Lexington Insurance President and CEO Jeremy Johnson radiates a relaxed enthusiasm that reflects the insurer's success in responding to market needs, as well as its consistent reputation among producers. National Underwriter sat down with Johnson to discuss Lexington's progress in the year since he took the helm.

What are some of the inroads Lexington has made in the past year under your watch that you're particularly proud of, and what are some of the market areas that exhibit real growth potential as we reach the midpoint of this year?

If you were to walk into any Lexington office, you would be struck by the level of energy and just genuine enthusiasm for Lexington, for AIG, and, frankly, for the market that we're in. We're very proud to be the U.S. leading excess and surplus lines market. We don't take that lightly; we don't get complacent about that. I would tell you that our staff prides itself on working with our customers and brokers on leveraging that freedom of rate and form to develop new products and new solutions.

I'm most proud of the innovation culture that we're driving through Lexington. We've put some real discipline, some real structure behind ideation. We've developed an internal crowdsourcing approach, if you like, to innovation to drive ideation from the field and our pipeline of products has never been more robust. We have dozens and dozens of products in the pipeline, so I'm very proud of that.

The product that we announced last week, CyberEdge PC, demonstrates our ability to look across all of our commercial product lines and produce a unique solution for a market that is crying out for a unique solution; to address those potential coverage gaps in all commercial and property & casualty covers.

To have a product that's excess and [difference in conditions] so to the extent that there is coverage, you've now got more coverage. To the extent that there isn't coverage, you've got a DIC feature. That doesn't exist in the market. It hasn't been addressed in the market and we've leveraged all of those capabilities, all of those product capabilities across AIG to produce this product. We're so proud of it and we did it really quickly as well to respond to our customers. You wouldn't believe the interest we're getting.

I think it's the culmination of the culture that we have of the company now, which really is, leverage One AIG; work together across our product towers to leverage that strength of that franchise. We think it's a true game-changer.

In terms of areas of growth, I would just watch the economy, basically, so energy, construction, transportation are areas where we see growth in the economy and we see growth in the market. And there are areas that traditionally have been solid areas for the E&S business.

What are you seeing as far as standard carrier appetite for E&S-type risks these days? Any lines in which you see some other competition coming in and trying to get a share of where they weren't a year ago?

There's no meaningful trend of business moving from E&S to admitted. There are always some geographic pockets where you see that happening and then reversing, but there's no major trend. In fact, if anything, I would tell you it would be the other way around.

If I think about some of our liability classes, liquor liability, restaurants, nightclubs, there's a lot of flow into the E&S business; E&S market from admitted. We continue to see tremendous growth in our cat-driven, personal-lines book as the admitted market continues to pull back from cat-exposed business in the commercial or personal lines. But for us, we've seen that significant growth in personal lines, 20-plus points of growth. Our energy and our construction businesses are up double digits.

In general, we really do try to sell ourselves on the basis of the freedom of rate and form, on the basis of our ability to tailor or customize solutions for our customers. And, hopefully, that's what we do really well. So I preach innovation, specialization and customer centricity, and those three are pretty fundamental.

Lexington's been long known for pioneering new markets. Are there any new areas that you see in which people are risking for cover that might lead to the creation of new products?

Firstly, if you think about the societal impact of technology, big data, science, you've got a real convergence that facilitates new business models in a way that didn't really exist before. So you've got, if you like, an acceleration in the rate of new business models. And the admitted market, it doesn't have the capability to respond as quickly to new business models as the surplus lines market.

If you think about biotech, robotics, those are industries that arguably are going to power the future of the economy. And those are industries that have developing risks that lend themselves to an E&S approach. So I think that those are industries that cry out for E&S-driven solutions. And then I would also say, just think about some of the legislation, think about the Affordable Care Act. We haven't had a piece of legislation like that in our lives.

The amount of societal change that that's going to drive, the number of new business models, the amount of M&A activity, the confusion as to what that act does, whether you're talking about for consumers, for businesses, for insurance companies, what the future is, what the new risks are, they're very much emerging, very much developing—and we're committed to doing everything we can to stay ahead of understanding what those risks are so that we can develop solutions for those risks. But they are evolving and emerging in real time. It's pretty interesting.

And then the other piece of legislation that is kind of interesting is the California Assembly Bill 32, which is promulgating a market for carbon cap and trade. And that's producing evolving business models around trading of carbon credits and, therefore, exhibiting new risks for which we're working on insurance solutions. We have produced some and we continue to work on insurance solutions for facilitating that emerging market.

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The NU Interview: Lexington President & CEO Jeremy Johnson

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