QBE Europe in board restructure

QBE European Operations has made a number of changes at board level, which it says are designed to position the business for the future.

It follows the appointment of Kathy Lisson as its new chief operating officer, who began the role at the start of the month after joining from Brit Insurance where she spent four years as chief operating officer.

The insurer adopted a revised corporate management structure from 1 June, which incorporated a number of changes.

Phil Dodridge’s role, formerly chief actuarial officer, is to be expanded to that of chief risk officer (CRO), a newly created board position. The CRO will have a broad remit across the performance management and reporting, enterprise risk management and governance of the business.

Robert Nias will take on an expanded role as director of business performance and reporting. Reporting to Phil Dodridge, he will cover all aspects of underwriting performance management and reporting, including business planning.

Ian Beckerson becomes director of compliance and governance. Also reporting to Phil Dodridge, his role is expanded to cover corporate governance as a whole and he will assume responsibility for Company Secretarial as well as Compliance.

Finally, as previously announced, John Neal, chief operating officer (COO), became CUO in succession to Peter Grove from 1 June 2009.

QBE said that John Neal’s role will in future take on a broad responsibility for business development, including the leadership of its eight product underwriting divisions and two distribution divisions. Kathy Lisson will oversee QBE’s claims, IT and operational support functions throughout Europe.

Steven Burns, chief executive of QBE said: “The existing QBE management structure in Europe has been stable for several years whilst the complexity and scale of the business has grown considerably. This new structure realigns management roles to support John Neal and Kathy Lisson’s new responsibilities, and also introduces the role of CRO under Phil Dodridge in formal recognition of the importance of enterprise risk management and the challenges of implementing Solvency II.”