Jones Joins HSCM From SCOR to Expand InsurTech Group

January 19, 2021

Adrian Jones, the former leader of SCOR’s P&C Ventures unit, has signed on with Hudson Structured Capital Management Ltd. to expand the asset manager’s InsurTech and global reinsurance groups, the company said last week.

Hudson Structured Capital Management Ltd., which does its insurance and reinsurance business as HSCM Bermuda (HSCM), announced that Jones will serve as managing director of HSCM and a partner in HSCM’s InsurTech group.

Prior to the move, Jones was also deputy CEO of P&C Partners for SCOR Global P&C.

HSCM’s InsurTech group was established by Vikas Singhal, a Partner of HSCM, and now includes eight professionals with Jones.

In a statement about the hire, Singhal called Jones a key addition to HSCM’s franchises in InsurTech, insurance and reinsurance, noting that his unique background has included senior roles in both the established and emerging parts of insurance.

Added Michael Millette, managing partner of HSCM: “Insurance is undergoing a generational change that presents great opportunities for investors and entrepreneurs who can apply technology to transform customer experience, risk analysis and expense management. The opportunities to invest in re/insurance are only growing, and we are delighted to have Adrian in a senior role at HSCM as we continue to reinvent re/insurance.”

Adrian Jones

In the same media statement, Jones commented that “HSCM has an industry-leading platform to partner with insurance innovators from seed to exit, [bringing] a breadth of capital options and depth of insurance expertise, which are critical in this capital-intensive, highly regulated industry.” He also noted that he has known and respected the HSCM team for many years, and that he looks forward to “forging the future of insurance and reinsurance” with them.

Well-known for his analyses of InsurTechs and InsurTech trends, many of which have been published by Carrier Management, Jones highlighted the theme of “building insurers of the future,” in a recent LinkedIn post explaining his move to HSCM. After having worked for nearly a decade as a consultant for Bain & Co. and for another decade at two large global reinsurers—Paris-based SCOR and RenaissanceRe Holdings in Bermuda—Jones wrote that he is made his latest move to “focus on making insurance work better for consumers and society.”

HSCM’s people “know insurance and bring flexible capital,” he wrote, identifying those as two critical ingredients to make insurance work better, and making note of special purpose acquisition company recently sponsored by HSCM.

The HSCM-supported SPAC is Kairos Acquisition Corp. Kairos is a blank check company incorporated for the purpose of effecting a merger, share exchange, asset acquisition, share purchase, reorganization or similar business combination with one or more businesses—in this case, focused specifically on regulated insurance or reinsurance companies, distributors or technology and insurance service providers that focus on specialty lines of business or that target product or customer niches.

Kairos is led by Chief Executive Officer Peter Bang and Chief Financial Officer Jerry de St. Paër, a former CFO of XL Capital.

Kairos recently announced that gross proceeds from its IPO had reached $276 million.

Jones highlighted Millette and Singhal as people who seek “unique, creative deals from a first-principles perspective,” setting them apart in an industry where “me-too” thinking and “follow-the-leader” waves of activity predominate.

Expanding on the idea of building insurers of the future, Jones devoted part of his LinkedIn post to reviewing consumer, business and government reliance on insurance and to the industry’s successful risk reduction and prevention efforts over recent decades. But he also highlighted the industry’s lack of investment in R&D and its inefficiency at time when losses from natural catastrophes, COVID and cyber attacks and the magnitude of protection gaps looms large.

“As I learned first-hand over the last decade, reinsurance is placed mostly using 1990s technology—email—despite major investments by industry participants in platform-building,” he wrote, underscoring the inefficiency.

He also noted that “InsurTech remains deeply underinvested vs. fintech,” and set forth five trends that need to take hold in order for insurance to really serve its place in society.

Listing “product innovation” first, Jones wrote: “In an industry awash in capital with slow or negative growth, innovators who unlock new markets can reap enormous benefits.”

Read more about Jones and Carbone in the CM 2018 article, “Changing the Conversation About InsurTech—With Numbers.”
In late 2018, Jones, serving as a guest editor for Carrier Management, together with Matteo Carbone, he authored an article in which he advised young professionals what it takes to make innovation happen inside of big companies. Among the 10 tips he provided in the article aptly titled, “So You Wanna Be an Innovator in a Big Company: “You have a five-year shelf life….Therefore, if you have been in the same job at the same company doing the same thing (even with a better title along the way) for more than five years, it’s time to find a bigger, broader or different role elsewhere.”

Jones and Carbone also wrote a series of LinkedIn articles about the financial results of Lemonade, Root and Metromile in their pre-IPOs days, starting in 2017, which Carrier Management republished with their permission. Explaining the impetus for the wildly popular articles back in 2018, Jones said, a lot of articles published about InsurTechs were devoid of numbers before they undertook the analysis—a situation that didn’t make sense in for the insurance industry, which is basically a numbers business.

In his LinkedIn post about his move to HSCM, Jones highlighted use cases for data and analytics as he looks into the industry’s future—and his own—and described needed changes in InsurTech investment, distribution, expense management and talent development.

Jones holds a Bachelor of Science in Economics from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and an MBA from Columbia University.

He has sat on several boards of directors, including the InsurTechs States Title Holding, Inc. and B3i Services AG.

Hudson Structured Capital Management Ltd., launched in 2016, is an asset manager focused on alternative investments seeking mezzanine level returns, which had more than $3 billion in assets under management and committed capital as of Jan. 1, 2021.

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