is the same work that has always been the training ground for the next generation. Automate the first rung and delay the hiring, and you haven’t found efficiency. You’ve hollowed out your own pipeline. It is a strategic risk almost nobody is pricing. But we also hold an advantage here, one we treat as a quaint tradition rather than the asset it has just become. We still meet people. The London Market is one of the last places in global finance where careers are built face to face where a graduate can stand in the Underwriting Room and watch a risk get priced, and a broker can watch how a difficult placement gets negotiated. Earlier this year I watched students compete in teams on insurance projects. Their excitement at having spent time understanding offshore wind, cyber crime or insuring a natural catastrophe. ‘Can you really insure a hurricane?’ Was brilliant, funny and contagious. AI can assess skills but it struggles to identify promise. A five-minute conversation still reveals more than a perfectly polished, AI-assisted CV and a summer job still demonstrates resilience in ways no screening model measures. The firms that win the AI era will not be the ones that automate recruitment fastest. They will be the ones still best at spotting talent before the data proves it exists and willing to spend time developing it. So here is my worry: that our market quietly adopts the same broken funnel as everyone else because it is cheap, and wakes up in five years wondering where the brokers and underwriters went. AI should take the drudgery out of early careers, the re-keying, the chasing but not the humans out of hiring. A generation is making 150 applications using A.I. to be ignored by software. We are the industry that can still say: come and meet us - that is our strength. And once they are through the door, the real investment begins: training graduates to use AI properly so the tools make them better informed, better equipped and, in time, better brokers and underwriters than any generation before them. Not people replaced by technology. People amplified by it. Human-led, AI-supported but in that order. That is an industry worth joining.
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Tracy Lee Kus shared thisSunday I boarded a flight I have taken more times than I can count. Johannesburg. Eleven hours, and I could walk the route to the baggage hall with my eyes closed. But this is the first time I have made this trip with South Africa in my job title. As of June, the market I grew up in is part of the region I am responsible for. I have been trying to work out how I feel about that, and the honest answer is: slightly fraudulent. Because here is the thing about a career like mine. It gets told backwards, as if it were a plan. Wits University, AIG South Africa, my own MGA, Singapore, Aon GBC London, EMEA, it sounds like a route somebody mapped. It wasn’t. It was a series of doors other people opened, and me being just brave enough or perhaps just naive enough to walk through them. The people who opened the first ones are in Johannesburg. Some of them will never know what they set in motion. One of them was Tony Stalker who taught me cricket is imperative to business …. but also explained every part of the underwriting process and built my belief that the only thing that really matters is getting a clients claim paid. South Africa taught me the trade the hard way, which is the way that lasts. It taught me that a policy is a promise, and that in a market where trust is scarce, the broker is the person who must keep it. Everything I have done since, in Singapore, in the Underwriting Room at Lloyd’s, in this new role, has been that lesson wearing different clothes. And I should say something about the team I am spending time with this week, because they are the part of this I can claim least credit for. Our South African colleagues are among the finest I have worked with anywhere and I have worked in a few places. They operate in one of the toughest trading environments in our industry and deliver work that would stand proud in any market in the world. I could talk about many people but Philip Cronje building AI agents to help his colleagues provide technical knowledge to clients was just one example. My role now is how to scale that. Too many collègues to call out but it’s been a brilliant week. This team were extraordinary long before South Africa appeared in my job title, and nothing about my arrival changes that. Which is rather the point of the next paragraph. So I am not flying home to tell anyone anything. I am flying home to listen to our teams, to clients, to a market that deserves more than warm words and a distant admiration. The young woman who left with one suitcase (and a new husband)would not believe this trip. I intend to make it worth her while.
Tracy Lee Kus replied to a comment
4d
Chris Rash I will help you on the first 25 and then you can help me on the next 25…..
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Tracy Lee Kus liked thisTracy Lee Kus liked thisInsurance Insider US is excited to announce that Jon Hancock, Executive Vice President and Chief Executive Officer, General Insurance at AIG, will be taking the stage as our Lifetime Achievement Award winner at the #InsiderHonors. Congratulations Jon! Jon was recognized for his outstanding leadership and the lasting impact he's had across the industry throughout his career at AIG, Lloyd's and RSA. It's a fitting recognition of a career spent helping shape the market, and the centerpiece moment of this year's ceremony. #InsiderHonors #NewYork #Awards #InsuranceInsiderUS
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Tracy Lee Kus liked thisTracy Lee Kus liked thisYesterday marked the end of a fantastic month raising awareness of dementia throughout the world of sport. Finishing on a high, Alzheimer’s Society Ambassador and Chair of Sport United Against Dementia, Richard Thompson, organised a brilliant and unique fundraiser bringing together leaders from the world of sport and broadcasting to walk 100 laps of the outfield of Lord’s cricket ground to raise awareness and vital funds. Taking part in the walk were not just famous faces but people impacted by dementia from every single walk of life, showing that dementia and its devastation do not discriminate. The event demonstrated sport at its very best: uniting people from different communities, all to make a difference to the people who need it most. I would like to thank Richard for his tireless efforts in organising this incredible event and to every single person who took part in support of people affected by dementia. The funds raised will provide a lifeline for thousands of people right across the country. Image credit: Alzheimer's Society / Thousand Word Media
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Tracy Lee Kus liked thisTracy Lee Kus liked thisCongratulations to Jane Drummond on her appointment as Aon's next Global Chief Commercial Officer! Jane has made a significant contribution to our business across APAC, strengthening client relationships, advancing commercial excellence and helping our teams succeed. Her leadership, client focus and deep commercial expertise have had a lasting impact across the region. I know she will bring those same strengths to this global role and help shape the next chapter of Aon's commercial strategy and growth. Wishing you every success, Jane. You can read the full announcement here: https://lnkd.in/gDPNduA4
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Tracy Lee Kus liked thisTracy Lee Kus liked this"Boat-casting" is a thing! Most exotic location for delivering serious messages - thank you to Ben Rose and The Reinsurance Podcast for the conversation.
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