Soon after Inga Beale started working in the London insurance market in the early 1980s, sexist intimidation almost drove her to quit.
“I changed my behaviour to be like a man — that’s how I coped with it,” she recalls. “I would make sure I could drink 12 pints in The Lamb with the boys, that sort of thing.”
When the laddish antics turned into outright bullying, the office became unbearable for the young underwriter. She fled the City. After a few months trekking and cycling across Asia and Australia, she temped as a receptionist in Sydney. It was just to raise some cash, but she found the experience illuminating. Her colleagues treated the female boss with respect.
“I was sort of, ‘Wow, they don’t talk about her being a woman, they talk about her being the boss.’ And I was so inspired: ‘You can just be yourself, and be a manager.’”
She went back to insurance, and a remarkable career lay ahead. Three decades on, Lloyd’s of London — among the most venerable names in world business — selected Ms Beale to be its first female chief executive.
Speaking in her office at the top of the landmark Lloyd’s headquarters on Lime Street, she tells how she is trying to drag the market into the 21st century.
Ms Beale spent much of her career outside the UK. When she returned to London, she was surprised by what she found. “I thought, ‘Oh gosh — it hasn’t changed much, has it, from when I left. This place must be ripe for some modernisation.’”
Despite the modernity conveyed by the Richard Rogers-designed “inside out” building, with its exposed ducts and elevator shafts, the three centuries-old organisation it houses remains among the most fusty in the City.
Before the FT’s photographer accompanies the chief executive on to the main underwriting floor, he is told he is one of the few men ever to be admitted without a suit and tie. Women were not allowed in at all until 1972.
Yet there are clear limits to Ms Beale’s apparent radicalism. She is not convinced about the need for gender quotas at Lloyd’s, even though she has been a supporter of the concept and also benefited from quotas at General Electric’s insurance arm, where she spent 14 years, with postings in Munich, Paris and Kansas.
“I’m influencing it perhaps in other ways. We’ve got it happening naturally — just by having conversations about making people feel included.”
And her case for drawing from a wider pool of talent is based on business necessity, not equality activism. Lloyd’s will not be able to keep up with globalisation “if we keep hiring the same people from the same backgrounds”.
Companies around the world still turn to Lloyd’s to insure complex risks, from satellites and oil rigs to employer liability and shareholder lawsuits. But its position is under threat as emerging markets develop their own insurance centres. To stay ahead, Ms Beale argues, Lloyd’s needs more people who properly understand policyholders’ businesses overseas — and who speak their language.
Another important part of her agenda is to update the market’s paper-based infrastructure. Even though they are surrounded by computers, brokers still walk between underwriters’ desks with “slipcases”, bulging with bundles of documents, under their arms.
“I think it’s because of the physical nature of the market here and because everybody was used to meeting physically and doing everything in person, there was no need to digitise.”
Lloyd’s has strived for several years to upgrade its systems. The previous chief executive, Richard Ward, stood aside from the job partly because of slow progress on modernisation. Some efforts, such as a push to replace slipcases with iPads, were seen as gimmicky.
Ms Beale is pursuing more technical, under-the-surface changes to IT systems, although some Lloyd’s executives say privately that there is still little to show for it.
“When you’re taking on a huge modernisation programme like this you can’t do the whole thing in one go, so we’re talking several years,” Ms Beale says. “Changing culture is one of the toughest things to do and it will not happen overnight.”
Ms Beale, who is bisexual and last month topped a power list of the world’s leading LGBT executives compiled by OUTstanding and the Financial Times, is similarly eager to reassure incumbent Lloyd’s workers about her diversity drive. “You may have people [who say] … ‘Does it mean I’m out of a job?’ Well, it doesn’t … We just want to hire different people.”
Her role is an unusual one. Lloyd’s is a market, not a company. The chief executive — a former competitive rugby player — supervises the almost 100 member underwriting syndicates that comprise Lloyd’s, as well as being a cheerleader. How does she juggle the roles? “I like to be very disciplined … this much time with brokers, this much time with underwriters, this much time with regulators.”
Her role also requires her to be on guard against the kind of mistakes that led to huge losses in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which almost destroyed Lloyd’s and ruined some of the wealthy individuals — known as “names” — who financed it.
She has some concerns that global insurance risks today are being mispriced. Persistently low interest rates and an absence of costly natural catastrophes in recent years have put downward pressure on premiums.
“We sell a promise to pay for the future,” she says. “We need to be around, which means we’ve got to get the pricing right. It’s such a difficult message to get across, particularly to customers who obviously are wanting to get good value for money, but they’ve got to understand we have to build a sustainable model.”
At the same time, Ms Beale wants Lloyd’s to take on more emerging and complex risks such as cyber security.
“It’s easier to go after what you know,” she says. “The toughest thing is always to go after the new stuff ��� tough as hell — and perhaps we haven’t and don’t, as a whole industry, invest enough in R&D.”
These days much of the capital that backs Lloyd’s is provided by multinational corporations, not individuals. Japanese insurers alone will soon provide more financing than names do.
Amlin is the latest UK-listed Lloyd’s insurer to fall into overseas hands, accepting a £3.5bn bid this year from Mitsui Sumitomo. Just before she took the Lloyd’s job, Ms Beale’s former employer, Canopius, agreed to be subsumed by another Japanese insurer, Sompo.
The slew of recent takeovers has left the number of Lloyd’s insurers on the London stock market dwindling. Yet the chief executive has a laisser-faire attitude to the dealmaking boom.
“It doesn’t actually particularly matter for us. One of the key reasons that these acquisitions are being made is because they want the Lloyd’s platform. They love the Lloyd’s brand, the reputation, the expertise, the access to specialty business.”
Ms Beale’s secretary soon pops her head around the door. “They’re here.” The interview is cut short by a visiting delegation from the Chinese insurance company Taiping, in town to sign a co-operation deal.
“I’m really not going to get on to the human rights thing. All I know is when I go there and I just look at what’s happening, how quickly it’s happening, how big it is … we have to get some relationships going there. We really have to consider the future.”
Culled from FT
Join BusinessDay whatsapp Channel, to stay up to date
Open In Whatsapp
