Lloyd

Each week, we dig into the memory bank of the City’s great and good. Today, Vicky Carter takes us through her insurance career, and becoming the first female deputy chair of Lloyd’s, in Square Mile and Me 

I was studying medicine. I started at St Bartholomew’s, failed my first-year pre-med physics paper by a couple of marks, and was told to go away, take another science and come back the following year. My father said, “You’re not spending another year travelling the world, it’s important to learn money doesn’t grow on trees.” So he suggested the City, something I would never have even considered to fill the year. And I never went back to medicine. 

Junior broker in non-marine reinsurance at Winchester Baring. I wrote to the CEO out of the blue and said I’d always wanted to be in reinsurance. He took me to lunch and asked where I saw myself in five years. “In your chair,” I said. “Great,” he said. “I’m hiring you.” That was it. 

I never planned any of it. The deal was one year in the City, then back to medical school. But I got hooked early; the people, the team, the buzz, and there was no going back. Two years in London, two in South Africa, then back into London placing non-marine reinsurance at Lloyd’s in 1984. 

In 1992, aged 32, I broke away with my then boss and we started Dunn & Carter, where I became the first female founder of a Lloyd’s broking business. Then Ted Blanch, the American entrepreneur who built E.W. Blanch from a small family firm into one of the world’s largest reinsurance brokers, came after me to run his international business. I kept turning him down, so I said half tongue-in-cheek: if you really want me, buy my company. 

He called my bluff, so I flew to Dallas, sat in front of the entire E.W. Blanch board, did my best broke, and they bought it on condition I came back to run it. Towers Perrin after that, where I became Chairman of UK and Europe. In 2010, Peter Zaffino recruited me to Guy Carpenter as vice chairman of international operations, and now I am chairman of global capital and advisory. I was elected to the Council of Lloyd’s in 2019, and became its . 47 years, and I’m still learning every single day. 

The city is a club in the best sense: once you’re in it, the relationships you build are extraordinary. Lloyd’s is still the only true face-to-face marketplace in the world, constantly changing, never dull. There’s nowhere like it. I travel all over the world and every time I land back in London, I feel proud it’s my home city. 

The traffic. The roads are constantly being dug up! But what I’d genuinely change: more opportunity for young people. When I arrived at the end of the 70s there were very few women in the industry, it could be a lonely place, no one to mentor you. Young people still get siloed into one part of the business too early. Insurance is at the heart of everything, travel, science, technology, development. It enables all of it. That’s what the initiative I created, The Rising Professionals is all about. But it remains the best kept secret! 

Meeting Ted Blanch. What struck me was that he didn’t care how old you were. If you were capable, he gave you the opportunity and let the best rise to the top regardless of age. His senior team were all dynamic thirty-somethings who went on to great things, with no wait-your-turn hierarchy. As a young employee walking into a company with that vision, it was the most stimulating thing. 

Hundreds. I can’t pick one. But you learn from everyone, and you never make the same mistake twice. I learned everything on the job, out in the market, sitting with underwriters every single day. But that’s where I learned the one thing technology will never replace: the relationship. Everything else is going through significant change. That doesn’t. 

Becoming deputy chairman of Lloyd’s, without a doubt. To be elected to Council by the market, then handed that honour, and to be the first woman to do it, felt like a vote of confidence for a whole career of hard graft, so that recognition meant everything. 

Plenty of people. I feel very lucky to sit on the Council of Lloyd’s and learn from its leadership every day. One of the proudest moments of my life was bringing F.W. de Klerk over from South Africa to speak at Rising Professionals in 2015, one of the most inspirational people I’ve ever met. Tim Peake was another. 

Always be honest. If you don’t understand something, ask. Don’t bluff your way through. 

Massively. I’m hugely optimistic about the whole future of the industry. There’s so much opportunity out there. You hear it all the time: Al is going to cost everyone their jobs. I think it’s going to be scary and exciting in equal measure, and that risk means opportunity. All it will do is remove a lot of the mundane, duplicative processes and free people up to do more interesting things. 

I’m not a big drinker, to be honest. But on a sunny day, somewhere by the river. 

Close to Wimbledon, a ten-minute walk from the tennis. 

If in the UK I will be down in the Sussex countryside. 

I’d drive over the Andes and down into Patagonia.