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Howard Gras has joined as Head of Financial Lines to spearhead Carbon’s expansion plans in this line of business. A highly experienced professional indemnity (PI) and financial lines specialist, Howard was previously PI Class Manager with CNA Hardy and prior to that, he held the role of Commercial PI manager with Nexus Underwriting. Earlier in his career, Howard was a Director with Howden Insurance Brokers Limited and he started his career as a broker with J H Minet Insurance Brokers / Aon.

Alex Marshall has also recently joined the business as an Underwriter focused on building out Carbon’s US property portfolio. He was previously an underwriter at Canopius Group focused on North American delegated authority business for almost 14 years.       

These appointments maintain the strong momentum of new hires for Carbon in its drive to expand further the existing talented underwriting team with ambitious and highly experienced experts focused on transforming the international coverholder market.

Nick Tye, CEO at Carbon, said: 

“The arrival of Howard and Alex adds to our exciting start to the year and I am delighted to welcome them to the Carbon family. As a people business, we always look to attract highly experienced talent and these appointments add further to our fast-growing underwriting bench strength. 

We were delighted to become the first Lloyd’s syndicate-in-a-box to transition to full syndicate status from 1 January and as we look to extend the breadth of our product offering and deliver on our plan to achieve top-quartile results for Syndicate 4747, our focus is to ensure that we have the right mix of skills and expertise across our business – as well as the cutting edge digital capabilities that our Graphene platform brings – to deliver differentiation, relevance and excellence to our clients and business partners.”

Howard Gras, Head of Financial Lines at Carbon, said: 

“Carbon feels like the natural home for ambitious underwriting and I am really pleased to be joining a business that has built such an outstanding reputation, great people and a culture that is unique within the Lloyd’s market – all of which leads to a very exciting future.

There are lots of opportunities to refine and grow financial lines underwriting through Coverholder channels and the strongest Coverholder relationships develop from a mutual respect and transparent partnership. I strongly believe that pairing expert underwriting with leading edge data insights is the way to achieve profitable and sustainable growth, and this approach further cements the relationship between capacity provider and Coverholder. I am looking forward to expanding our financial lines offering to help drive the innovative solutions that our clients have come to know and expect.”