Welcome to my first blog. 

I'm David Walsh and this is my first blog post ! The challenge is to bring some relevant insurance information and insurance news to you on a regular basis and keep it as interesting and relevant to our audience as possible. Blog posts will be sometimes technical, maybe sometimes slightly off topic, occasionally light-hearted and hopefully always insightful.

Quick Bio: I'm 34 yrs old, happily married with my wife and 2 gorgeous daughters, recently retired from a hectic rugby career (explains the nose on my twitter profile pic @daviddwalsh) so despite the growing brood am enjoying having the extra hours to grow & expand Challenge.

I set up Challenge Insurance 6 years ago after spending 8 years with some of the industry's larger companies (correct 14 years in total), I enjoyed my time with all my previous employers and gained lots of valuable experience along the way. The Insurance Industry is a fascinating area in many ways and whilst it can be easy to flag it as a necessary evil for most there can be lots of good to be gained from it.

There are many components required to complete the insurance industry machine, the most important one being the client, because if we didn't have clients there would be no need for any other entity, no need for insurance brokers, insurance companies, underwriters, re-insurers, loss adjustors, loss assessors, risk managers and no need for claims managers (hmm...) etc.

As well as there being many components they combine regularly to serve society at large both domestically and commercially. There are far too many entities served by the insurance industry to even begin to summarise let alone list but over the course of these blogs I will touch on many. Our client base covers a broad range of private and commercial industry and we have experienced first hand most possibilities and most eventualities.

I am believer that insurance is fundamentally a straight forward business and it should be easy to understand once done correctly.

What we try to do at Challenge is to educate our clients on the basics of how insurance works, it may not seem important to clients at the time to understand the mechanics, but in the long run and especially in times of a loss it helps greatly with the understanding of how their policy works. I will be using my blog to try and impart some of this knowledge with you and give you our take on current issues within the industry.

Communication is a key element to insurance, it is important that communication channels between various parties are kept open at all times. At Challenge we are working to improve communication channels, the latest developments in digital marketing, social media and cloud computing have given us unbelievable opportunities to bring insurance into the 21st century. I hope to use this blog to share some ideas and hopefully get some feedback from clients, prospective clients and industry colleagues on how best to improve how we communicate in this industry.

So hopefully that gives you a rough idea of what's to come.