Legal & General Reinsurance has appointed Tom Ault (pictured) as chief executive, promoting him from within the business he has helped build since 2019.
He succeeds Amy Ellison, who has led L&G Re since 2021 and is returning to London to become the group's chief internal auditor.
L&G Re is the Bermuda-based international reinsurance arm of Legal & General Group, supporting the pension risk transfer market across the UK, US, Canada and Europe through bespoke annuity and reinsurance structures.
Ault joined L&G Re in 2019 as chief business development officer, a role in which he led the firm's external reinsurance activity and built out strategic client relationships. He brings more than 25 years across reinsurance and pensions in the UK, Canada and Bermuda, having previously spent 19 years at Aon, where he was a partner in the retirement consulting practice and held senior roles covering pension risk settlement and longevity in Canada.
Ellison, a chartered accountant who joined L&G in 2016, took over as L&G Re CEO in June 2021 after earlier roles including finance director for the group's investment management arm. Her move into the chief internal auditor role keeps her within the wider L&G Group rather than marking a departure from the business.
Reinsurers sit behind most of the large pension risk transfer deals that UK brokers and consultants bring to market, and leadership stability there affects how much capacity is available and how quickly deals get priced. L&G's own institutional retirement division, now led by Gareth Mee, oversaw a global annuity book worth an estimated £96 billion as of mid-2025, and the group has set an ambition to write between £50 billion and £65 billion of UK pension risk transfer business over 2024 to 2028.
That ambition sits against a UK pension buyout market that S&P Global Ratings analysis has suggested could absorb up to £500 billion of British pension obligations over the next decade, a scale that has already produced headline transactions such as BP's £1.6 billion deal with L&G last year.
For brokers and trustees weighing which insurer can actually deliver on a large or complex transaction, knowing who runs the reinsurance capacity behind the scenes, and how experienced they are with cross-border structuring, is a genuine part of due diligence rather than a footnote.
Gareth Mee, chief executive of institutional retirement, framed the appointment as reflecting Bermuda's role in the group's broader ambitions. "Bermuda [provides] the scale and capital efficiency that underpin our international ambitions," he said, adding that Ault's experience and understanding of clients make him well placed to lead the business through its next phase of international growth.
Ault, for his part, pointed to what he described as the strength of the team and client relationships built over his seven years with the business, saying he was looking forward to working with partners on delivering what he called long-term value in the next chapter for L&G Re.
Choosing an internal successor with deep client relationships, rather than bringing in an outside hire, signals that L&G wants continuity in how it approaches the reinsurance side of pension risk transfer at a moment when demand for that capacity shows no sign of slowing.
With trustees increasingly comparing insurers not just on pricing but on execution certainty for large and complex schemes, the reinsurance layer that sits behind a deal is becoming a more visible part of how brokers assess which provider can actually get a transaction over the line.
