Veteran insurance executive Michael Morrison is retiring after more than 40 years working in the insurance industry. Yesterday he spoke with The Royal Gazette on the highlights of his career, the Bermuda market, and where he thinks the sector is heading.

CAREER HIGHLIGHTS: Mr. Morrison said he would be hard put to pick just one event but did narrow it down to three.

Two of the highlights were during his time with insurance giant American International Group (AIG), with his tenure there dating back some 40 years having actually worked for the company before it was even named AIG. The first was setting up the domestic branch structure for AIG's operations in the US. Secondly was having worked for three years for AIG in Shanghai, China and then leading Allied World Assurance Company (AWAC) in Bermuda from November, 2001 to January of this year.

BERMUDA HIGHLIGHT: Mr. Morrison said it was easy to pick out what he was most proud of during his time heading up AWAC; the company's employees.

“I am most pleased about the staff base we have built,” he said.

Although he pointed out that some key personnel had had to be brought in because the company was, from the first, writing some lines that had not really been written in this market, he said now two-thirds of AWAC's employees were Bermudian.

“We have alot of very bright, young Bermudians,” he said, adding that recruiting them had not been a difficult task once “word got out that AWAC was the best place to be.”

BERMUDA'S BIGGEST CHALLENGE AS A RE/INSURANCE MARKET: Mr. Morrison limited his comments to the challenges facing AWAC and its peers, or the companies that set up on the Island from 2001 on. He said the biggest challenge would be to “maintain viability as a group with unencumbered capital.”

In the early days, when brokers and company heads were finding it difficult to find risk management capacity, they turned to the Bermuda market. But now that “capacity is building in the US”, Mr. Morrison said the true test would be to see if the Island continued to get visited by brokers and risk managers. Mr. Morrison said the message that Bermuda still had “clean capital” must be the one that is emphasised with those who buy and place business with the industry.

BERMUDA'S BIGGEST STRENGTHS: Mr. Morrison said first was the unencumbered capital of the new companies - with the firms that set up after the void in capacity in 2001 not having exposure to the legacy issues plaguing established players throughout the industry - and secondly, was what he believed to be the quality of management at companies throughout the Bermuda market.

AWAC'S FUTURE, PUBLIC OR PRIVATE: AWAC is noted for not going public when most of its peers have listed on major stock exchanges. Yesterday Mr. Morrison said there were no plans at the present time to go public. But he added that AWAC was different from many of the other companies in the so-called ‘Class of 2001' as they were primarily an insurer, while others, at least initially had focused on reinsurance.

As for whether an IPO is in the pipeline, Mr. Morrison said some of AWAC's Bermuda peers had gone public almost as soon as they set up.

He added that his personal view was that “you have to build something before you sell it.”