That there’s no one right route or time to pursue a career in re/insurance is never clearer than during a conversation with one of the professionals who make up this richly varied marketplace. The re/insurance journey of Gareth Davies, head of parametric solutions at Howden, is a case in point.
It was after 14 years as a professional rugby player that Davies found his way into the financial services sector, working as a trader on the LME for an investment bank. As a 35-year-old father of young kids, he found himself working alongside traders at the very beginning of their careers, he said, and the effort of keeping up with their energy was leaving him too exhausted to be the kind of dad he wanted to be.
“I was knackered the whole time,” he said. “I was getting up at four in the morning and getting in at nine or 10 at night. I was doing all the socializing it takes to build a network that I should have been doing when I was young and single. I was tired and sleeping in on the weekends so I could function through the week. My life was entirely back to front.”
When Davies was introduced to some brokers and underwriters at Lloyd’s and offered the chance to join a brokerage, it felt like a natural next step and a chance to really turn things around. Reflecting on his journey through the financial services market, Davies noted that he faced the challenge meeting so many professional players at the end of their sporting careers – how to go from being pretty good at something to starting again.
“I was 14 years as a rugby pro, and had done three or four years before that in the amateur days, working as a police officer, it’s a nice feeling to be really good at something, you do take comfort in that,” he said. “It’s quite a common conversation among my generation of players, how it feels to go from being really good at something to not good at something, over the space of a weekend. The question is, how quickly can you fill that trough and get back to being competent, knowledgeable and confident in what you’re doing?”
As somebody for whom ‘good enough’ is never good enough, it was tapping into his natural competitive streak that enabled him to quickly advance to the next level in the early days of his insurance career. He made a bet with another ex-player to see who could complete the ACII exams the quickest. It was those little challenges that really pushed him along, he said, combined with a healthy dose of luck - though he agrees with Tiger Woods’ quip that, “the harder I work, the luckier I get.”
From the self-doubt of those early days, Davies highlighted that he has come to truly appreciate the advantages that stem from bringing a raft of different experiences and skills to a new sector. Now 15 years into his re/insurance broking career, he joined Howden earlier this year, where he had a chance to utilize the skills he gained on the trading floor to bring fresh insight into parametric solutions and weather derivatives, which is still comparatively new in insurance.
“It’s quite an interesting dynamic,” he said. “Because I’m only 15 or so years old in my insurance career, most of the people I deal with in this new area of the insurance market are in their mid-to-late 30s and younger because they came straight from school or college. So there’s a slightly different dynamic between my age peer group and my professional peer group. And I see that there’s value in having somebody with an older head on their shoulders and everything that comes with that in terms of bringing a different approach to the development of a new product.”
Whatever route you take to the market, Davies has seen that there’s a variety of shared traits that it takes to build a meaningful re/insurance career – chief among them resilience. If you want to be effective at anything you do, you need to be stubborn enough not to back down from hitting the targets and standards you set yourself, he said, but equally, you need to be flexible enough to alter your targets, so you keep progressing.
“You have to be willing to learn from hard knocks, because inevitably those will happen,” he advised. “And criticism correctly given should be correctly accepted. Criticism isn’t a word in wide use these days but criticism and positive feedback do amount to the same thing. Correctly delivered, they’re useful. Incorrectly delivered, they’re damaging.”
At its core, he said, success in your career, as in so much of your life, comes down to drive and motivation – and they’re two core characteristics that are impossible to teach people. “People need to want to succeed. You can’t help people to help themselves because the drive needs to come from them.”
That’s what a truly meritocratic environment really looks like, according to Davies - an environment where employers want their teams to thrive and support them in reaching their goals, but equally, those teams are willing to make the right moves and put in the hard work necessary to get where they want to go. There’s a lot of truth in the idiom that consistency beats talent 100% of the time, he said, because it’s that consistency that allows you to develop a long-lasting career.
What has been interesting to see, Davies said, is the strong link between what it takes to be a great sportsperson and a great re/insurance professional. The ability to hear and action feedback, to be a strong team player, to take knocks and learn from them, and the need for honesty and accountability – those are just some of the many threads connecting the two sectors.
Davies is a big believer in actively seeking out feedback, a hangover from his sporting career, and he encourages his teams – and his own children – to do the same. “As I say to both my kids, I don’t expect excellence or brilliance but I do expect them to try hard in what we’re doing. And that’s what it’s about, going home at the end of the day and recognizing that you may not have had the best day, but you did the best you could.”
