Background

Chubb Insurance Company of Europe (CICE) is the European subsidiary of the Chubb Corporation and is engaged in the same lines of business. It had premium income of $1.2 bn in 2007, around 1,200 employees and operates in 11 European countries.
 
 
Positions held

 
Responsibilities

Headed a team of 27 (including contractors), with two direct reports and an annual budget of $4.7 million ($6.2 million in 2006 including the GFS Asia Pacific project). Areas of responsibility spanned Management Information, Financial & HR Systems (both Oracle PeopleSoft), Technology Training, Applications Integration, Strategic Marketing systems and any IT initiatives that cross multiple business units. Geographic responsibilities extended beyond Europe to the Latin American and Asia / Pacific operations of Chubb.
 
 
Major achievement – The award-winning EMIR business intelligence system

CICE suffered a series of losses in the years starting 1999. These were severe enough to require a re-capitalisation by its parent and drew the viability of the European company into question. The European Senior European Management Team (SMT) realised that they did not have good enough management information to either foresee such problems or to fully analyse the drivers behind them.

In 2000, I was selected to lead CICE’s response to this major crisis and quickly teamed up with the Chief Actuary. Together we developed the concept of a European Management Information Repository (EMIR). We convinced the SMT that EMIR would be the best way to address the organisation’s problems and, in mid 2001, obtained $5 m funding for a multi-year project to build the system.

I was accountable for executing the strategy that I had co-authored and assembled a team of professionals to do to this. As well as this strategic work, the same team developed a significant number of interim reporting systems between 2000 and 2003. Our first EMIR report family went live, on time and under budget, in June 2003. The launch was backed by a highly-professional training programme. Since then, seven further report families have been launched and the system now covers virtually all European reporting requirements.

EMIR has been a major success, wining two industry awards and being the subject of numerous articles and case studies in the European and US business and technology press.

More importantly, EMIR and the earlier interim reporting systems achieved their primary objective of returning the company to profit in 2003. This trend has been sustained to the degree that since making its final and record loss in 2002, CICE has established a new record for profit in five out of six years starting from 2003.
 
 
Other achievements