“We were just two guys moaning away actually about the markets,” said Nigel Frudd, head of Global M&A and group counsel for Sompo, recounting his initial meeting with John Charman, then chief executive officer of Endurance Specialty Holdings, in late March 2016, which would mark the first step toward Sompo’s $6.3 billion purchase of Endurance in October last year.

“I first met John on a very miserable, wet Wednesday morning,” Frudd told an audience of carrier financial executives and analysts at the S&P Global Ratings Insurance 2017 Annual Conference last month. “I was very fed up because we were looking at prospects and nothing really was coming up which fit the bill,” he said, reporting that Charman “was similarly fed up because he needed the double size of his company.”