Launching a specialty insurer from the ground up [case study]

The client 

Our client is a boutique specialist insurance and reinsurance broker focused on clients with complex or challenging needs. Launched by some of the most well-regarded leaders in the insurance and reinsurance industry, it aims to create specialist transactions to manage risk, while delivering economic flexibility and stability for its clients. 

The opportunity 

We were engaged pre-launch by this global broking start-up to support executive hiring and talent strategy as they prepared to enter the market in 2018. Working from the offices of their investor, we had an opportunity to deliver on critical leadership searches while advising on hiring risk, regulatory exposure and competitor sensitivity. 

The solution 

“As we’d already partnered with them for a while before funding, when it came to hiring, we already understood their talent requirements and how to work with them from a cultural perspective. We’re proud to have been with them from the start and we’re excited to help them continue to forge their future.” Matthew Eames, Founder and CEO, Eames Group 

Already with a longstanding relationship with the founder, who we’d worked with on a retained basis in his previous role at a global professional services firm, we helped him understand the talent landscape, providing detailed market insights, assessing the firm’s strategic talent needs and mapping out its organisational structure. 

Part of this involved running workshops, delivered by ECMS with external experts, to understand the client’s objectives and devise a plan for how to achieve them. As well as delivering projects and running programmes of work, ECMS would also manage any ancillary recruitment that was required elsewhere. 

To supply the leadership talent needed, Eames Partnership mapped out the best senior execs in the marketplace against each role, across ten speciality lines of business in the broking markets. We then built the function from there. Once we’d appointed a CTO to put together an IT roadmap, we then deployed a team of desktop engineers through ECMS. If there were requirements for more junior hires within its core functions teams, Eames Consulting would supply the talent.