David McKibbin

He entered the London Market after the Big Bang of 1986, as the reinsurance markets moved from tariff-rated pricing to genuine free-market risk assessment. The discipline he trained in was falsificationist before he would have called it that: the underwriter's job is not to find reasons a risk is sound, but to identify the condition that would prove it is not, price that condition, and decide whether the premium compensates. He turned down Barings at the start of his career; it became the textbook governance collapse.

After 9/11 he was the nominated underwriter on an AIG property book co-underwritten 50:50 with National Indemnity, Berkshire Hathaway's vehicle for large and complex risk, written net account, to exploit the wholesale facultative capacity vacuum the attacks opened. Both AIG and Berkshire were AAA-rated at the time. He underwrote from inside two diametrically opposed business models.

AIG's discipline resided in Maurice Greenberg's personal oversight; when he was forced out in 2005 the architecture did not hold and the firm required the largest government bailout in financial history. Berkshire's discipline was structural: it charged more, wrote less, and retains a AA rating today. Governance as architecture versus governance as person. The difference was not capital.

What followed was two decades of watching that discipline eroded, as abundant credit socialised the cost of being wrong and suppressed the feedback loop that should punish fragile risk management. His closest sight of governance failure came at GFG Alliance, where he served as Insurance Director and sat on the M&A deal team during the group's rapid expansion. The Greensill exposure, and the collapse that followed, showed what happens when governance is asserted rather than demonstrated: the structure holds until it does not, and the rupture is never proportionate to the warning signs. The governance failure preceded the financial failure. It always does.

In AIG's trade finance division in 2008 he worked on ABS/ABL transactions with the trade-receivables technology the firm had built and adopted. It was only selectively adopted in other finance houses depending on business culture, regulation and incentives. He co-founded XS Reserve with Alastair Malcolm; its excess-of-loss trade credit reserve instrument won a 2016 Business Insurance Innovation Award, and the intellectual property now sits within Centinel 10 Ltd, the company behind Arkaya. He held the FCA Chief Executive controlled function, the most senior controlled function the regulator pre-approves, before founding Arkaya.

Insurance was designed as the financial canary, the risk signal that governs capital disbursement and makes economic growth legible. Compliance culture hollowed that function out, substituting documentation for assessment. Arkaya uses AI to reinstate the testing mechanism: making governance risk continuously visible, independently verifiable, and legible to the capital markets that need to price it. The instrument is built by someone who underwrote the difference and recognises how AI allows governance risk to now be priced before it crystallises, rather than hit investors after.