Leading insurance figures highlight Lloyd’s serious culture challenge

Senior figures in the insurance industry have said that the future of Lloyd’s will depend on its ability to change its culture.

Speaking at the Insurance 3.0 event in London, Vicky Carter chairman of Global Capital Solutions at reinsurance broker Guy Carpenter warned the market’s blueprint for the future will flounder if it doesn’t get the culture right.

“With the recent publicity around Lloyd’s and its plans for the future I think the thing that comes through it the question of culture.

“Yes, there is the growing ability to access and use data and understand your customers, but you have to have the culture to support this. Unless Lloyd’s changes its culture it simply will not succeed.”

She added that Lloyd’s senior management team had been working hard but the plans laid out in its blueprint could only go so far.

“John Neal, Jon Hancock and Bruce Carnegie-Brown have spoken to clients and the wider market and taken that information to create six clear streams for the future, but it requires a change of culture to be delivered. Technology and data are great, but it is not everything. The culture has to change.”

But Stephen Catlin chairman and chief executive of Convex said Lloyd’s required a wider buy in to what it wants to achieve around the culture of the market.

Lead from the front

“However good the two Johns are they cannot change the culture of the individual businesses in the market,” he said.

Catlin added that leadership had to come from the top and that leadership had been leading from the front.

“Where you see strong leadership in the market you see people who want to work at these companies. In terms of Convex it has been humbling to see how many people who worked with us at Catlin who have come to us to say that they want to work with us again.

“I would love to say it is simply down to the fact that we are a great company, but it goes beyond that. These people want to work where they are treated with dignity and fairness.

“Sadly, the distance between the coal face and the leadership grown as companies have got bigger. People are feeling unloved and unsupported as senior management are becoming distant.”