Vero New Zealand acting chief customer officer Paul Gallop’s (pictured) desire to earn as a teenager landed him a job in insurance over 40 years ago, and he has not looked back since.
In an interview with Insurance Business, Gallop quipped: “I disappointed my parents when I was 18, halfway through Year 13, when I said to them I wanted to go and buy a car and go to work. They had aspirations for me to go to uni; all my other siblings have got university degrees. They’re all really clever people apart from me, but I wanted to buy a car.
“I got two job offers within two weeks as you could back then. One was at the Post Office, and that paid $7,600 a year. And the AMP job that I had – that’s morphed into Vero today – that paid $8,400. I knew $8,400 was more, but I had no clue about insurance.”
Gallop admitted it probably took him more or less six years before he ‘got’ insurance.
“I was certainly no child prodigy; I was the opposite of that,” the industry veteran declared. “But I loved the people aspect of it and being able to work with customers face to face. That was always my thing – relationships and people… From day one, I was answering the phone, I was serving customers, and there’d be claims, there’d be policy alterations, there’d be new business to write.
“I found it very easy to fall into insurance 42 years ago but impossible to leave. The ‘impossible to leave’ piece is because I love helping people, and ours is a people business. I’ve always loved being able to talk to brokers and advisers, or customers and clients, and try and help them solve their problems. That’s one of the main reasons.”
Gallop has since become an insurance ‘geek’ who never forgets past weather events as if “they’re kind of imprinted on my brain,” he said.
“Starting way back in 1984, we had some floods in Invercargill,” Gallop noted. “In ‘99 we had Queenstown floods, and we had our largest-ever claim – it was a chemist shop in Queenstown, and it was more than a million dollars. And then you go through the early 2000s and there were floods in Manawatū, there were snowstorms in Timaru, hail a little bit later, and obviously the terrible Canterbury earthquake sequence… And now we’ve got January 27 and Gabrielle.”
Through all those events, Gallop stayed not only in the industry but in the same company from 1981. He most recently served as executive manager for strategic broker partnerships before stepping up as acting chief customer officer at the Suncorp-owned intermediated business.
“I know a lot of people move around, but I’ve always found that, on the Vero side, there are so many cool jobs to do I didn’t need to look anywhere else,” the stalwart said. “And I’ve always recognised and valued loyalty.”
That isn’t to say, though, that the prospect of making the switch to broking had not crossed Gallop’s mind after his many years on the insurer side of the fence.
He told Insurance Business: “I had considered that from time to time. Because when you’ve been around the block a bit, opportunities come along. And I look at my friends in the broking industry and most of them are pretty successful, and I thought I could have done that but I didn’t want to. One [reason was] I liked the security of being paid every second Tuesday, and so I’ve been paid every second Tuesday for probably 1,100 Tuesdays. I love that part about the security that I have.
“And I always enjoyed the work. For a lot of my early career I was out selling commercial insurance with brokers and advisers, and often directly with clients giving advice. This was in the ‘80s and ‘90s. I don’t give advice today, but that’s what I did as a young man and really enjoyed that people aspect. You could learn about people; you could learn about their business, and you could see it grow.
“And then occasionally a claim might happen and then you’d see the policy in action. If you had given some good advice and the policy responded, then that was a really good feeling… I could go and work in lots of different industries, but for me it’s the worthiness of what we do that I love.”
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