Now grappling with two quarters of losses and deteriorating net premium revenue, IronRock Insurance Company says it will be courting brokers to gin up business for the boutique firm.
The general insurer’s second-quarter losses more than doubled to $17.5 billion, which, in turn, pushed half-year losses to $26 million.
But IronRock’s CEO Evan Thwaites is still optimistic that the company can turn around its fortunes in the second half of the year.
He is looking towards a repeat of the previous year in which IronRock swung from six-month losses of $3.6 million to a profit of nearly $54 million for the full year – a recovery Thwaites attributed to the reconciliation of reinsurance arrangements.
“I am certainly cautiously optimistic about our performance for the rest of the year. We’re taking steps to address the issues causing the losses. The signs indicate that we’ll have a pretty reasonable second half of the year,” he told the Financial Gleaner.
IronRock’s core underwriting operation suffered an annual loss of $18 million for year ending December 2021, but that was still an improvement relative to the $32 million of losses that obtained six months earlier.
This period, however, underwriting losses have worsened to nearly $50 million for January-June 2022, which Thwaites attributed to a spike in motor vehicle claims.
Now that the economy is fully reopened, he said the small team at IronRock would be knocking on the doors of brokers to gin up business.
“Although we’ve been around six years now, we’re still the new kid on the block. We have to go and market ourselves to all these brokers to make sure that we get business from them otherwise they will just renew with existing companies,” he said.
With the construction sector continuing to grow and shipping and logistics normalising, Thwaites said IronRock will also look to the engineering, contractors, and marine insurance market segments for more business.
neville.graham@gleanerjm.com
