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Another Perspective: Shaking Hands and Teaching Trust at Reinsurance Broker Holborn

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Recently Holborn Chairman and CEO, Frank Harrison, sat down with Carrier Management to discuss the role trust plays in our industry. In it, Frank discusses why, despite the importance of analytics, capital, and sophisticated reinsurance solutions, enduring relationships are ultimately built on trust, accountability, and putting clients’ interests first.  These are principles that have shaped Holborn’s culture and client relationships for over 100 years.  Quite simply: we are in the trust business.

See Link https://www.carriermanagement.com/features/2026/08/31/291519.htm

Risk that is understood, managed, and clearly communicated in a way that is consumable to everyone in your organization encourages a strong risk culture. Governance, training strategies, metrics & controls, and capital allocation are techniques to ensure day-to-today adherence to your ERM program and corporate strategy. Leveraging Holborn’s comprehensive tool suite, we help tailor an ERM framework that supports managing your risks. 

One of the key objectives of an insurer’s operating strategy is to maintain an acceptable target financial strength rating. Holborn has extensive experience in helping clients balance the sometimes-conflicting objectives of growth, profitability, portfolio optimization, capital adequacy, and multiple return metrics. Our robust financial analytics enable our clients to assess multiple key performance measures and analyze how various strategic decisions could be expected to impact the company’s financials and underlying qualitative and quantitative rating factors. 

By their very nature, catastrophic property losses can wreak havoc on businesses and personal property, as well as the balance sheet. Media coverage of the devastation from a hurricane or tornado often makes these events seem “unexpected.” Even though recorded weather history is relatively limited (on a geologic scale), it’s clear that outliers, storms of extraordinary magnitude, have occurred before and will again. 

It shouldn’t be a surprise that some of the largest insured events we see are not property, but liability-driven. Losses stemming from workers’ compensation, mass tort, clash, runaway defense costs, product liability, and punitive damage judgments can quickly add up to amounts greater than most weather or fire damages. Holborn monitors the litigious US landscape, tracking the latest judicial rulings and regional and local hotspots.

Contract wordings are continuously evolving to stay on top of emerging risks such as cyber, intellectual property, and labor laws. Working together, we ensure that the proper coverage and limits are maintained.  

Holborn’s Reinsurance Security Committee (a select group of our senior managers across multiple disciplines) meets regularly to review the financial condition of each reinsurer. Each entity is closely monitored for financial and operational performance through meetings with management, rating agency activity and news releases. Our monthly newsletters keep clients informed of any noteworthy changes. 

Holborn can provide clients with access to RiskRater®, a proprietary reinsurance pricing engine designed (but not limited) to manage portfolios of mutual insurers. RiskRater® employs a systematic approach to pricing that is consistent across client companies. Smaller companies with sparse rating histories are rated with the support of defined cohorts and compared with industry information to enable a more informed view of risk. Developed to be nimble and flexible without proprietary software installations, RiskRater® requires only a connection to a centralized database, where all data (present and historical) is stored and archived, allowing access to detailed information for year over year pricing. 

Our Vision

Our way includes giving the client peace of mind of knowing they can “shake the same hand” again and again over time, and that our team is uniquely positioned to represent their interests in the marketplace, given our in-depth knowledge of their operations, business plans and issues, nuances, history, and the way they like to receive service from us and from their reinsurers. This is how we define our “client intimacy strategy.”

Our Mission

The mission of Holborn Corporation is to provide efficient tailored risk assessment and reinsurance solutions to US insurance organizations, using markets of appropriate quality. Services include risk analytics, contract and claims management, and the maintenance of trading relationships with high-quality reinsurance markets throughout the world.