2023 US Insurance Awards: RT Specialty, Wholesale Brokerage Team of the Year

RT Specialty’s wholesale construction specialty insurance team handles challenging risks that need an innovative approach, its leaders say.

Chad Hall, Tampa, Florida-based president, and Erik Davis, Los Angeles-based managing director, at RT Specialty, a unit of Ryan Specialty LLC, specialize in wrap-up programs where construction or repair problems develop and insurance that was provided previously is no longer available.

“We’re not doing vanilla stuff. We’re doing all the nastiest, hardest stuff,” Mr. Hall said. “We cut our teeth” and “thrive on that,” he said.

The team is “heavily weighted toward project solutions,” Mr. Davis said.

“Our team is known nationally for complex protections” that serve the contracting market, Mr. Hall said.

Several of the wrap-up programs they devised emerged because of the distressed economy after the 2008 financial crisis, where banks had a number of incomplete construction projects and in 2010 “all the projects came back to life,” Mr. Hall said.

RT Specialty developed products that would cover the projects through to completion, Mr. Hall said.

“But it was more than just completing them, because most insurance products won’t take over” existing projects, he said. “We had to build specialized language in insurance products to pick up prior work that was incomplete and make it part of the final work product. We call those takeover wrap-ups.”

Demand for the coverage is rising again, including for a major project where an insurer wrote a policy that paid out millions of dollars, but another insurance policy was needed to repair the building, Mr. Hall said.

Among its innovations, RT designed wrap-ups to provide coverage for supply chain risk in modular construction, accessing offsite and manufacturer exposures. Modular construction involves standardized building units that can be constructed at a remote location before being assembled on-site. 

The team has also developed an apartment wrap-up program that allows for the conversion of apartments to condominiums for a pre-negotiated additional premium at the policy’s inception, as well as a program focusing on sellers’ interest that covers 10 years.

RT Specialty’s team has “30-plus members that are bicoastal” and operates in all 50 states and internationally, with significant portions of the team operating in Southern California and Florida, said Mr. Davis. 

FINALISTS

• CRC Insurance Services Inc. — The wholesaler’s Redondo Beach, California, brokerage team was able to leverage strong insurer relationships and new capacity to provide solutions for disrupted placements.

• Risk Placement Services Inc. — The broker’s property team accessed new capacity and developed solutions for clients facing some of the toughest risk management challenges.

• Synapse Partners LLC — The company designed and built a proprietary data management platform that leverages specialty insurance data and allows retail brokers to cross sell products.

• XS Brokers Insurance Agency Inc. — The broker created a service agreement that includes reports and data analytics to support strategic growth partnerships.