Beazley hired two new executives charged with beefing up its U.S. commercial insurance operations, and a third focused on medical professional liability risks. Ascot appointed two individuals who will write excess casualty insurance for large corporations across a broad range of industry classes. Chisel AI made three new appointments to its leadership team.
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Specialist insurer Beazley appointed Matthew Westhoff as head of U.S. large commercial property.
Based in New York, he reports to Beazley’s global head of commercial property, Simon Jackson. In his new position, Westhoff will manage the U.S.-based team, working alongside the property team in London.
Westhoff, a 16-year industry veteran, was previously a vice president at Berkshire Hathaway Specialty Insurance, leading the Northeast region property underwriting team from 2014. Prior to that, he spent five years at AIG as a senior property underwriter and regional property leader for the New York Metropolitan region.
In addition, Ashley Irwin has joined Beazley as a commercial property underwriter, also in New York. She has more than 12 years of underwriting and broking experience, joining Beazley from Ironshore (a Liberty Mutual company), where she was a general property underwriter. Before that, she spent 11 years at Marsh & McLennan Companies as a property broker.
As well, Beazley appointed Hannah Smith as a miscellaneous medical underwriter within its U.S. healthcare team.
Based in Atlanta, Smith will underwrite a range of miscellaneous medical professional liability (MPL) risks, from blood and tissue banks through to laboratories and medical clinics, on both a primary and an excess basis. She will also underwrite Beazley’s growing virtual care book, which provides cover for technology-enabled healthcare and lifestyle management services.
Smith joins Beazley after six-and-a-half years at Hiscox USA, most recently serving as regional lead, managing a team of professional liability (PL) underwriters, and as PL senior underwriter. She will report to Jennifer Schoenthal, healthcare underwriter.
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Ascot made Patrick Kenahan its head of excess casualty in Bermuda and appointed Jason Pugi, Kimberley Pursell and Michael Watkins as senior vice presidents.
The team will write excess casualty insurance for large corporations across a broad range of industry classes.
Kenahan joins Ascot with over 25 years of experience in the insurance industry, 16 of which have been in Bermuda. He was previously at Allied World where he was senior vice president and Bermuda branch manager.
Ian Thompson, head of casualty and specialty at Ascot Re, said the group has a strong reputation in the market for their casualty insurance expertise. Their appointments, he added, mean Ascot operates “in almost all casualty and specialty classes of business in the Bermudian market.”
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Chisel AI, a technology provider for the global insurance industry, made three new appointments to its leadership team.
The company hired Colin Toal as chief technology officer; Pearl Chiu as vice president, operations; and Eldar Curovic as vice president, product management.
Toal is a deep technologist. Over his 20-year career, he has built products and teams at Amazon, IBM, Oracle, Siebel Systems and most recently integrate.ai, according to the company.
Before joining Chisel AI, Chiu was chief people officer at OneEleven, where she worked with a community of more than 50 emerging tech startups to help them grow and scale their teams. Before OneEleven, she held senior leadership roles at tech firms focused on the financial services and insurance markets.
For over 16 years, Curovic has been involved in all aspects of enterprise application development to deliver products and services for financial services and insurance markets. In the role of vice president, product management at NexJ Systems, he was instrumental in the launch of new cloud-based CRM and data analytics software.
Sources: Beazley, Ascot, Chisel AI