Sir Charles Roxburgh is sitting at a magnificent mahogany desk when he points out a stain. It is proof that this otherwise glistening piece of furniture is in everyday use at Lloyd’s of London. Indeed, he reminisces that he had a seat at this table 30 years ago, when he was part of the team drawing up the rescue plan that has ensured the 300-year-old insurance market is still functioning today.
At the time he was working for the management consultancy McKinsey, but since May he has enjoyed something of a homecoming as the chairman of Lloyd’s, which is known around the world for insuring almost anything — ships, oilrigs and even concerts, such as the ones Taylor Swift had to abandon in Vienna last year in the face of security threats.
So, as he gives his first profile interview since taking on the role, it seems apt that the late Sir David Rowland, who orchestrated that crucial rescue and was a mentor to Roxburgh, is looking down at him from a portrait in Lloyd’s “inside out” building in London.
“Emotionally, I’m delighted to be back,” says Roxburgh, 65. “Some things are very familiar, like this room.”
But other things have changed: “The market has been transformed over 30 years for the better — far more professional, far more influential in the world of insurance.”
In the late 1990s, Lloyd’s was on the brink when the “names” — wealthy individuals who underwrote insurance policies — could not pay out a deluge of claims, mainly for asbestos.
Now, with the market mostly backed by corporate vehicles, it is a key plank of the government’s plan to grow financial services. Insurance as a sector was highlighted by Rachel Reeves in her Mansion House speech last week, and Roxburgh was sitting at the top table for this set-piece occasion — a sign that a man more accustomed to being in the background has taken on his highest-profile role yet.
While the London Stock Exchange is facing an existential crisis as it fails to attract new company listings, the City is looking to Lloyd’s for growth.
Roxburgh will be at the heart of efforts to promote London’s credentials as an insurance hub and fend off mounting competition from centres such as Bermuda.
“This part of the City continues to be a very strong, successful, important part,” he declares, as he promises a “redoubling” of efforts to ensure it can fend off competitors.
Tracing its roots back to 1688 when Edward Lloyd’s coffee house was a meeting place for ship owners to insure their vessels, Lloyd’s took on a more futuristic feel when it set up shop in its eye-catching, Richard Rogers-designed steel building — with its vents and lifts on the outside — in 1986. It is still based there now.
There is office space for 1,300 Lloyd’s staff and three vast floors where the 85 syndicates that underwrite insurance polices meet face to face with the brokers who are seeking policies for their clients. Lloyd’s is not a company itself but exists through parliamentary acts and is a mutual, owned by members who ultimately provide the backing for the syndicates.
Roxburgh describes Lloyd’s of London as a “classic industrial cluster” in attracting insurance firms to set up in this corner of the City to be near the underwriting floors. But being one of the last bastions of face-to-face broking has its downsides: in 2019, Lloyd’s had to issue a code of conduct to discourage drinking during working hours, after an exposé of bad behaviour and sexism in the market.
Roxburgh has spent his first few weeks visiting the underwriters who use the market and says they all agree that in-person deal-making is vital. “There was a fear at the time of Covid that people wouldn’t come back,” he acknowledges. “One of the first questions I ask all the younger underwriters is, how important is the floor? They love the sense of being part of a market, the efficiency of doing it face to face — so much better to actually talk to the broker rather than ping emails back and forth.”
That is not to say technology is not used. When the deals are agreed — “bound”, in the industry jargon — they are more usually now signed electronically rather than with the ink stamps of the past, although some jurisdictions still require a “wet” stamp.
But the tech being used to process claims is still mainframe computers, “which are working fine … but some of them have flashing green cursors”, says Roxburgh.
A project, known as Blueprint Two, to move this processing from 40-year-old computers to “the cloud” should have been implemented by now. Roxburgh refuses to give a date for when this might finally happen. “We’re now in the testing phase, which will take many months. What we have said is that it will not ‘cut over’ in 2025 and we will not announce a date until we’re confident we can do it safely,” he says.
It feels like the sort of safe answer he would have crafted during his previous role as one of the most senior mandarins in the Treasury. He was convinced to leave McKinsey in 2013, after 26 years, by Sir John Kingman, now chairman of insurer Legal & General but then a senior civil servant who was looking for a head of financial services at the Treasury.
As it was, Roxburgh was unusual in spending so long at McKinsey; it is known as a training ground for ambitious individuals who go on to run big companies. “I had several half-lives as a McKinsey consultant,” he jokes.
Kingman says: “Lots of people don’t make the transition from commercial life to the public sector very easily. Charles was a stellar success because he wins people’s respect very quickly, and from long experience working with clients [at McKinsey], he was instinctively good at working with ministers. He’s just very clever and knows an awful lot.”
Roxburgh went on to replace Kingman as second permanent secretary at the Treasury when the latter left in 2016.
One of four children, Roxburgh says almost gleefully that “I’m a second son”. This is “why I didn’t want to be a doctor. My father’s a doctor, my grandfather’s a doctor, my older brother’s a doctor. Second sons often don’t see the birth order career choices.”
But he did follow family tradition by being educated at Stowe, the prestigious Buckinghamshire school where his great uncle was the first headmaster, although only one of his two sons was educated there, the other going to Eton.
He met his wife, Karen Pierce, British ambassador to the US from March 2020 until this February, while at Cambridge (he read classics) and at times they have had a long-distance relationship given her career in the Foreign Office. One of her postings, for a year, was to Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. “What we learnt was that car bombs would often go off in Kabul in the mornings,” Roxburgh recalls. “So we got into a routine that if a car bomb went off or there was some attack, she’d send an email.
“That way, when I woke up, I’d get an email to say everything was fine — rather than wake up and find some bad thing had happened and then try to work out where it had happened.”
Due to Pierce’s ambassadorial role in America, Roxburgh was a guest at the official visitors centre for Donald Trump’s inauguration. Was he, in his words, the only man “tagging along”? “There are plenty of male diplomatic spouses and lots of talented women as diplomatic spouses. [At the inauguration] I sat next to the Israeli ambassador’s wife … she’s one of the most distinguished lawyers in Israel.”
Does he tire of these extraordinary first-hand views of history in the making? “You never get used to it. It was a great privilege being in Washington. Karen’s had a great career and I’ve been lucky to tag along with that, but I have also enjoyed my career.”
Roxburgh did indeed have personal experience of some of the key economic events in Britain while at the Treasury, notably Brexit, Covid and the fallout from the Ukraine war. “People used to ask me, ‘What’s the big difference [with the private sector]?’ I’d say the speed,” he says, noting the perception of the civil service is that bureaucracy slows down decision making. “It’s the other way: it’s faster in the Treasury. The Treasury works at real pace. You saw this very publicly with the Covid response.”
He was involved in devising the Covid loan schemes and became embroiled in the Lex Greensill scandal when the former prime minister David Cameron — who was an adviser to the failed financier — lobbied the Treasury for his firm, Greensill Capital, to obtain access to the Covid corporate financing facility.
Roxburgh received nine calls on the matter in 2020. “We said no … and the only reason I had so many phone calls with [Greensill] was he wouldn’t take no for an answer. So we had to tell him no again.”
During the Covid lockdowns, his wife was in Washington, “so I hardly got out there at all in 2020”. During 2021, he was “out there a bit more because I was able to work remotely on UK time. But then in 2022 we were going back to work at the Treasury. So I was more in London,” he says.
When he left the civil service that same year, he moved to Washington, just as his friend Sir Tom Scholar, the top civil servant at the Treasury, was fired by then prime minister Liz Truss because she wanted to change “Treasury orthodoxy”. Roxburgh says: “I was dismayed. I think most people were dismayed at the treatment of Tom, who is an incredibly committed public servant, served Conservative and Labour chancellors with distinction, and is a true believer in serving the government of the day. So it was a shame.”
Roxburgh is based back in London now for the Lloyd’s job, while his wife is now the UK’s special envoy to the Western Balkans. He is also an adviser to the law firm Herbert Smith Freehills and sits on the board of the FTSE 100 oil giant Shell, the subject of speculation that it could bid for rival BP. “I couldn’t possibly comment on that,” he says solemnly.
When Roxburgh arrived at Lloyd’s in May, there was controversy because of the number of top people leaving at once. He replaced Bruce Carnegie-Brown in a long-planned succession, but this coincided with the departure of chief financial officer Burkhard Keese and the resignation of chief executive John Neal in January to take a role at Aon, the insurer whose building is opposite Lloyd’s.
There were rumblings that Neal should have been required to leave immediately, but he remained until Roxburgh took over in May, after a three-month induction period. Last week Neal stunned the industry when it was announced he would not join Aon after all, but instead move to AIG.
Roxburgh dismisses talk of a corporate governance mess. “As far as I’m concerned, in week one I appointed a new chief executive [insider and frontrunner Patrick Tiernan]. At the end of my first month, on Patrick’s first day, he appointed a new executive team. Compared to many transition processes, it’s moved pretty fast.”
While Tiernan will set the strategy, Roxburgh is clear they have a “common vision” to “strengthen and extend Lloyd’s position as a pre-eminent marketplace for risk”.
That mahogany table will provide a perfect place for ensuring that vision comes to fruition.
