Insurance industry training
At MDA Training, we have extensive experience of creating experiential learning solutions for the insurance industry, helping your people develop the commercial acumen, financial understanding, critical thinking and risk management skills needed to drive business performance. Our tailored commercial acumen programmes bring today’s commercial challenges to life, empowering teams to make more informed decisions, balance risk and reward, and understand how their actions impact profitability, customers and long-term business success.
We work across the insurance industry, including general and specialty insurers, reinsurers, brokers, MGAs, coverholders and TPAs, as well as Lloyd’s syndicates and organisations operating across the London market.
Our commercial acumen programmes for the insurance industry include…
Building commercial resilience in a soft insurance market
Building commercial resilience in a soft insurance market
Our experiential workshop is designed to help insurance professionals navigate the challenges and opportunities of a soft market cycle, strengthening commercial acumen, critical thinking and underwriting judgement. Through realistic business scenarios participants explore the pressures facing Distribution, Underwriting and Financial Lines, developing the confidence to balance risk and reward, strengthen stakeholder relationships and move from service provider to trusted advisor. The learning experience equips teams to identify commercial opportunities, make informed decisions and take proactive action to protect profitability and drive sustainable business performance.
Understanding financial performance
Understanding financial performance
Being commercially aware is a pre-requisite for everyone, regardless of role or function. Being able to understand not only the numbers, but also the financial consequences of personal decisions, is essential. This workshop will enable participants to link behaviours to KPIs, actions to commercial outcomes, and change their behaviours based on their new insights and understanding.
Practical portfolio management
Practical portfolio management
Bigger issues and different concerns arise when underwriters move from looking at individual risks to coordinating the performance of a portfolio of business. In managing portfolios, the challenge is to look at the performance of the book as a whole, beyond individual losses arising from a single policy. The skill is to identify patterns and trends that drive the portfolio’s performance, and take appropriate tactical or strategic actions that lead to a clearly defined plan that shapes the portfolio as a whole.
Our practical portfolio management workshops involve an end-to-end process that analyses and transforms the performance of a portfolio, from initial market investigation, determining risk appetite and strategic ambition, through to the actions taken by underwriters to determine what business to write, what business to renew, and on what terms.
Commercial skills pathway
Commercial skills pathway
The ambition for the structured pathway is to build confidence and capabilities around commercial, financial and wider business skills, as well as articulating the roles, functions, products and solutions that insurance companies offer their customers.
The impact of claims on insurance performance
The impact of claims on insurance performance
Effectively managing the claims process can make a big difference to an insurance business. This workshop explores the fundamental drivers of GI performance that support Claims teams in their work in an insurance business.
Exploring reinsurance
Exploring reinsurance
This workshop explores the important role that reinsurance plays in the insurance marketplace. It provides a practical context as to why insurers use reinsurance, the key players, the buyers and sellers, types of reinsurance and the main reinsurance policies.
Risk and insurance business simulations
Our immersive insurance business simulations bring the complexities of the insurance industry to life, providing an engaging, practical way for early careers talent, specialist teams, or experienced managers, to develop commercial acumen, financial understanding and risk management skills.
In our insurance business simulations, participants experience the operational and commercial challenges, balancing risk and reward, responding to changing market conditions and making decisions that impact profitability, customer relationships and long-term business performance. With no pre-set outcomes or computers to beat, participants experience first-hand how an insurance business operates, creates value and makes money.
We can tailor our insurance simulations to align with your organisational values and culture, strategic goals and imperatives, commercial context, and performance KPIs. Our portfolio includes a variety of insurance simulations for specialty insurance, general insurance, brokers and reinsurance.
Training for new and experienced hires
For those new to the insurance industry, our Commercial Skills Pathway offers an insightful introduction to the insurance industry and an essential mix of commercial concepts and principles. Our Pathway follows a structured series of modules designed to build confidence around insurance products and language, the roles and functions in insurance, and the solutions that an insurance company provide. Our Commercial Skills Pathway can be tailored to your business needs in terms of content, delivery format and duration.
- Understanding, identifying, measuring, and managing insurable risk
- Recording and reporting risk in an insurance business
- Quantifying the impact of insurable risk as an insurer
- Analysing risk and performance in an insurance business
- Modelling performance and value added as an insurer
- Exploring insurance from a Broker’s perspective
- The impact of a proactive claims process on insurance business results
- Quantifying and pricing the risk inherent in an insurance contract
- Reinsuring the impact of risk on an insurance business
Military veterans bring transferable skills, work ethic, and values that can hugely benefit the talent pool in any insurance business and the wider insurance market. Our approach focuses on the commercial, technical and interpersonal skills that your ex-Military personnel will need at the start of their new careers. The underlying theme of this programme is one of context – what your insurance business does, how it does it, and what is expected of a new joiner within the dynamic marketplace in which your business operates.
The ambition of the programme is to align the skills and values of your ex-Military hires into the language and framework of your insurance business, providing the grounding, framework and insights for them to begin to build their own journey into a second career. The focus is on the technical and office-based skills necessary to have an immediate impact in their new world of insurance.
Non-Executive Directors (NEDs) play a key role in the corporate world. However, the insurance industry is unique and those new to the industry, or unfamiliar with specific markets, products, or language may require further insight. Our focused workshops will help your NEDs make a stronger contribution to your business by growing their confidence and understanding around the commercial concepts and principles in your business and the wider industry. Our structured approach comprises two possible routes, Commercial Insights and Commercial Acumen, are both carefully designed to build on the experience of your NEDs.
Leadership development in insurance
In a fast moving and ever-changing insurance market, people need to lead their business in a commercially-focused way, taking the initiative and making the most of opportunities while maintaining proper control over risk. Our ‘Leading an Insurance Business Simulation’ enables leaders to practice their leadership skills and insurance business knowledge in an applied context – running a simulated insurance company.
The simulation gives leaders a real-time opportunity to practice and focus on key leadership and business skills, attitudes and behaviours they need to adopt to drive commercial success. Through the simulation, teams manage the complexities of strategy, financial performance, risk solutions, resourcing, and stakeholder management, all set in dynamic evolving market and a changing competitive landscape.
A powerful learning experience for leadership development, our simulation-based programme provides leaders with a practical insurance setting to experiment with and internalise new ideas, a safe environment in which to challenge their thinking, and confidence to utilise new skills and capabilities in the workplace.
A name you can trust for insurance industry training
