Ryan Wimberly: growing Bondaval in the US

Ryan Wimberly joined Bondaval in December 2025 as its new Managing Director, Americas. We caught up to hear about what drew him to the company, and what opportunities he sees for Bondaval to grow the market alongside our brokers.

Harriet:
Great to have you here. You joined us after spending 15 years at one of the largest insurers in the market — so quite a big change coming over to Bondaval. What gave you the confidence to say, “Yes, I’m going to join Bondaval. This is going to work”?

Ryan Wimberly:
It really came down to three things.

First, the team. Tom, you, Simon, Ewa, Sam, Sandy and honestly the whole group behind Tom’s vision. It’s very rare to find such a high-calibre group of people. I could go on and list the other 40-plus people in the business. That was number one.

Number two is the platform. Trade credit in the United States is more than 130 years old. It’s a little stodgy, a bit stuck in its ways. Typically, you have a product, a price and coverage, and that’s it.

Bondaval has a completely different philosophy. The platform is the product. Of course, we’re a trade credit provider — we have the coverage, the pricing, and we have to participate in that traditional structure. But what’s unique is the software. From my perspective, I immediately started thinking: where can we take this? Where can this go? Yes, it’s trade credit... but it’s really software. That was incredibly exciting to me.

And number three — and honestly none of this works without number three — is the Swiss capacity. We’ve got a real arsenal of dry powder to deploy in the market.

When you combine the team, the technology and the capacity, it ultimately comes down to hard work, and that’s something I find exciting. If I’m willing to bet on us and bet on myself to work hard, good things are going to happen. I’m very confident of that.

Harriet:
Completely agree. The quality of people we’ve brought into the business from the industry, combining that expertise with technology expertise, is something totally different from what our competitors are offering.

Ryan:
One hundred percent. Half of our team are software engineers and tech specialists. That’s extremely uncommon in this industry.

Harriet:
And it makes so much more possible. It allows us to expand the market.

Ryan:
Exactly. Speaking candidly, I’m not interested in taking someone else’s slice of the pie. I want to grow the pie. That’s my ambitious goal here.

I think the way to do that is through the tech and the platform. It’s not just about getting on a spreadsheet with a price and coverage and offering it to a client. That’s worked for a long time, and it has its place. But what really excites me is asking: what can we do with this software? How can we support our clients and brokers with a platform that is categorically best in class?

Harriet:
Around 80% of our GWP is net new to the market, so we are expanding it. There have been plenty of times where brokers have used us to open conversations with prospects they couldn’t previously get in front of, because we’re offering something different. It’s a great way to start discussions.

Ryan:
Absolutely.

I spent a good deal of time at my previous employer managing the energy team. In that industry, counterparties often both buy and sell to each other, so you’ve got payables and receivables at the same time. That’s true of many trading companies, not just oil and gas.

On our platform, clients can view their payables position, receivables position and net position relative to their credit limit in real time, multiple times a day. I believe it’s updated four times daily. That’s crazy valuable for trading businesses.

That’s just one example. The platform is modular. We customise it for each client and build based on their feedback. That particular module was developed because of a client need. Now it’s part of our library — and we can iterate further for other clients with unique requirements we may not have anticipated.

Harriet:
And that library is continually growing.

One of the advantages of having an in-house tech team is that we’re not outsourcing development to an external agency. It’s a living, breathing system that improves over time.

Ryan:
Exactly. It’s dynamic and shaped by our collective feedback. The analogy I use is that I’m used to being on a big cruise ship. Now I’m in a speedboat. It’s a bit crazy, but it’s nimble, agile and incredibly exciting.

Harriet:
A little bit of splash — but that’s part of the fun.

So we’ve talked about how other insurers approach things and how credit managers benefit from Bondaval. Brokers are some of our most important partners. How does working with Bondaval give brokers something different?

Ryan:
In the short term, it’s the paper and the capacity. Brokers now have access to another AA-rated market that they didn’t have broad access to before. For trade finance deals, bank transactions or corporate clients with ABL facilities and borrowing bases, that’s huge.

And then, to sound repetitive, it’s the tech. That’s the end game. The platform enables us to support their clients in a fundamentally different way. It has the potential to revolutionize how their clients manage credit.

That might sound ambitious, but I genuinely believe we can do it. That’s the ultimate goal.

Harriet:
It’s the beginning of the year. If we fast-forward a few years, what does success look like for Bondaval?

Ryan:
Ambitiously, it’s revolutionizing how trade credit is done and how credit is managed. I know that sounds bold, but I believe we have the team and the technology to make it happen.

At the same time, it’s about becoming one of the top trade credit insurance players: not just from a tech perspective, but in terms of team, capacity and market presence. We have the paper and the talent to become a serious force in the market.

And again, the goal isn’t to take someone else’s slice of the pie, it’s to grow the market.

So success looks like two things: being recognized as one of the premier trade credit companies globally, and achieving broad adoption of the platform: helping companies transform how they manage credit and helping brokers transform how they support their clients.

I truly believe we have the platform to do that.

Harriet:
Absolutely. Thank you very much, Ryan. I’m looking forward to working with you.

Ryan:
Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.