All our insurance sector hiring data covers senior level appointments, moves and promotions, sourced from TALNT, Sheffield Haworth’s proprietary AI-driven platform for tracking executive moves, which gathers and analyses data from 3000+ reputable public sources around the globe.
Top 10 senior moves in February
Of the 177 senior global insurance moves tracked over the last month, the ones that received the most interest from our subscribers on TALNT were:
- Liliang Zhu, who has been appointed Chief Technology Officer at growing InsurTech firm Igloo. Zhu is a senior architect and product development leader with over 20 years of experience building scalable cloud solutions for the insurance industry. In his new role he will lead Igloo’s tech and innovation strategy and oversee the growth and operations of its tech hubs in China and India.
- Thomas Rose, who has been appointed Head of Capital Markets, North America, digital insurance risk transfer and investment platform Vesttoo. Rose, a former BlackRock Director, joins Vesttoo from 3iQ (US), a leading crypto-asset firm in Canada that launched the first regulated crypto funds in North America. In his new role, Rose will be responsible for continuing to grow Vesttoo’s investor base via his team of capital markets specialists covering North America.
- Tim Hopgood, who has been appointed to the newly created role of HR Director, Howden UK & Ireland. Hopgood joins Howden – and the insurance industry – from French food multinational Danone, where he spent the last 12 years of his career, most recently serving as Business Services HR Director. Howden says that the new HR role reflects the importance it places on the retention and attraction of top talent to drive its growth strategy.
- Wendy Crosley, who has joined WTW as Global Director of Underwriting Transformation and Automation within the company’s Insurance Consulting and Technology (ICT) business. Crosley joins WTW from Zurich North America, where she most recently served as Underwriting Solutions Director, Operations and Technology. She brings a strong background in driving enterprise-wide transformation focused on aligning strategic vision to tangible business outcomes.
- Jennifer Butts, who has been appointed Vice President of Information Security at Ventive Technology, the provider of advanced analytics for risk, claims and underwriting solutions. Butts has over 20 years of software experience, specializing in data security, privacy and compliance.
- Dr. David Speights, who has been appointed Vice President of Analytics at the workers compensation division of Berkshire Hathaway Homestate Companies. Speights will enhance BHHC’s use of its decades of data and machine learning models to develop solutions that operationalize data intelligence across the company refining its current analytic practices. Over the last 20 years, Speights was the Chief Data Scientist of Appriss Corporate, which includes Appriss Retail, Appriss Insights, Appriss Health, and The Retail Equation along with a successful consulting business, Equity Decision Systems, LLC.
- Maria Guerico, who has been appointed Climate Tech Industry Practice Leader for North America at Chubb. Guerico is responsible for growing Chubb’s underwriting portfolio and creating products and services to support climate tech companies focused on the efficient and sustainable use of resources, products and technologies aimed at mitigating the impact of climate change.
- Melanie Markwick-Day, who has been appointed Natural Resources Head for Chubb Overseas General. Prior to taking her new role, Markwick-Day served as Head of Upstream Energy and Offshore Renewables for Chubb Global Markets. In that role, she led the launch of Chubb’s offshore renewables product offering. Markwick-Day joined Chubb Overseas General in 2020 as a senior underwriting officer. She began her career in 2009 as a claims specialist for a Lloyd’s of London syndicate.
- Diana Murphy and Vanessa Wittman, who have joined AIG as independent Directors – effective in March. For the past 15 years, Ms. Murphy has been a Managing Director at private equity firm Rocksolid Holdings, LLC. Ms. Wittman was most recently the Chief Financial Officer of Glossier, a digital-first beauty company. She previously served as Chief Financial Officer of Oath, a subsidiary of Verizon; Dropbox; Motorola Mobility, a subsidiary of Google; and Marsh McLennan.
- Tony Tarquini, who has joined digital ecosystem Insurtech Scout as its new Strategy Director. Tarquini has won industry awards for IT innovation and created an extensive network of contacts and a strong reputation amongst the major players in the business.
Global senior insurance hires, February 2023
The following chart shows the overall trend in senior global insurance hires since January 2021 – covering 25 months. After a slowdown in senior appointments in November and December, February built upon the dramatic comeback first seen in January, with the second highest peak in terms of senior moves in any month since the beginning of 2021.
Global senior insurance hires by sub sector, May 2021 – February 2023
Looking deeper at senior hiring trends by sub-sector, we can see that the numbers for February were unusual. Normally, a large increase in overall Insurance sector hiring is driven by Non-Life. However, February shows a sharp decline in Non-Life senior appointments. All the hiring increases were seen un every other sector, with Reinsurance and Brokers and Intermediaries seeing the biggest upswing.
Gender balance of senior global insurance hires, February 2023
Of the new senior appointments we tracked last month, global gender diversity was down on January. Of course, January’s diversity stats were higher than usual, so to some extent February represents a return to normal – from 31% of senior appointments being women back to just 24.3%. The EMEA region led the way in February, with 28.6% of appointments being women, but APAC saw only a single senior female appointment last month (6.3%).
Top 10 companies with the most new appointments in February 2023
Here are the global insurance businesses who made the most senior appointments in February, according to the publicly-available sources tracked in TALNT. WTW and Aon led the way, which is consistent with the overall trend showing a sharp rise in senior hires in the broking sub-sector.
