SRG seeks to tackle industry’s ‘very rich vein of nepotism’ through charity partnership

Intermediary organisation Specialist Risk Group (SRG) is “doubling down” on its partnership with social mobility youth employment charity LTSB in order to tackle “the very rich vein of nepotism that goes on in the marketplace” and improve “the availability of opportunity” for youngsters from a low socioeconomic background, according to Lee Anderson, the broker’s group deputy chief executive.

SRG has collaborated with LTSB – which works with “with the lowest 25% economic households in the UK” – for the past two years, accepting a cohort of 12 participants suggested by the charity who are in their late teens or early twenties and looking for their first job outside of the retail sector.

The programme provides cohort members with “mentoring, mock interview [practice], CV building [and] work experience”.

Day to day, the scheme is led by SRG’s people and culture director, Joanne Wright, who joined the firm in 2020. However, Anderson is a particularly passionate advocate of the partnership with LTSB, describing himself as coming from a “white trash” background.

Recounting his interactions with past programme participants, Anderson was visibly emotional when speaking to Insurance Times.

He explained that when he was first setting the ethos of SRG’s brand with group chief executive Warren Downey in 2019, one facet he certainly did not want to empower “was the very rich vein of nepotism that goes on in the marketplace”.

He continued: “If you’re [a] university educated graduate who knows somebody in the industry, you do ok [and] you find a way in. Those people are already kind of winning at life. So, what we’ve done is we partnered with a charity called LTSB.

“We treat everybody equally insofar as the availability of opportunity. They come in, they go straight into our specialist businesses and they learn to become a specialist in a thing.”

With the scheme’s second cohort settling in nicely at SRG at the conclusion of 2024, Anderson emphasised that the broker would be “doubling down” on the initiative moving forward because “it’s worked really well”.

He added: “These are people who are very hungry, engaged, enthusiastic, keen to learn. And all they really ask from you is time. You get to a stage in your career where that’s something you should be willing and able to give freely.”

Business benefits

Despite the societal benefits of the partnership – in terms of contributing to a “generational change of circumstance” – Anderson admitted that SRG’s work with LTSB was “not completely altruistic”.

It provides an “absolutely brilliant feeling” to help cohort participants, Anderson continued, as well as gives a “visual and physical” demonstration of SRG’s “people and culture focused business”.

In addition, SRG recruited 60% of the last cohort into the business.

However, this initial recruitment of cohort members is not a metric of success for the scheme, Anderson noted. For him, the “real measure” is centred on promotion and career progression.

He explained: “There’s always the need for junior level staff, so it’s actually a relatively low barrier [to entry to gain a job in insurance].

“The success for me will be if we train them in the right manner and we’re respectful of them and they take the best of it, the mark will be how they promote and move through the business – not the fact they’re here, the fact they can move through and up. It’s not tokenism.”

Removing barriers

For Anderson, collaborating with a charity such as LTSB is important to address the insurance sector’s ongoing war for talent, particularly in terms of attracting diverse talent and futureproofing succession pipelines.

He told Insurance Times: “If you don’t know the [insurance] industry, it’s totally invisible to you.

“When we talk about some of the real specialisms we do – which are weird and wonderful and varied – there is so little context for [cohorts] to understand how that even exists, how it came about, why it happens and who buys it. You find yourself having to very consciously tell stories because it’s not just ‘we do this product’.

“You have to go right back and say ‘here’s how this industry works, here’s why this came about and here’s how the sector responded. Here’s why it’s different to the other things I told you about yesterday and here’s how we think it will evolve’.

“But if you have no access point to that world, it’s totally alien. If they don’t have a father, a brother, a friend that is in the industry, it’s invisible in a way that banking isn’t.”

Aligned to this, Anderson is a firm believer that class should be more heavily included in diversity and inclusion initiatives, to ensure the insurance sector does not “default to a mono view” that is purely focused on gender and ethnicity.

“Female leadership is a very well supported and developed part by some big names in the industry, [as well as ethnicity]. But there are also class barriers. There is also neurodivergent thinking of people,” he said.

Tapping into high potential

Aside from its partnership with LTSB, SRG also practices what it preaches around staff opportunities through its 18-month Hypo programme – a centrally funded, internal training programme for high potential individuals that the firm believes could be its future leaders. The broker launched the scheme in 2020 and sources candidates for it annually.

“One of the things we try to avoid [is] where people work really hard and then all the good jobs go to people that get parachuted in,” Anderson explained.

“It’s primarily for companies that we’ve acquired that have young talent [and that] probably can’t afford to support them through that [career progression] journey. We give [that talent] exposure to learning experiences that would be hard for them to otherwise get.”

More than half of the programme’s first cohort have now “been promoted or have got profit and loss responsibility or have gone on to do more”, Anderson added.

“Those guys now mentor the new guys coming through the programme – so it reinvests back into the business.”