AFRO-ASIAN REINSURANCE
B2B Brand Positioning Through Competitive Intelligence
(Context)
The brief came out of a conversation between my manager and the head of underwriting: when brokers were shopping a risk around, nobody internally could say with confidence how Afro-Asian was perceived versus the reinsurers it kept losing deals to. Over the prior 12 months the underwriting team had tracked losing roughly 40% of competitive tenders to the same handful of names, without ever documenting why.
(Challenge)
The first week was mostly realizing how hard this information actually is to get. I spent almost two days trying to pull pricing signals from one competitor's public filings before accepting the numbers were too aggregated across 15+ business lines to isolate anything reinsurance-specific, and pivoted to broker commentary instead.
(Approach)
From a review of 23 recent tender records I picked the five reinsurers that came up repeatedly as the names Afro-Asian was actually competing against across the Africa, Asia, and Europe corridor. I built a comparison across four dimensions: risk appetite positioning, pricing signals, business line emphasis, and target client size and type.
(Execution)
Everything went into a single spreadsheet matrix, pulling from roughly 30 source documents across filings, rating agency commentary, and broker updates gathered over about three weeks. Three of the five competitors were using near-identical positioning language around being "financially strong, responsive partners." Cross-referencing against the 23 tenders showed none of the five had specific messaging for mid-sized regional insurers in the Africa corridor, a segment accounting for roughly 35% of the tenders reviewed.
(Results)
- Benchmarked Afro-Asian against 5 direct competitors across 4 positioning dimensions
- Reviewed 23 recent tender records and roughly 30 source documents to ground the analysis in real competitive activity, not just brand messaging
- Flagged that 3 of 5 competitors (60%) were using near-identical positioning language
- Identified a segment representing ~35% of reviewed tenders where no competitor had specific positioning
- Findings presented in a 12-slide summary, shared onward to the underwriting team and referenced in a subsequent broker-facing pitch
(What I learned)
The actual skill wasn't the analysis. It was figuring out where to find reliable information in an industry that doesn't publish it willingly, and being upfront that maybe 70% of the findings were solidly sourced while the remainder were educated inference, so leadership knew exactly which parts to lean on.