BPL, an independent broker specialising in credit and political risk insurance (CPRI), has established a new Funded Solutions team to provide insurance-linked capital and credit management strategies, including repackagings, for a broad range of financial institutions.
The Funded Solutions platform will facilitate cash-collateralised and insured risk participation transactions.
This allows sellers of risk to manage capital and credit exposure more efficiently, while buyers can access lower-risk assets with potential for improved yields. Credit insurers will continue to expand client relationships and portfolios in line with their current objectives.
The launch comes at a time when the credit insurance market has grown substantially over the past decade, leading to increased capital allocation to insured assets and heightened demand for credit lines. BPL’s insured portfolio now exceeds USD 100 billion, reflecting this market expansion.
The Funded Solutions team will continue to support banking clients while also targeting institutional investors, a group that has previously had limited access to CPRI products. This approach enables investors to utilise insured credit strategies to access investment-grade assets with potentially enhanced returns.
Leading the team are Directors George Biddulph and Harriet Rowland Clark. Biddulph, with over 23 years of experience in fixed income and credit risk at Willis and Credit Suisse (now UBS), will focus on developing the platform for banking clients to distribute, insure, and fund or acquire risk. Rowland Clark will design tailored repackaging solutions for existing BPL clients, leveraging her prior experience heading Insured Strategies at Aegon Asset Management.
The team’s expertise is further supported by Riz Sheikh, BPL’s Significant Risk Transfer lead, and Gregory King-Underwood, who leads the Reinsurance and Portfolio Solutions offering.
Charlie Radcliffe, Chief Commercial Officer, BPL, said: “While we have been picking up on the demand for a while, we believe our Funded Solutions offering to be unique on the broking side in terms of the level of expertise we now have. It positions both existing and prospective clients to capitalise on the type of innovation in our market that has led to its impressive growth in recent years.”
Biddulph commented: “This initiative will directly support the growing mobilisation of capital into the target areas of a range of development, commercial and investment banks, while providing a mechanism for insurers to continue to demonstrate their ever-increasing relevance in support of the same aim. The growth objective is supported by investments that the credit insurance market has made to develop their knowledge and systems in order to take such risks.”
Rowland-Clark added: “Having spent the last eight years as a buyer of credit insurance it is great to be back in the insurance market broking these innovative structures. The scale of interest from non-bank FIs in this asset class is a true reflection of how important this type of credit protection is set to become for a much broader swathe of the FI community.”
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