Louise O’Shea was appointed group CEO of CFC Underwriting Ltd. in January after serving as an independent nonexecutive director since 2021. Her appointment followed the departure of CFC’s founders following a Lloyd’s of London investigation into allegations of non-financial misconduct at the London-based managing general agent. From 2017 to 2023, Ms. O’Shea was CEO of Confused.com, an insurance and financial services comparison site. She recently spoke with Business Insurance Deputy Editor Claire Wilkinson about her first year in her new role, how the business is growing, and the importance of technology.

Q: What have been your priorities since taking the reins of CFC?

A: My focus is always on the people. People deliver the results at the end of the day. It’s about investing in people and ensuring they have the support, training, and development they need to make the most of their talent. That’s always the top priority. There’s a lot about CFC culture that is brilliant. We did a big culture review to understand what people love about it and what they want to see evolve because we have grown quickly as an organization. That was a big exercise for us when I first started. Then we are looking at the business to position ourselves for success in the future. We’ve started to plant seeds for future growth and add additional building blocks, invest in the structure of the business and position ourselves for scale. My background before CFC was in the personal lines space, but in the high-volume, high-transaction space of aggregators. My background before that was around technology. CFC has always had fantastic tech capabilities, but that’s not something you can rest on your laurels about. It’s about continuing to invest to challenge ourselves and push forward with our capabilities because technology is always moving forward.

Q: What changes have been made since the misconduct issues came to light?

A: It’s not uncommon that in businesses with fast growth, we also need to invest in the organization’s structure. Unfortunately, things do go wrong. It’s what you do about it that does matter. We’ve invested in the organization to make sure that from a cultural point of view, people are in an environment where they can thrive, where their talent is nurtured, and where they’re empowered if they see something that they don’t think should be happening they speak up about it. That’s been a big focus for us. CFC has always been a fantastically fun environment to work in, and it remains so today. Fundamentally, there’s been a lot of investment in governance and HR throughout CFC. We’re 1,000 people. We have 11 offices globally, which requires a different level of expertise that we want to bring into the organization to help us grow.

Q: Despite progress on diversity and inclusion, claims of workplace misconduct in the London insurance market are up. Where do you think the sector stands?

A: One of the conclusions from the most recent Financial Conduct Authority report was that the claims of issues might be up, but they were probably always there. People weren’t speaking up about them, so I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s increased. I’d say actually, the fact that we’re now hearing about these things gives me hope that we can do something about them, because what we don’t want in any organization or any industry is bad behavior going unreported, because then, as a leader of an organization, you don’t know and you can’t do anything about it. The onus is on leaders to make sure they put the right culture, structure and environment around their teams so that they feel psychologically safe to speak up. At CFC, we’ve put so much work in, and the culture and the surveys that we do set us in a good position, but it’s not something that you can stop investing in. It continually evolves and you need to keep working on it.

Q: CFC started as a cyber insurer. What other lines of business is CFC writing?

A: Cyber still is one of our major focuses. About 50% of our business is cyber, including cybersecurity services, and it’s the biggest line for us in the U.S. We have also expanded and diversified the business. We’ve got about 50 products across 20 lines of insurance. Transaction liability is significant and growing in the U.S. We also focus on identifying emerging industries with high growth trajectories. Fintech and e-health are examples of where we pull together specific policies that address the needs of an industry. We’re also looking at emerging risks. A new product for us is in the carbon space, around carbon credits. Companies may want to buy carbon credits to reach targets that reduce or offset carbon emissions. Sometimes something happens and there’s no delivery of those carbon credits. We’ve provided a brand-new product in that space, and we see huge growth going forward. Customer service is critical but also operating at scale across multi-geographies. We offer products in about 90 geographies, and our technology platform enables us to do that efficiently for the SME market.

Q: Did CrowdStrike change things from the SME perspective?

A: CrowdStrike was more a product that was purchased by larger corporates. One thing that we were able to do very quickly in that situation, in a matter of hours, was to identify who of our insureds were exposed and also reach out to them and provide them with a potential solution to their challenges. An event like that certainly puts cyber into the mainstream agenda, which does, in turn, lead to increases in demand, but fundamentally what you have in the market is an underlying trend of increased demand, and then you might have little blips like that that increase the number of requests or inquiries or submissions. But it is not as prolonged as during COVID when there were a heightened number of cyber threats that people were responding to.

Q: How is CFC using Gen AI?

A: We’ve got lots of different use cases. Fundamentally, Gen AI is good for unstructured data sets and synthesizing learnings. Gen AI is interesting for insurance companies. The most common use case is in claims data, taking unstructured claims data and using Gen AI to identify key trends. That’s an exciting area for the future that you can expect a company like CFC to invest in.