Leigh Moore (pictured) did not set out to become a transformation leader in reinsurance. His career began in the world of debits and credits, training as a management accountant before discovering that the spreadsheets, formulas, and code underpinning the finance function interested him more than the balance sheets themselves.
That curiosity pulled him deeper into the technology stack of data-driven businesses. Excel and formulas led to Access, and then into SQL Server and data warehousing, taking him out of accountancy and into full-time technology.
After consulting roles delivering business intelligence and data warehousing solutions, Moore joined Bet365. There, in one of the most demanding digital trading environments, he saw what he describes as “how fast-paced customer-focused software delivery can work” and learned quickly that “value was measured in outcomes that mattered to customers, not by tasks ticked on a plan.”
That experience informed subsequent work leading agile transformations in financial services, including Coventry Building Society and an online casino operator and platform provider, before he was approached to join Lloyd’s of London. There, Moore was brought in to deliver the early (pre-joint Venture) capabilities of Blueprint Two, including “the digital spine” and “the digital gateway” intended to drive the digital placement of risks.
From there, he moved to Willis Towers Watson to deliver the Neuron Digital Trading platform into production, a digital marketplace with submission, enrichment, and quote capabilities before taking on his current role at Hannover Re.
Today, he finds himself at Hannover Re, leading the global single risk data transformation programme, a multi‑year effort to standardise cedant data and overhaul how it is ingested, validated and provisioned across the global branch network.
Moore’s description of the starting point will sound familiar to many reinsurance professionals. Cedant data arrives “in a multitude of formats, file types, and structures”. Field names, column orders and structures often change without warning.
“Purely from an ingestion and a storage point of view, that makes it seemingly impossible to have a centralized system, especially using traditional, relational data models” he notes.
The consequences land squarely on the actuarial and data operations functions. Instead of analysing portfolios and quantifying risk, Moore says, teams are “crunching data, writing Python, R or SQL” just to get datasets into a usable state; a process which can take days, even weeks.
The direction of travel is now to move more of that effort upstream. “If you can standardise and validate data earlier in the process, you remove a lot of friction later on.” It’s about shifting the burden away from manual intervention and embedding it into the way data is handled from the point it arrives.
Ultimately, the goal is to give business and actuarial teams access to data they can trust. “You need a consistent, reliable view of the data, so people can focus on decisions rather than reconciliation.”
The scope of the task is daunting. Hannover Re has “multiple branches located across 5 continents,” spanning diverse markets and, each with its own operations, systems, regulations and data requirements.
As with most early-stage adoption of new digital capabilities, the business is exploring this through targeted pilots that offer a meaningful balance of scale and complexity. These environments provide a practical proving ground for improving data handling, processing efficiency, and complete workflow design before broader rollout.
Even where capabilities are relatively mature, there’s still a surprising amount of manual effort sitting behind the scenes. That’s pretty consistent across the market. “We’ve digitised parts of the journey, but not always the whole thing end-to-end.” A lot of the opportunity now is in joining those pieces up properly and taking friction out of the process.
There’s a clear direction of travel towards cloud and more flexible architectures, but it’s rarely as simple as “lift and shift.” Different markets and regulatory environments mean you have to adapt as you go. “There isn’t a single blueprint that works everywhere, you have to design for context.” The key is building in a way that lets you evolve over time, rather than locking yourself into something too rigid early on.
More broadly, the shift away from legacy infrastructure is well underway, but it’s not an overnight change. “Most organisations are somewhere in the middle, not at the start, not at the end.” The focus now is on steadily improving scalability, flexibility, and cost over time, rather than trying to solve everything in one go.
Like most firms, the delivery model involves a mix of internal teams and delivery partners, but the specifics matter less than how those relationships are set up to support outcomes. “It’s not about who builds it, it’s about how effectively you work together to deliver the outcomes.”
Delivery is often spread across multiple locations and time zones, which brings its own challenges. “You’re dealing with different ways of working, different contexts, and you have to find a rhythm that works across all of that.” But ultimately, this isn’t just a technology exercise. “Tech enables it, but the real change is in how people work and how processes evolve around it.”
Crucially, pace comes from not designing a single monolithic platform with fully specified, up-front requirements. Instead, the team is working iteratively, prioritising outcomes for branches and functions and making data available to existing tools rather than baking in tightly coupled integrations that may outlive the applications they serve.
“We're not flying blind or making stuff up on the fly” he insists, pushing back on caricatures and misconceptions of agile delivery. The programme has a clear view of where it needs to be by 2027, but “how we get there” is intentionally flexible, shaped by what is learned as each slice of capability is rolled out.
Introducing an iterative delivery model into a sector whose entire business is the management of risk presents its own tensions.
“Insurance, by its very nature, is risk-averse,” Moore observes. Many senior stakeholders have grown up with “a detailed project plan that tells them when everything is going to be happening, despite that project plan being out of date the second it's printed or distributed.”
By contrast, Moore will often tell them only that a given outcome will land “somewhere between these two dates,” dependent on what is learned along the way. To explain the approach, he uses the classic “cone of uncertainty”: “when we're in the wide part of the cone, we don't know a lot. Until we get towards the narrow point, then we know a lot more, and we can be a lot more prescriptive and predictable.”
He is quick to emphasise the capability of the local teams but notes that many “probably haven't worked in the cross jurisdictional way they are right now,” and that working practices must evolve on both sides. “One size does not fit all.”
Moore describes his role as one of coaching and mentoring: “taking people on a journey; to change their way of thinking about software delivery, and to get them thinking in an iterative, product-centric way. Ultimately, the only effective way to do that is to show them rather than telling them.”
Executive sponsorship has been strong, from the top of Hannover Re all the way through. Moore says, “support has been almost complete and overwhelming.”
Earlier initiatives, he argues anecdotally, often tried to fix isolated parts of the value chain without considering the whole business process. The current programme is explicitly end-to-end, “from the data landing to the data being available to an actuarial team, looking at whether or not a particular treaty or a particular group of policies is commercially viable.”
The end‑state the programme is aiming for is clear: “seamless data ingestion, validation, and provisioning in any format and with significant, if not near total, reduction in the manual hand cranking that business teams have to do in order to work with their data.”
Asked which digital initiatives he sees as having truly shifted the market, Moore points first to Brit Ki and its algorithmically driven follow-only syndicate, he notes how algorithmic capacity can scale once it proves its worth.
He also points to Neuron, where he previously led delivery at Willis Towers Watson.
What marks these platforms out, in his view, is their ability to take a digital broker submission, run the necessary completeness and enrichment checks, and route risks through to an algorithmic underwriting decision within predefined tolerances.
In a market historically “full of unstructured data” and reliant on documents and spreadsheets pinging between London, offshore processing centres and client offices, Moore argues that “anybody doing” serious work on converting unstructured into structured data “is moving the needle.”
Looking three to five years out, he expects “algorithmic underwriting to get more prevalent” across the industry, supported by “a decision engine that takes some of the human intervention away.” There will, he believes, always be “a human in the loop,” at least to set tolerances and monitor performance.
He also anticipates a rapid evolution in methods “of getting unstructured data into a structured format” and the use of so-called agentic AI to streamline workflow processes that today rely on large offshore teams keying, reconciling and correcting inbound data.
Despite the hype, Moore is cautious about the current phase of AI adoption, especially in contexts where underlying data is still fragmented.
Moore is clear that “no organization should be embarking on a digital initiative in 2026 without having a consideration of AI,” but the priority today is to get ingestion, standardisation and validation right across the group, rather than bolt machine learning on top of unreliable inputs.
He expects the AI landscape itself to look very different by the time Hannover Re’s pilots are fully embedded in 2027, and “completely different” again by 2031, when the group aims to have all sites on the global single‑risk solution. Part of the design philosophy is therefore to keep options open for future tools, rather than locking into the current crop of generative platforms.
Where Moore sees the greatest promise is in augmentation rather than replacement. “We can utilise augmented intelligence by, in our case with Hannover Re, freeing them up to do the job that we want them to be doing, not the admin and the data cleansing,” he argues.
“It’s easy to think of AI as just replacing people, replacing jobs. That may be true in some cases, but it should be seen more as an augmentation of our human intelligence.”
He draws a parallel with software development, where predictions that AI will eliminate the need for junior coders miss the point and that “your senior developer still needs to troubleshoot it, bug fix it and make it fit for purpose, and without junior developers, where do the senior developers come from?” and that code produced by today’s generative tools is “functional, but it's by no means optimal, yet.”
Moore believes the next wave of change in the London market will be driven as much from within as from Insurtech’s pushing in from outside.
He points to firms like Ki, Neuron and others “looking at driving into the Lloyds market” as evidence that change can be delivered in smaller, modular pieces rather than via “monolithic change programs.” Over time, he suggests, these initiatives “are going to ultimately be greater than the sum of their parts.”
But he also forecasts a generational shift. New joiners “are not used to carrying around paper folios,” he says. “They want to have a degree of digitalization, they want to carry an iPad instead of a file, they want to submit stuff electronically rather than typing it all out into an email.”
As that cohort moves up the hierarchy and “more traditional workforce naturally age out of the market,” Moore expects internal expectations to align much more closely with the digital journeys being designed today.
For all the complexity of his day job, Moore is clear that he does not live and breathe digital transformation around the clock. Away from Hannover Re, he has embraced a different kind of risk – on snow.
“I learned to ski three years ago, and I can't think of a better way to spend my time than throwing myself head-first down a really steep mountain with two skis attached to my feet,” he says. “I absolutely love it.”
He also “loves to cycle, cook and travel”, ideally combining the latter with his passion for skiing. “The closest thing I'll ever get to a religious experience is being stood at 3,000 meters on top of a mountain, looking across at all the other mountains. I think it's just breathtaking,” he reflects.
It is a telling image for someone whose professional life centres on navigating uncertainty. In both domains, Moore seems most comfortable on steep terrain, provided he can see just far enough ahead to know where he is going.
