A leading figure in the Lloyd’s of London hull insurance market is moving to Singapore to join Asia Capital Re.

Simon Stonehouse’s decision to relocate is a sign of changing times as the city state’s insurance market matures and takes a bigger share of the large Asian fleet.

Stonehouse, the hull underwriter of Brit Insurance’s syndicate 2987, is a former chairman of the London market’s Joint Hull Committee and also sat on the Joint War Committee and International Union of Marine Insurance (IUM)committees.

He came up with the ingenious idea that underwriters should offer replacement ships rather than cash compensation to owners who suffered a total loss.

The idea was to get away from agreed insured amounts that bore no relationship to market values. So for standard vessels, at least an underwriter could put the owner or mortgage bank in no worse a position than before a total loss by supplying an equivalent or slightly better ship.

But it was too radical for the market and remains on the shelf.

Stonehouse has spoken at insurance events, where the chronically unprofitable state of the global hull insurance market has been on the agenda.

He has argued that among the reasons for the continued poor performance is a strategic shift in world trade and shipowning that has reduced the importance of international insurance markets.

China, for example, is more inclined, as the workshop of the world, to insure its fleet domestically than a cross trader would.

Stonehouse has worked for the Brit group through his Lloyd’s career, being appointed as hull underwriter on the retirement of Peter Chrismas a decade ago.

Asia Capital Re was set up in Singapore eight years ago by a group of ex-Swiss Re executives with financial backing from Khazanah, the investment arm of the Malaysian government.

But the investment base has widened to include Singapore-government backed Temasek as well as Marubeni Corp and 3i.

Marine was one of its target areas from the beginning but it began to get noticed a couple of years later when it prised the Evergreen Marine hull lead from Gard.

Evergreen has a decades-long relationship with the Norwegian protection-and-indemnity (P&I) club but moved its hull account to get substantially better terms in Singapore.