Despite the enormously complex global macroeconomic environment there are still “pockets of opportunities’ in certain lines of business—and they will be the focus of Dale Underwriting, a Lloyd’s underwriting business, while sticking to its core expertise.

“We are quite narrow in our focus on the areas of business that we want to be in where we have that sort of expertise. We would rather do a few things well than do lots of different things,” Duncan Dale, chief executive officer of the business, told Monte Carlo Today.

“We are not motivated to be highly diversified. We can grow significantly without needing to do other things.

“We have no huge ambitions of how big we want to be. We are not motivated by growth per se. We are a nice-sized business with a nice-sized workforce and a lower-than-average expense ratio.”

Dominic Peters, active underwriter in Dale Underwriting, said he sees opportunities and better margins in areas such as in property insurance. But he stresses that a lot of business does not meet pricing adequacy.

“Market conditions have improved, there are pockets of opportunity where we think the margins are strong, but in certain areas such as property reinsurance, pricing adequacy still needs to improve,” he said.

“We are most effective and will be best positioned to take advantage of those opportunities if we focus on a few areas and do them as well as possible. That’s the strategy of the business.”

In addition to forming its own managing agency, for which it secured approval last year, the company is looking to expand into marine treaty in 2023.

“A couple of very experienced marine treaty practitioners have joined us to help develop our reinsurance portfolio,” Peters said.

“We hoped that the property reinsurance area would have been likewise, but conditions haven’t supported that,” he concluded.