Our client is a global insurance platform operating within the London Market, with a diversified, multi-line portfolio across specialty classes. The business combines underwriting expertise with a long-term partnership model, creating a dynamic environment where risk selection, portfolio performance, and capital discipline are central to success.
The role
This is a senior, non-production underwriting role focused on risk oversight, referral decision-making, and portfolio shaping across a broad specialty portfolio.
Sitting close to senior leadership, the role plays a critical part in ensuring underwriting discipline, profitability, and capital efficiency, while working in partnership with an established delegated underwriting platform.
This is a unique opportunity for an experienced underwriting professional to step into a role that is less about writing business and more about shaping and challenging risk at a portfolio level, influencing outcomes across multiple lines of business.
Key accountabilities
- Provide independent oversight of underwriting activity across a multi-line portfolio
- Review and challenge referrals, shaping underwriting decisions on a case-by-case basis
- Ensure alignment with risk appetite, focusing on margin adequacy, volatility and capital efficiency
- Identify concentration risks, systemic exposures, and emerging trends across the portfolio
- Contribute to portfolio optimisation and underwriting strategy across classes and geographies
- Partner closely with senior stakeholders, including underwriting leadership, risk, and executive teams
- Act as a key interface with external underwriting partners, balancing collaboration with appropriate challenge
- Support business planning, reforecasting, and strategic decision-making processes
- Provide technical insight into product structures, wordings, and underwriting approaches
Skills & experience
- Significant underwriting experience within the London Market or broader specialty insurance sector (typically 15+ years)
- Broad, multi-line exposure across specialty classes (e.g. property, marine, aviation, credit, or reinsurance)
- Strong technical underwriting capability with the ability to assess risk, pricing, and structure
- Experience operating at a portfolio or oversight level, including referral or underwriting governance processes
- Credibility to influence and challenge senior underwriters and stakeholders
- Strong understanding of market dynamics and underwriting cycles
- Ability to balance technical detail with commercial judgement
- Experience within reinsurance, underwriting audit, or portfolio oversight environments is advantageous
Personal Attributes
- Gravitas and executive presence
- Highly credible and confident in technical discussions
- Constructively challenging, with strong influencing skills
- Commercially aware, with a pragmatic approach to decision-making
- Comfortable operating in a collaborative but complex stakeholder environment
This role is particularly suited to individuals looking to move away from a purely production-focused position into a broader, more strategic role, where they can leverage their experience to influence underwriting outcomes at a portfolio level.
