Miller’s Group COO Clare Lebecq (pictured), is steering one of the London market’s most ambitious technology overhauls, consolidating a fragmented estate onto strategic platforms, experimenting with AI, and bringing the workforce with her.
Clare Lebecq’s route to Miller Insurance has been shaped by some of the London market’s most influential institutions and by a long-standing focus on specialty wholesale business, which she describes as her “heartland”.
Prior to joining Miller, Lebecq served as CEO of the London Market Group before moving in 2021 to Specialist Risk Group (SRG), where she became Group COO. She remained at SRG for around three years before an unexpected approach shifted the trajectory of her career.
“Miller had been a company that I’d admired from afar for a while. It has a really solid reputation in the market, a very professional organisation, and is backed by incredibly prestigious global institutional investors in GIC.”
The move also meant returning to a part of the insurance sector she knows best. “It was very intriguing what they were doing, and I felt that it was something I’d really like to do, go back into the specialty wholesale market.”
Today she is group COO, with responsibility for all of Miller’s global offices.
When Lebecq arrived at Miller, the firm was already some distance into a multiyear modernisation effort, but parts of the journey were proving difficult. The broker had started to invest in a handful of strategic platforms but was operating across multiple legacy systems and lacked what she describes as a clear IT strategy, particularly as acquisitions mounted.
“We were beginning to acquire more and more businesses, and the estate was beginning to look fragmented,” she said. “We needed to create strong platforms for growth.”
That ambition has been underpinned by the ownership structure. Miller is backed by Singapore’s GIC, which, crucially, is not bound to the shorter investment windows that often characterise private equity in the broking space.
According to Lebecq, the investor has kept faith while the slow, unglamorous foundational work has been carried out. “These implementations have taken time, but they’ve said it’s fine they understand what we’re doing, they understand that we’ll reap the benefits once those foundations are in and they’ve been hugely supportive on that journey with us.”
Miller’s technology strategy can now be summarised as a deliberate bet on a small number of high‑impact platforms. Over time, the aim is to coalesce the business around three distinct broking and distribution engines that together will support its wholesale, facilities and MGA activities, underpinned by a standardised invoicing layer.
At the centre of the wholesale operation is Salesforce. Miller has not confined it to customer relationship management; rather, it has reconfigured the system as a full broker workbench.
“We’ve implemented Salesforce, and I think we’re quite proud to say that we’re one of the only brokers, if not the only broker, in the London market that has implemented Salesforce from back to front,” Lebecq said. “A lot of organisations have implemented Salesforce as a CRM; we’ve got it as a broker workbench.”
Alongside Salesforce sits Catalyst, an in‑house system written on the Mendix low‑code platform and aimed at higher‑volume, more “facilitised” business.
The third platform is now in development as Miller scales its MGA ambitions. Recent hires, have been brought in “to really build our MGA platform, and in the fullness of time we’ll have a third broking platform for our MGA business.”
Beneath those layers, Miller runs OpenTwins as its invoicing platform, giving the Group a common financial backbone across the three trading environments.
Miller has opted for a mixed delivery model, with significant development capability retained internally and selective use of external partners where scale and specialist expertise are required.
“Catalyst is our in-house platform. We have a team of developers developing that and putting more and more products onto it. That often goes hand in hand with our portals proposition, which again has an in-house team,” said Lebecq.
Salesforce, however, is deliberately treated as a strategic ecosystem. “With Salesforce, we have some people in-house that we use, but Salesforce is a huge and an important partner to us, as is PwC. It’s a really good collaboration, particularly on the Salesforce element of our platform.”
The choice of Salesforce predates Lebecq’s tenure, but she sees the logic clearly enough. The system is, in her words, “huge”, with “a huge amount of firepower” and “incredibly adaptable”, making it a natural foundation for an organisation pursuing both growth and standardisation across multiple jurisdictions.
“What we were trying to do was choose a vendor that would serve us for the future and be that foundational element, one that’s adaptable enough to mould to the nuances of our international offices. “We wanted platforms that had that adaptability to be able to mould into the needs of the various jurisdictions to best serve their clients.”
At the heart of the digital transformation is a desire to replace anecdote with evidence in the running of a global specialty broker. Legacy systems and local workarounds made it difficult to understand where processes were breaking down or how service levels varied from one team or office to another.
By moving onto standard platforms, Miller has begun to expose and measure those frictions. Adoption of the Salesforce broker platform has now reached most of the firm’s business units. “At the moment we’ve got about 85% of our in-scope business onto the Salesforce broker platform. So far, we’ve got about a 99% adoption rate across new and renewal,” Lebecq reports.
However, workflow data is already reshaping how the organisation targets process improvement. “With the use of workflow, we’ve been able to identify where our pinch points are and where we need to take further action to review processes. Previously it was a bit anecdotal where attention needed to be focused. Now we’ve got the data to be able to say, ‘At this particular point in the process we’ve got some latency and things are idling there for too long.’ From a client perspective, we need to take action to ensure that client service is spot on.”
One of the near‑term goals is to automate the creation of renewal packs, a task that relies on consistent data capture. “We’re hoping to automate the renewal packs, but we couldn’t have done that until all of the technology was embedded within Miller,” she said.
If Salesforce and Catalyst provide the structural backbone, the firm’s experimentation with artificial intelligence is being channelled through a separate, but connected, initiative: Miller Labs.
“ A couple of years ago we created Miller Labs. We have about 30 tools that we’ve deployed within Miller Labs that people throughout the whole organisation can use,” said Lebecq. “They’re mainly focused on efficiency, summarising documents and ingesting documents.”
This year, the broker is significantly upping the ante. “This year we’ve created an external–internal partnership to really bolster our use,” she said, pointing to proof‑of‑concept work with PwC and Salesforce that has stress‑tested Miller’s data maturity.
Miller is convinced that AI and automation will play a decisive role in the next phase of its transformation. Lebecq is realistic about the pace and direction of change across the industry.
“It’s always difficult to predict that far because technology is changing so much. AI is now the buzzword, but a couple of years ago it was only just emerging and it was very niche,” she said. “You’ve got to say it’s going to be AI and automation. As we get up the maturity curve in terms of data, we’ll see more and more of that.”
For specialty lines, she expects a different set of use cases from those already common in personal lines. “In terms of specialty, I think there’s a different use case, but you’ll see it automate and facilitate a lot of the mundane tasks we do. I can see it really helping with email and extracting data from email to populate systems so people don’t have to do it, and right up to drafting slips based on information within proposal forms.”
She is also acutely aware that the technological frontier keeps shifting. “Because of the rate of change of technology, something will come along in 18 months’ time that you and I don’t even know about yet, and that will shift the dial again. It will be the next AI, and we’ll see rapid change, a bit like we have seen with AI itself.”
Her own exposure to the latest advances has reinforced just how quickly the landscape is moving. Speaking about Salesforce’s Agentforce event, she notes: “They did a live demo of an agent on the phone. You couldn’t tell it was an agent because it sounded like a person asking perfectly reasonable questions to a candidate who had applied for a job. It’s incredible how much it has advanced.”
Yet even as Miller explores these tools, she insists that deployment must be anchored in the firm’s core identity. “Miller has a very, very strong value proposition. We’ve just revised that value proposition, and we’ve got to make sure that however we deploy these tools stays true to that value proposition for our clients and our markets,” she said.
For all the focus on architecture, data and AI, Lebecq is adamant that the toughest part of Miller’s transformation has been human rather than technical.
“When I joined, the change management element needed a review. Both she and Group CIO Steve Jolley arrived at similar conclusions about the need to rethink how the programme was being led and communicated.
“There needed to be a step back and refocus on how we’d approached the change management piece. That was one lesson, and it was really difficult because we were in a repeat-sale situation. The implementation was going forward, but not necessarily in a way that was going to be completely successful. People were a little bit jaded by the process, and we were coming in and saying, ‘Now we’ve got to go again.’”
That challenge, asking people to commit to the same destination but via a different route, has shaped her thinking as a leader. “Our industry has had a few noticeable big shifts in the way we do things, the implementation of ETFs was a big thing, so we know we can do it,” she said. “But inevitably, when you’re trying to service your clients, produce the business and make the number, any distraction can be difficult. Change management is always going to be difficult.”
Since then, Miller has invested heavily in both the central change team and in equipping broader leadership and staff with tools to understand and navigate change. “We’re investing a lot not only in our change team, but also in the wider organisation, to recognise and understand their own personal reaction to change, as well as how to deal with change when they are trying to implement a new way of working or a new process,” she explains.
Reflecting on what she would now do differently, Lebecq is philosophical. “No implementation is ever perfect, and there are always lessons you can learn from what you’ve done.”
Looking ahead, Lebecq expects the organisational skills mix at Miller to continue to evolve as AI and automation move from pilots to industrialisation.
“The upskilling we’re envisaging around the AI piece mean jobs will need to be created because all of the agents we have will need to be overseen and the quality of the output will need to be reviewed,” she said. “Those jobs don’t exist at the moment, and that’s quite exciting.”
This opens up new career paths, especially for younger professionals. “Anybody coming in will see a new raft of jobs and skill sets required to oversee those agents, and that’s exciting for young people coming into the organisation,” she adds.
On the more immediate training front, Miller relies on a dedicated internal function. “We’ve got a great in-house training team. They use various methodologies: face-to-face, a lot of video, and user manuals. We’re using the full gamut of methods to train people throughout the organisation.”
Crucially, she does not see AI as a destroyer of roles. Rather, it changes their content. “I absolutely see AI and technology as building capacity rather than removing roles. It takes away the mundane, repetitive tasks, and frees people up to do more meaningful work,” she said. “We see new roles emerging around overseeing agents and validating the quality of outputs. That’s additive. It’s about redeploying people to higher-value activities rather than replacing them.”
Away from Salesforce dashboards and governance frameworks, Lebecq’s life is shaped by two very different pursuits: movement and making.
She is a long‑time enthusiast of yoga and Pilates, “Part of yoga is the mindfulness and the relaxing.”
In the last few years, though, a new passion has taken hold. “About three years ago, I took up pottery and ceramics. Now I have my own studio at home where I create stuff, and I’m going back to university in May to do an advanced course”.
The output is far from a purely private pleasure. “I sell them at craft fairs locally. I live in a little village and we have quite a big village fête. I probably do about three or four markets a year, because otherwise I just get overrun with creations, and there’s only so much pottery you can have in your house.”
It is a quietly fitting counterpoint to the day job: methodical, tactile, and built on the patient layering of foundations, much like the transformation she is overseeing at Miller.
