Vario Partners adds CFO, as specialist risk advisory & ILS firm develops

Vario Partners, the specialist risk advisor launched in late 2014 by three former PwC exec’s to facilitate the bringing together of portfolios of insurance or reinsurance risk and the capital markets through securitisation or ILS means, has hired a CFO.

Vario Partners, now calling itself a “specialist insurance analysis and modelling firm” which suggests that its work with alternative sources of risk capital or reinsurance will be analytical and advisory based to begin, as it seeks to help clients build portfolios of risk that perform, has appointed Rebecca Elliott as Chief Financial Officer.

Elliott is another PwC alumni, coming from the PwC Zurich office where she held the role of Senior Audit Manager and led some of the largest global audit teams in the insurance and reinsurance industry.

Quentin Moore, one of the founding partners of Vario, commented on the hire; “We are very pleased to welcome Rebecca to the Vario team as our Chief Financial Officer. Her specialist knowledge and expertise, particularly in respect of solvency and regulatory reporting, will be invaluable as we develop our business and client base.”

Elliott added; ”I am very much looking forward to joining Vario Partners, and to working with the team that has developed such a new and exciting approach to risk modelling.”

We have yet to see Vario partners in the wild, so to speak, as the firm has very much been in stealth mode since its launch. But we understand that it is gaining traction.

The firm launched with a stated mission to facilitate the matching of risk with insurance-linked securities (ILS) investor capital more efficiently, through analysis, advisory and modelling. Vario also seemed set to originate risk where it could, package risks into forms that suited the ILS markets it worked with, as well as a future that could potentially involve fund management.

This places Vario Partners in a relatively unique position of sourcing, analysing, structuring and investing in insurance or reinsurance risks, a proposition that in the current market could be an efficient way to make a profit from the convergence trend.