It’s been a solid year for insurance services provider Charles Taylor – to say the least. In September, the firm revealed a 36.1% increase in revenues for the first six months of 2017, which it said underlined “solid business growth.”
But the company is not resting on its laurels: Group CEO David Marock is focused on driving change, which he believes is crucial for the industry.
Insurance Business spoke to Marock about his pathway into insurance, how he climbed the ladder to the top, and his goals for the coming year.
How did you get into insurance?
I studied a business degree, specialising in actuarial science, at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, and after graduating I originally started working in the life insurance, pensions and investment side of things. I qualified as an actuary and spent a couple of years working in actuarial, before moving into business and product development in insurance. I did that for a number of years as the head of a team, then I took a year off to travel around the world.
While travelling, I spent most of that time in Asia, in the Southeast in particular – from India and Nepal to Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia. Then I travelled down to Australia, throughout the States and into Mexico. I then came over to the UK and started working here around 20 years ago.
I joined McKinsey & Company, first working in corporate finance and then in insurance turnaround and transformation. From there I joined
Beazley, where over the course of six years I did almost every role possible; I originally joined to transform the claims team, and then took on one of the underwriting teams too.
Beazley then created a new role of group chief operating officer, which I took on, and on top of that I ended up leading an initiative to start building up the business more in Europe.
In 2011, I was approached to join Charles Taylor as CEO. I’d always wanted to run a business, and I felt like by that time I’d done pretty much every role that I could have besides that. I was approached to come in and grow the business.
What drew you to Charles Taylor as a business?
The business had been around for a long time, more than 150 years. It has a fantastic reputation out in the market for client delivery, for service, and for generally doing the right thing. It had some core businesses that were very strong, with some great people, and yet, at that time, in 2011, the business faced quite a few challenges, and there was quite an urgent need for change.
Everything I have done generally has centred on transformation, and Charles Taylor was a business where it had all of the core ingredients for success, but needed some real change for it to really gain momentum and build in the right way. That combination was very exciting and a great opportunity for me personally.
What are some of the highlights of your career so far?
In my McKinsey days, it was having the opportunity to work on two major turnarounds of UK-based global financial institutions, and having the pleasure of knowing that those two organisations were able to do so, and are now up and running and successful.
At Beazley, it was taking claims – which as an environment has historically been a second-class citizen of sorts – and being able to transform how they were managed in the company, and create something that I think shifted the balance. It became far more of a partnership-driven approach between underwriting and claims.
Finally, at Charles Taylor, over the last six years we’ve managed to double the size of the business, quite materially broaden out our range of offerings, and launch lots of new products and services. We were also appointed by Lloyd’s as a preferred provider on the delegated underwriting authority solution work that’s happening now across the market. That for us is a very positive acknowledgement that the approach we’ve taken in bringing insurance expertise and technology capability together is credible and attractive in the market.
What are some of the challenges you’ve faced?
Going all the way back to the beginning of my career, in retrospect choosing the actuarial path that I initially followed turned out to be more demanding and challenging than I’d imagined.
When I was working in South Africa, I was quite young and was managing projects with people in my team that were twice my age – that required a lot of learning in terms of how to do that in a way that was appropriate, and how to get things done while building relationships with people.
Then when I came over to the UK, I didn’t have much of a network and had to almost rebuild from scratch – that was challenging. When I entered the Lloyd’s market, on one level it felt quite familiar, but on another level, Lloyd’s has its own way of doing things, and it took time to build another set of relationships and connections, and to understand how that market works.
Finally, in my current role I lead what is quite a large and complex business, with clients from all over the world, in quite a fast-moving environment. That’s certainly challenging too, but given my bias towards turnaround and transformation type work, by its nature that comes with challenges along the way.
What are your goals for 2018?
My role as CEO is demanding and intensive, so on both the personal and professional side, my goal is to manage my work-life balance – and I suspect I’m not alone on that! But it’s definitely an important one.
On the purely professional side, as a group we are driving a lot of change, and 2018 is the year in which a number of our bigger initiatives, particularly around insurtech, we really see coming to fruition. Making that happen will definitely be a big part of both mine, and the group’s goals for the coming year.
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