Carolyn Callan: ‘Walking the talk’ with ‘integrity’ at Brown and Brown

Carolyn Callan has known Mike Bruce, currently chief executive at Brown and Brown Europe and former Global Risk Partners (GRP) group managing director, since his days running broker Bluefin between 2010 and 2015.

Over the years, there has been mutual interest and repeated conversations between the pair about 54-year-old Callan joining Bruce’s team. However, the logistics supporting this kind of appointment were only cemented in October 2023, when Callan left her role at Covéa Insurance to become Brown and Brown’s new retail managing director.

Soon after getting her feet under the table at the American-headquartered broker – which bought GRP in July 2022 – Callan took yet another step up the career ladder in May 2024 to become chief executive of Brown and Brown Europe’s UK retail division, reporting into Bruce and leading the charge to action the broker’s One Retail strategy.

From her career roots in marketing, then taking on more senior and broad broking roles, followed by a six-year stint at Covéa Insurance, Callan joined Brown and Brown last year hoping to recapture “that real passion for work and making a difference in an organisation”.

Speaking exclusively to Insurance Times, Callan confirms she has “absolutely had the best 12 months of my career”.

She says: “I got to the point where I was done last year, where you haven’t got the same passion and drive as you had. My dad was also seriously ill [and] was in a coma for three and a half months.

“[This] made me think about what’s important in life and my job is very important to me – you’re in work more than you’re at home and I wanted to get back to loving it again.

“Brown and Brown is a great business to work for – that was really important to me, being back in [a] business where culture [is] really strong, a business that’s very performance driven and [has a] work hard, play hard culture.

“A business with real integrity.”

Back to broking

Callan first started out in financial services in 1998, putting her marketing degree to good use as a product manager at Girobank – a business that subsequently morphed into Alliance and Leicester and then Santander.

In the early 2000s, Callan swapped banking for insurance when she joined commercial broker Premierline – at the time, a Lancaster-based startup that sold business insurance directly to small and medium-size enterprises.

Embracing the startup mindset, she quickly became a “jack of all trades” who was “part of the team that eventually did a management buyout” ahead of the broker being bought by insurer Allianz in 2006.

However, after having her son, Callan wanted to find a job nearer to home. So, in 2004, she joined broker Swinton Insurance to “champion setting up the commercial insurance broking division”.

She then served 16 months at Ardonagh-owned Towergate followed by a similar length tenure at private bank Worldpay. These roles did not fulfil Callan’s career appetite, however, with Towergate pigeonholing her back into a pure marketing role and Worldpay making her realise that she “missed insurance massively”.

So, Callan accepted a job on “the insurer side of the fence” with Covéa Insurance in 2017, which is where she got to know both GRP and Mike Bruce a lot better through a strategic working partnership.

Initially she fronted the insurer’s SME and schemes division, but she soon went on to lead its commercial lines operation from 2019.

Although this experience enabled her to get a more granular understanding of the insurer-broker relationship, Callan confesses that she soon realised that broking is her passion – she prefers the “whole immediacy of performance in the broking world”, the ability to be “so much closer to the customer” and the “cut and thrust of being in a sales environment”.

Therefore, when brainstorming for her next position, she had broking firms high up on her wish list – with Brown and Brown in pole position thanks to her experience dealing with the firm during her Covéa days.

“They [are] a team that do what they say they’re going to do – they make a commitment to an insurer and they’ll deliver it,” Callan says.

“My experience of other brokers when I was working at Covéa Insurance was that that wasn’t always the case. Integrity is the key word here in terms of doing the right thing by the customer and the right thing by our insurer partners. People are absolutely key.”

This people focused mantra heavily influences Callan’s leadership style – she describes her approach to people management as “genuine”, “authentic” and centred on understanding what makes her staff “tick” both personally and professionally.

“I won’t expect somebody to do something I’m not prepared to do. Walking the talk is really important. I like to know the detail. I will roll my sleeves up and get stuck in with everybody else,” she emphasises.

Futureproofing the sector’s workforce

For Callan, the people-centric nature of broking means that “the whole talent attraction, development and retention piece is absolutely key” – however, she also believes that “as an industry, we’re not particularly good at” this.

“There’s lots of individual initiatives going on in individual brokers, but as an industry, it’s something we should be joining together on, [led by] one of the key bodies – whether it’s the ABI, Biba or even the FCA,” she continues.

“Fast forward 15 [or] 20 years and if we don’t bring young people into the industry, what happens to the insurance industry? It’s something we’ve talked about for a long time, but I don’t think there’s enough momentum behind it.”

Brown and Brown Europe is pulling on its American parentage to get talent initiatives off the ground, with Callan highlighting that the US part of the business has been “very much focused on” developing talent pipelines in recent years.

For her, however, education is the crux of the matter – she firmly believes the sector has to promote the multitude of available career pathways, the “tight knit community” and “good social scene”, alongside the ability for insurance jobs to facilitate “a nice lifestyle”, in order to attract the next generation of talent.

She says: “We need, as an industry, to educate young people and talk passionately about [insurance as a career] to them. I don’t think doing that as individual businesses really solves [the talent attraction] issue.

“We need a group of us to get together and come up with some initiatives that we can really own among us all.

“Yes, we all want to compete and attract the right talent into our individual businesses, but if we don’t do that first [education] piece, then we’re never going to [attract the right talent]. We’re never going to get the best of the best coming into insurance.”

Callan adds that firms need to be open minded when recruiting and look for candidates that display the “right attitude and the right interpersonal skills” rather than already having a set amount of years’ experience on their CVs or a fully-fledged technical skill set.

She continues: “If you’re bright and prepared to work hard, you can go from being a trainee account handler to being Mike Bruce because it’s about applying yourself, working hard [and] having a certain degree of intelligence.”

Making a difference

Callan is incredibly invested in Brown and Brown. This is demonstrated by the fact that she started brainstorming the firm’s One Retail strategy before even formally starting work at the broker.

Describing the UK retail chief executive role as one she had always hoped to achieve, Callan tells Insurance Times that she now looks “forward to nine o’clock on a Monday morning” – an important consideration for Callan as this appointment marks “probably what is one of my last roles” in the latter stages of her career.

She says: “I’m loving life at Brown and Brown. It’s the best move I’ve made. It’s exciting, it’s rewarding, it’s challenging, it’s hard work. But I feel like I’ve landed in the right place.

“I hope to be able to make a real difference.”