Ben Dunston: One out of the box

Vol 47: Issue 1 | April 2024

A career in insurance can certainly take you places. Ben Dunston, now placement leader, Asia, with WTW in Singapore, originally thought insurance would take him snowboarding — a fanciful dream for a university student craving adventure.

“I saw a picture of a guy on a snowboard in a recruitment centre that read: ‘All things in life have an element of risk. Willis.’ As the business student I was, I thought that working for WTW would take me snowboarding as a career.

“I applied, got an interview and ended up joining an insurance broking firm, so it wasn’t quite what I was promised,” he jokes.

His current location has meant swapping snow for sand: the UK-born insurance professional moved to Singapore about seven years ago.

Dunston says that some people in the industry in the UK are content to spend their entire careers in the same place — even at the same ‘box’ for some at the illustrious Lloyd’s of London — but this wasn’t a path that appealed to him.

“I wanted some diversity in my career,” he explains. “Once I made that decision, within two weeks I had a plan to move to Singapore.”

Broad experience

Dunston’s commitment to variety doesn’t end with living and working abroad. He has made the move from broking to underwriting and back to broking — and highly recommends stretching yourself and trying different areas of specialisation.

“It’s a little bit like when people go skiing and they never learn how to snowboard. And when people go snowboarding and they never learn how to ski,” he says. “I’ve never quite understood that. If you love the snow, you love the snow. So, you should mix it up a bit, and I think that gives you a much better perspective.”

Dunston has also gone from working in financial lines to marine, as well as fine art and specie. Plus, he’s a strong advocate for putting your hand up to take on projects outside your current scope of work.

“The main lesson that I learned was to try and get involved in projects that benefit the company outside of your core technicality,” he says. “It gives you exposure to different people within the organisation and different products, distributions, technologies.

All of that is extremely beneficial to you as an individual, but only if you’re a curious person and willing to chalk it up as experience, rather than inconvenience.”

Apart from developing your technical expertise, sometimes these ‘side projects’ result in big pay-offs.

“When I was applying for leadership positions, it was the digital trading platform I helped build for single shipment cargo at one of the leading insurers which actually made me stand out from the other candidates,” says Dunston. “It was a non-core project at the time for me, but it gave me a differentiator when I came to apply for something more senior.”

Improving standards

Dunston is very engaged with the levels of professionalism in the insurance industry, particularly in broking.

One change he has observed is that there is less appetite nowadays to acquire high levels of technical knowledge. As someone with both broking and underwriting experience, he says understanding these two sides of insurance is hugely valuable for insurance professionals.

“I asked some underwriters in the market what it is they would deem as being a more professional broker,” says Dunston. “Every one of them said roughly the same thing: better submissions, more information, more structure and fewer rounds of questions back and forth between client and underwriter.”

While brokers can work on understanding the needs of other roles in the industry, WTW has also done its own work to bridge that gap, launching a ready-for-market initiative in its marine business that is focused on raising the standard of underwriting submissions.

Says Dunston: “The intent is to make submissions easy to agree on and produce the best terms for the client. This benefits underwriters because WTW brokers gather all the risk information before the underwriters ask questions.

It benefits brokers because it’s helping the broker to put themselves in the position of the underwriters and be structured and knowledgeable about the client’s risk profile. And, most importantly, it benefits clients because they get fewer rounds of questions from underwriters and quicker decisions.”

WTW is going one step further with the rollout of an innovative, digital broking platform that enables its brokers to capture risk information across industry, product and country, and incorporate it into a market submission. The project is scheduled to go live in Singapore and Hong Kong in Q2 2024.

“This drives a sophisticated client presentation based on the underwriting responses, and it looks far more professional than receiving and comparing three different insurer quotes by email,” explains Dunston.

“We’re pretty excited about what it means for the industry. I’m a big believer in the ‘rising tide raises all ships’ theory.

Other brokers may copy us, but making the effort to put these responses together in a more structured and coherent way shows the client who is buying insurance that we’re listening and responding in an enhanced way.”

The perfect mix

WTW’s broking platform is a technology-driven initiative to improve the insurance-buying experience for clients, but Dunston believes that insurance professionals will also benefit from using a mix of face-to-face and tech communications — as well as from trying something new.

That’s why, after nine years in broking, he deliberately sought out a position as an underwriter to have the experience to sit at one of the famous Lloyd’s boxes and trade. 

“It’s the kind of early education which takes you in person to the trading floor, and global talent is all around you,” he says.

“The underwriting speed, the confidence of decision-making and the variety of the deals that you’re doing is unmatched, plus it’s a very, very competitive environment. That’s the perfect training ground for younger colleagues and it’s based around face-to-face negotiation.”

Dunston describes it as a huge learning ground. “You can be doing reinsurance in Argentina and India in the morning. And then you can be doing a direct piece of business in Australia in the afternoon and surplus lines in the US later on. It’s different distributions, different geographies. I think that environment is optimal for learning.” 

He believes that using tech in place of some in-person discussions (including email, online communications platforms, video calls and more) is a result of changing business culture, rather than a generational shift.

“Nowadays, there are no nameplates on desks. People come in on different days. They don’t have office phones with their names on them,” he says.

“It’s becoming quite difficult to build culture around these areas in general for the industry. Younger brokers are simply using the resources that are in front of them.

But, when it comes to connecting with each other and building friendships and alliances, they are doing the same as anyone else would have done even 20, 30 years ago over lunch, coffee and social events.”

The road less travelled

Dunston notes that while some people may be in a hurry to climb the career ladder and get that next promotion, your greatest opportunities may lie in different directions.

“Don’t be afraid to make a sideways move,” he says. “I’ve done it twice in my career, and it’s benefited me hugely each time. If you back yourself, you should be able to move sideways into a new role and impress a whole new set of stakeholders over the next few years.”

Dunston stresses that we need to think in terms of a few years in each role, rather than just one or two.

“One of the things we might have seen in insurance recently is a lack of patience,” he says.

“It takes a while for you to do your best work in any new company. You need to build personal capital with internal stakeholders and understand how decisions are made before you can be as impactful as you could be.”

TWO-MINUTE BIO

Education
Bachelor of Arts from the University of Sheffield.

Career
Ben Dunston started his career in broking with WTW, in the United Kingdom. He moved into underwriting with Pembroke syndicate then Chubb syndicate in Lloyd’s, subsequently moving to Singapore to be head of marine and lead regional fine art and specie for Asia. He rejoined WTW in 2019 and is currently placement leader for Asia.

Top career tip 
Dunston advises younger insurance professionals to get involved in projects outside their core specialty. “It will add variety to your skill set, which can lead to new opportunities in your career that might not arise if you choose to just stay in your own corner.”

Outside the day job 
Dunston and his family love the Singapore weather, food and lifestyle. He enjoys running, cycling and watching rugby, and he’s also an avid reader. 

Read this article and all the other articles from the latest issue of the Journal e-magazine.

 Read issue 1 of the Journal