From today, an intermediary placing credit or suretyship business in Spain, Italy or Romania deals with our associated managing general agent rather than writing to Dublin and waiting. It is a firm we have worked with for years, on the same two lines of business we write here, and the mandate went to it for that reason rather than as an experiment in coverage.
The reason is proximity, and proximity is not a slogan in this business. A guarantee is bought in the market where the contract sits — in its language, against its standard wordings, to the timetable a contracting authority sets rather than the one an insurer would prefer. An agency with its own people in the market reads the tender documents the day they arrive, knows which employer will accept which form, and answers a broker in the afternoon instead of the following week. That is what being close to a market buys, and it is worth more to an intermediary than any amount of head-office goodwill.
For a broker it means one route in and a shorter one. Submissions are received and prepared locally, guarantees and credit cover are issued and administered under the mandate, and endorsements, extensions, releases and renewals run through the life of a facility from the same desk — with the first line of contact in the market’s own language. One submission address, not two, and no translation of your client’s paperwork on the way.
What does not move is the part a broker is actually buying. Every risk decision, the pricing, the wording we will accept and the claims and recoveries stay with the underwriters in Dublin. The guarantee is issued on FDI Insurance paper, and the balance sheet standing behind it is the one published here in full: £16.21m of eligible own funds and a 163% solvency cover ratio in the report filed for 2024. A mandate delegates administration. It does not delegate capital.
The three markets are not at the same stage, and this site says so rather than letting a broker find out. Spain is on a public register: we are entered with the Dirección General de Seguros y Fondos de Pensiones under clave L1617, for two complete ramos — 14 crédito and 15 caución — and that entry is reproduced on our Spain page as the register prints it. Italy and Romania are distribution arrangements through the same agency today. If a host-state register entry follows for either, it will be published the way the Spanish one is, and not before.
Nothing changes in how an appointment starts. A broker in any of the three markets writes to the broker desk in Dublin, we make the introduction to the agency that handles that market, and the agency is named — with its submission address, its own register entry as a distributor and the underwriters behind it — when terms of business are issued.
Written by the underwriting team at FDI Insurance d.a.c., Dublin. This piece is general information, not advice on any particular transaction — and it is not an offer of insurance.
