push the envelope. Because we understand our position in the marketplace. I don’t know whether you all would agree with me or not.

LASSITER: I see you as very competitive.

MARKEL: Thank you very much, E.G..

McDONALD: Chris, you’re a producer and you work with a lot of producers. What do they need to know here?

TREANOR: Well they need to know that they should be calling their wholesaler on every transaction. I think that’s obvious. Realistically we do provide, to Tony’s point, we provide a relief valve in tough markets. But our industry and the wholesale part of the industry, we’re certainly good information gatherers and disseminators. My company is relatively small and we trade with over 1,000 retailers. As a retailer you’re a little bit in a box. Your information is limited to your customer base. So to the extent that we can magnify that by 1,000 and play back what’s going on in the industry and where the hot spots are and where the opportunities are and do it on a specialty basis because we’re all specialized by product and industry, that’s a big value.
We’re in a very unsettled time. I think what we all do right now is try to gather more information and more data points. Because making a decision in a vacuum is always dangerous. Making it with a few data points is always dangerous. So one of the things we provide as an industry is information and a different perspective.
I would like people to use us on every transaction. Certainly they won’t but I think in this environment, in this unsettled time more conversation, more interaction, more engagement is one of the things, more information is one of the things we provide.

McDONALD: Thank you, Chris. E.G.? What do producers need to know and what are you hearing?

LASSITER: The value that the wholesale customer brings, our wholesale customer, the wholesale brokers to the marketplace, it’s a relationship business and they have the skills and expertise to know who to go to for what product line for what type of limits and coverage and they add a value to the marketplace.
One of the things that I think differentiates them is at the retail level very often the person placing it, the agent is generalist. The people we deal with are specialists and they focus on D&O as we’ve talked about or general liability or property. They can have a broader skill set than you can have when you’re just a journalist.
It’s tough in the soft market. In the soft market things move away. Where we have to guard is the things that move away from us and back to standard companies happen to be the things that are fringe E&S. that leaves us with a more difficult book. It may be a more difficult book but hopefully we price it right and we still make money. But there are some accounts that stay here forever and there are some that move back and forth and some that we never see. It’s between us and our customers to ferret out which ones are really true opportunities when we work on them together.

McDONALD: Thank you, E.G.. Dan, any closing remarks?

RYAN: I guess with respect to the brokerage community, the wholesale community, given the issues that we face day in and day out and the fluidity of the market and the collapses of companies all around us, it’s very important that a producer, and I’m going A.M. Best, that a producer should be very mindful of the ratings of the companies that they’re dealing with. Again because it’s so fluid, they should try to tap ito the resources that we have available, that we make available to them in the event they are going to a market, maybe a new market and not understanding that market or where that market is. With the information that we have, the ratings that we have and the sensitivity to timeliness and transparency, I think it’s critical that anyone that associates itself with an insurance company should be aware of the financial strength of that entity.
Just be very mindful of A.M. Best, the ratings and what products we have and the services that we make available.

McDONALD: Well thank you everyone and thank you for all our attendees. I did integrate the questions I received into our discussion here. So I hope you found it to be an interactive experience as well.
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