Four companies have announced senior appointments spanning regional growth, marine liability underwriting, insurance technology and Lloyd’s actuarial leadership.
Arch Insurance’s UK regional division has appointed Karen Donald (pictured, first from left) as branch manager of its Glasgow operations. She reports to Janine Starkie, regional manager for North and Scotland.
Donald brings more than 35 years of insurance experience to the role, most of it spent exclusively in the Scottish market. She joins from AXA, where she was most recently a regional underwriting manager. Her remit covers day-to-day branch operations, broker distribution management and the delivery of Arch’s growth strategy across Scotland.
Markel Insurance has made two appointments within its marine and energy liability underwriting team in London, both of which sit within the firm’s recently consolidated marine transportation business. That business brings together hull and hull war, marine energy cargo and offshore (MECO), marine and energy liabilities, and transport and logistics under a single structure.
Josephine Stroud (pictured, second from left) joins as head of energy liability, having spent more than 18 years in liability broking and underwriting at Willis Towers Watson and, most recently, AXA XL, where she focused on underwriting for oil and gas sector clients and the energy transition. She will work alongside Rhys O’Neill, head of marine liability, developing multi-line and cross-class facilities.
Jenny McFarlane (pictured, centre) joins as senior underwriter in the same team, coming from Tokio Marine HCC International with more than eight years of marine and energy liability experience. Her focus will be product development, broker engagement and identifying growth opportunities within the portfolio. Both report into Grant Smith, director of marine transportation.
Stroud described the current environment as shaped by geopolitical volatility, energy security challenges and disruption to global shipping routes, pressures that Markel says informed the decision to consolidate underwriting expertise under a single marine structure.
OneAdvent, the specialist MGA incubator, has appointed Sebastian Basso (pictured, second from right) as chief digital officer. Based in London and reporting to chief executive Tim Quayle, Basso will lead the company’s digital innovation strategy alongside Kristian Feldborg, chief technology officer, together forming a dedicated digital innovation department.
Basso brings more than a decade of technology and product strategy experience from insurtech firms, AI start-ups and scale-ups. At enterprise agentic marketing platform Yext, he built an automated analytics proof of concept that developed into a full data infrastructure programme. Quayle said the firm first encountered Basso when he was part of a team that launched a personal lines MGA on the OneAdvent platform during the insurtech wave, and that they had stayed in contact since.
OneAdvent’s model of providing infrastructure and governance support to MGAs rather than operating as one means the CDO role is as much about scaling internal capability as it is about client-facing technology.
Antares Global has promoted Meera Rajoo-Oakley to the newly created role of chief actuary of commercial, bringing together pricing, reserving and exposure management for its commercial division under a single leader. The commercial division comprises Lloyd’s Syndicate 1274 and Antares Re. She reports to Mark Graham, Antares Commercial chief executive.
Rajoo-Oakley joined Antares in 2017 and has served as chief actuary of its Lloyd’s syndicate since 2020, giving her close to a decade with the business. She has more than 18 years of actuarial experience across the UK and international re/insurance market, with earlier roles at Direct Line Group and Grant Thornton. She is also chair of the Committee of Actuaries in the Lloyd’s Market.
The promotion consolidates three functions previously held separately. For a division operating across both Lloyd’s and a reinsurance entity, that integration puts one set of eyes across the full exposure picture, which is particularly relevant when pricing and reserving assumptions need to align across both platforms.
