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In this episode of Making Risk Flow, host Juan de Castro is joined by Laurent Rousseau, CEO of Global Capital Solutions at Guy Carpenter, to discuss leadership, success, and the evolving role of insurance in society. Laurent reflects on his career journey from equity analyst to CEO, sharing his personal definition of success: one that prioritises inner fulfilment over external expectations. Together, Juan and Laurent also discuss the insurance industry’s role as a key enabler of societal good and the need to shift public perception of the sector, why insurance must embrace innovation, and the challenges of leadership transitions, including the importance of knowing when to step down as part of an organisation’s evolution.
Juan de Castro: Hello, my name is Juan de Castro and you're listening to Making Risk Flow. Every episode, I sit down with my industry-leading guests to demystify digital risk flows, share practical knowledge, and help you use them to unlock scalability in commercial insurance. Laurent, thank you so much for joining me today for another episode of Making Risk Flow. Let's start with an overview of your role and your career for those people who don't know you.
Listen to the full episode: here
Laurent Rousseau: Hi, everyone, and thank you for having me. So my current role is to lead Guy Carpenter, which is a reinsurance broker in one region, which is Europe, India, Middle East, Africa. And in parallel to this, to lead Guy Carpenter's Capital Solutions. And Capital Solutions, what we mean there is where reinsurance and finance converge. So it's essentially a mini investment bank if you wish. We issue bonds, we issue securities on behalf of our clients, and we advise them on M&A transactions. These two roles that I have, one addressing the needs of insurance companies in Europe, India, and Middle East, Africa, and providing a strategic financial advisory to clients, go to the two steps in my career. I started as an equity analyst covering insurance companies. So my job was to advise investors looking at investing in publicly listed insurance companies. And then I became an M&A banker. So the first 10 years were in finance, applied to the insurance industry. And the second leg of my career was at Score, a IRS-based global reinsurer, where I had varying roles from underwriting insurance, specialty insurance, underwriting in reinsurance, and as well in group functions. And so I left Score in 2023 as the group CEO.
Juan de Castro: I've known you for a while now, and I know you're quite a humble person, which I really admire. But just based on the description of your background, it's very clear you've been very successful. But success means different things for different people. So when you look back, how would you define success? What's your own personal take on success?
Laurent Rousseau: It's a term I'm not very comfortable with because there is a big, I would say, social component to it. Success is defined by norms, is defined by an outside look. And in that respect, I guess, yes, what you say is right. There is this, I would say, image of success. And I don't want to, it's a term I quite like, I don't want to humble brag, I don't want to pretend there is no success. But I think this perception, this look at what is a success can be very inhibiting, can be very limiting. It can be very restrictive. It defines very often a world that we're in where the norms of beauty, the norms of the ideal are fine, sometimes are quite poor and quite dry, if you see what I mean. And more driven by the outside look than by your own vision, your own view of what it is that you want for yourself, of what it is that you want for the world that you're in, and what it is that for the role that you want to play in that world. And I think, and maybe this is a feature of life and aging, actually, today is my birthday. You tend to move over time. And over time, the most standard way of defining success, which is what we have been educating in and working very hard, succeeding in your exams, going to a good university, all of that is very much of a normalized definition of success and social definition of success. And over time, seeking more inner goals and what it is that you want to achieve. And so while I can see that what my career can look like some success, I've had many setbacks. I had many disappointments. Some of them were unexpected. Some of them were actually almost, I would say, not sought after, but very knowingly pursued and led to what could be seen as unsuccessful. But I think it all depends on your own inner norm and what it is that you want to achieve. So I don't want to make it too philosophical, but I'm very uncomfortable when we talk about success and want to avoid the simplistic images that we see on social media and more generally speaking in the media.
Juan de Castro: And as part of that wisdom that you get with age. Yeah. And what stage are you now in being able to separate those two groups that you just described? What do you think is expected from your kind of the social norm of success versus at the end? How happy are you with your career, with what you've done, with what you're doing now? So to what extent is philosophical versus you really feeling it?
Laurent Rousseau: Look, it's a bit of both. I tend to be a very reflective kind of person and internalizing and maybe intellectualizing things a bit too much at times and asking myself too many questions. Which leads to a lot of insecurity in many circumstances. And then actually the simpler answer is to say, you know, just get along with things. And as long as you make the right decisions for you at the right time, not trying to second guess the bigger picture. These are the kind of journeys that the retrospective bigger picture only comes afterwards and there's no big plan. So the way I try to cut short to all of these questionings is to say, do what is right. Do, you know, follow your instincts in many respects. Provided these instincts come after thorough thinking, thorough fact finding, thorough investigation, I would say, everything else becomes secondary. It's something that actually my dad had told me when I was preparing for university. It was an army, say in France, say you do what you have to do as much as you can. It happens what happens. This is out of your hands and everything else you don't care. And I think these three steps have been a very strong north star for me saying, you know, you have to fight hard. As much as you can. That's in your hands. There's so much then that is not in your hands. And after that, you just kind of don't ask yourself too many questions.
Juan de Castro: And if you look back, can you think of what are those moments that you felt there was success in your career or success personally? I mean, it would be interesting even if you could find some examples where they would not have been defined as success by the social norms, but they were success to you. Can you think of any of those examples?
Laurent Rousseau: The one that first comes to my mind is when I was working for J.P. Morgan in the city and I've been in banking for about 10 years. So things that you would say correspond to social normal success are positively viewed, even though that was during, before and after the financial crisis. But it's when banking rose where it became a bit less glamorous, I guess. But after 10 years in banking at J.P. Morgan, I decided to move to the industry. And this is when I moved to school. And at the time, it was not an obvious career move to do. I was not looking to go back to France in particular. My wife is British and we loved it in London. And I joined Score, which was a midsize reinsurer coming out of very deep trouble at the time. And that was quite a risk. The company had just come out of troubles and I was taking a group role as the chief of staff to the chairman and CEO at the time. So the role was very much of interest to me. But there was a bit of a gamble about whether I would like joining the industry, whether I would like moving away from being an advisor position, which is often questionable. I was quite respected as more of an operator and a principal, which is often more in the weeds, more under the radar screen, and then taking a view on the future of a company. And so here, for sure, many questions, people telling me I could have a great career in banking and stay in M&A and move up the ladder. So that was one where I was pretty convinced that I was following my own heart, I would say, and gut instinct. And that's an important thing to do is to start thinking with your mind and then ask things that are in your mind. Let them come down in your body and think less from the brains and think more from the heart and the guts. And so that, in a way, was counterintuitive in terms of the success norms as such. But in the end, it was a very happy ride. And maybe the second example to your question is, so I became group CEO in 2021. And so you could, again, qualify this as a sign of success. But it was not a very obvious choice. I mean, at the time, the company was suffering, again, in a meaningful manner. And taking the helm of a suffering business and organization and governance was not an obvious choice to make. And here, in a way, the weight of success, of what you have to do, what cannot be declined, you know, this idea that these certain jobs cannot be turned down is not an obvious decision to make in reality. And the right balance then to strike is doing what is right for the company, what is right for the business, and sticking to your own values, to your own principles. And that is, you know, can come into conflict at times.
Juan de Castro: And you've mentioned before, you talked about setbacks and challenges. Obviously, this, what you could call a successful career, is always full of or not so much, so happy moments or setbacks. So I guess the question is, has it been an easy ride for you? So, or has it been a linear path? I mean, you've already given a couple of examples, but is it just trending upwards, but it's more like an up-and-down type of career, do you feel?
Laurent Rousseau: I mean, the consistency, the consistency of it stands out when you look back. It doesn't appear on the day when you look forward. So it's, I think, the linearity or the consistency only appears over time. And there's actually, I tend to be very nervous and very sceptical about people's ambitions. Ambitions can be very healthy, and ambitions can be as well, actually, the most self-limiting features in someone. Because you set yourself a goal very often, and I find that those self-imposed goals are the biggest limiting, and the most motivating factors that there are is you reflect on yourself and the image that others have for you, as opposed to just following your own intuition. The setbacks I might have had. The key question there is not so much are you doing well or are you not doing well. The question is, have you done the maximum you could? Have you stuck to your key driving principles? And then there's so much that is not in your control, not in your hands. And I think that the idea of success is accepting that not everything is in your control or is in your hands. So you see, you know, when asked to step down from the Score as CEO role in January 2023, that was okay. That was okay in the sense that I had done what I thought I had to and a disagreement on this, this is okay. But this is only okay to the extent I felt comfortable with my own actions and with my own principles. And that becomes a much more self-defined criteria as opposed to outside defined criteria, if you see what I mean.
Juan de Castro: So let's take that as an example, right? When you step down from the CEO role at Score, how do you see something like that at the time? I mean, obviously now looking backwards, I mean, this happened. It's probably almost two years ago. Probably things make more sense at the time. You're a very reflective person, probably you thought through all of these as things were happening, right?
Laurent Rousseau: It's both a disappointment and total acceptance that if what you think should be done cannot be done, then there's only one way when you're a CEO, when you're accountable for an organization, accountable for a business, when you have a fiduciary duty, if you feel that you cannot accomplish it, then you're okay then indeed not to remain in position. So I think it might appear brutal, violent. It might appear, you know, ruthless, but I think it comes with a responsibility. And I think those CEO positions are huge honours. They're huge responsibilities, and they come with adequate duties. And I think for me, it is kind of alignment with the overall stakeholders of the organization. When this alignment is not there, this is only the nature of those roles to step down. So I think it's, having that understanding gives you a lot of freedom. And I think this freedom is the better answer to trying to define success. And you find over time that what looks like a setback actually was probably a form of success or a form of being right. But this, you know, only time will tell. And what matters most is that you act according to your own principles. And this requires some form of freedom.
Juan de Castro: It's really interesting when you say that, because I think there's a bit of stigma, that if you're asked to step down, it's a failure. And I've always said that like in any leadership role, you should only be there as far as you're aligned with the vision of the company as you should only be there as far as your skillset is the right skillset required for what that role's required at the time. The skillset for any leadership role evolves over time. Sometimes it's more of a transformation role. Sometimes it's more of a business as usual role. And so the same role at different stages of a company might require different types of people. And it's totally fine to be enrolled for a while and then be asked to step down and somebody else takes over, right? And I think this is something that we, I think as a society, we should just get our head around, which is there's nothing wrong. Every time somebody is asked to step down, there's always this glare around it of how do we position this to the company? How do we position this in a way that it doesn't feel like we've asked you to step down? It's like, no, it should be totally fine to be open about it, eh?
Laurent Rousseau: I think for me, what it comes to as well is, is a sense of entitlement and possession. And you often see, it doesn't have to be CEOs. It's generally speaking in corporate life, a sense that you own something, when in fact you're only being entrusted to pass something along, to manage something, to get a job done. I think from the moment you cling onto it, from the moment it becomes your possession, it drives the wrong behaviours. And so I think, you know, as long as you get the job done, as long as you act in what you think is the best interest of the company, and you're not, you're only here for a certain given amount of time, is I think this tends to drive much better behaviors. I've always had admiration, and you do see that, for certain CEOs who say, look, after X years, five years, 10 years, I need to pass a baton. I need to organize my own succession. And I think it's a bit like great sportsmen. Some of them never know when to retire, or they cling onto something that they think they own, and in fact they don't anymore. And so I think as long as you do what you think you should do, as opposed to entertain some kind of entitlement, or status in that sense, I think it is fine. And then life carries on. And as long as you perceive that as having done the right things, options come to you, ideas come to you, and life carries on.
Juan de Castro: One of the points you made earlier was about, you just made it right now too. It's like making sure you always live up to your values. You're doing the right thing. You're shaping the company in the way you think is the right way. As you take on new CEO roles like your current one, and you think about what's the type of company you want to create, how do you think about that? What do you want your legacy to be in your current role or in future roles?
Laurent Rousseau: So this legacy idea is one I'm dead against. I don't want my legacy to be anything. And that's where I think people get a bit mistaken. Their legacy is only as good as what the next person is going to take it to. So what I'm more interested in over time is what is the impact of what you do and what your company does. So when you're a risk taker as a reinsurer, when you're an advisor and intermediary like I am today, how do you have an impact on your clients? And how do you have an impact on the broader economy business world? And then to the next level, how do you have an impact on society? And this, I think, is what has kept me digging deeper into this. The insurance world is having that sense of participating to an industry that actually brings a greater good. I know that we are not very good at putting that across, but this is something that does get me up in the morning. The second thing is I'm also very keen to try to take a business from one place to another that is a better one. And any business can be in a good position or in a less good position. The key question is how do you put it on the move and make it better? And third and last but not least is the people. How do you enjoy working with people? How do you enjoy having to get that freedom around yourself and not get lost into hierarchy, into formalism, into thinking that you're becoming an important person and keeping that spontaneity of relationship with people you work with? And I think these three components, the bigger picture, the macro, you know, what is a greater good to society? Second what is a better position for the business? And third, it's very simply, do you enjoy yourself? Do you enjoy interacting with people on a day-to-day basis? These have been the kind of the inner drivers, if you wish, of the past 25 years for me.
Juan de Castro: And now that you mentioned one of those three being the greater good of society, the role of insurance in society, one of the things you mentioned is that we don't do a great job at communicating that value to the broader society. What would you say is where would you want the insurance industry to be in five, 10 years? I guess from different dimensions. One is from a role in society's perception, but the other one also is from an internal functioning of the industry.
Laurent Rousseau: I think the insurance industry, and it's quite natural, most people want that. The insurance industry wants to be at the front of the stage, wants to be very visible, wants to be celebrated for itself and in itself. When actually I think insurance is way more of an enabler. It's a mechanism of neutralization. It's a mechanism of sharing. It's a mechanism that relies on the long term, that you trade some short term premium in exchange for a longer term gain. And all of that, I think, are mechanisms that actually are not directly linked to human nature. Human nature prefers the present and human nature prefers oneself. And that's OK. So in a way, the insurance mechanisms, the insurance industry is there to provide protection and to even prevent humans against themselves in many aspects. But then I think that requires a bit of a trick. The way you need to allow insurance is for it to be backstage, not necessarily to be front and center, but to be enabling a service, to be enabling a solution. And so this is where I think at times we get lost a bit in our own way in insurance. What is important is to have a free trade going on in the world. What is important is to have resilience going on in the world. What is important is to have human activity. And life being on. And then insurance is just a mechanism of that. And so I wish that insurance would be like God would be present everywhere, visible nowhere and accept that insurance can be embedded into a service and can be embedded into a product. And it can be the smaller parts of that value proposition. And that's OK. And that is maybe my own kind of character and so on. I'm OK to be the smaller part or to be the enabler behind the scenes. And that, I think, is what's. I think that's what insurance has to come to terms with, as opposed to seeking its own complexities that it has grown over time.
Juan de Castro: Also, one of the three dimensions that you mentioned about what you look for in your current role was I think you mentioned something along the lines of developing teams, working with people you enjoy working with. And we do have this challenge in insurance where it's not perceived as a sexy industry. So there's almost like a barrier to enter. I think once people join the industry they stay because it's a brilliant industry. It's fascinating. It serves a real purpose in the world. It's full of really interesting people, but it's difficult to attract people into the industry. And I think my hypothesis is part of it is the perception of the industry, but part of it is also how backwards sometimes it functions internally. I mean, it's difficult to attract a really good younger talent from other industries when they have to work with the mainframe from the 70s. So do you see that as a challenge, too?
Laurent Rousseau: I do too, on the two angles. So the first one, you're right. I mean, insurance has grown as a substitute to a provident state. So whenever they couldn't provide protection, private forms of insurance would develop: health, life, and property, of course. And this, I think, is the businesses that have such an important link to the public good and the common good. Actually, you don't have so many of them. And insurance is a private form, if you wish, of public goods protection. And again, they can be health, they can be life, they can be properties. It's an economic activity. So this stimulates some people, some others not at all. For sure, it has struck a chord in me very early on. I actually wanted to work in the public sector as a good Frenchman tends to. On your second point, I think, and this is actually what has led me to become a broker. It's very important in the sense that I find risk carriers very often don't understand distribution, don't understand intermediation. And the other way around. Intermediation, distribution, often poorly understand risk-taking. These are very two different businesses. What I find interesting is a bit of a cascade of looking down on the other and fundamentally misunderstanding two ships passing in the night in a way. And I thought for my own understanding, actually staying in the reinsurance industry, but being part of a very different part of the value chain was a huge attraction to me. I think both parts of the value chain, risk-taking or intermediation, have very different challenges. Clearly the one of intimidation is one of cost, is one of being, to your point, backwards looking and a bit antiquated and being stuck in that historical stack buildup of technology and admin and bureaucracy. The question is, how do you foster technology to reduce the cost of the business? And by reducing the cost of the business, I think you increase the value of the proposition. And this part of technology is interesting. It's essential. I think that, like in many things, the finance industry, the banking industry, asset management industry have understood that way before the insurance industry. And so the insurance industry lags the broader finance by a good five or 10 years. It's getting there. And when you say this, you can either get to a very glass half empty point of view and say, well, you know, insurance is boring. Or you can have actually a glass half full point of view and say, well, actually there is so much to be done. The opportunity is huge there. And I'm clearly in this latter category. And this is what led me to get into it. Intermediation to see that, like in any intermediation business, technology means that the unit costs have to come down and then you differentiate yourself. You bring value to other parts of the transaction. You bring value through advice. You bring value in a much more holistic way. And this, I think, has, again, a lot of value to the insurance in the end, provided the cost structure is addressed over time.
Juan de Castro: And what do you think are the enablers for reducing that cost structure? We know that a lot of that cost structure is driven by the friction of how risk flows to the value chain. Again, we've got quite a complex value chain within insurance with different types of brokers in primary insurers, reinsurance brokers, reinsurers, retros. What needs to change for the industry to provide more value to the client?
Laurent Rousseau: It's a good question. It's a difficult one. I see two ways of answering that. The first one is, I think that the good way is to be very segmented between what the banking industry would call the bad bank and the good bank. There is a legacy and there is a new business. If you wish, or in insurance terms, there is the in-force and there is a new business. And I think the insurance company's ability to treat each very differently, I think, is often a very interesting way because managing an in-force, managing an aging technology stack is something that requires very different skills than actually setting up a new standards, new processes. There are new ways of working that correspond to today's world and that are not tainted by yesterday's. So actually, you do see certain insurance companies having a digital business, having a direct business, often one or different brand, not to upset the legacy business, the legacy brand. But this, I think this kind of in-force versus new business or the good bank or the bad bank is often a way of operating that allows a segmented approach, bringing different solutions to different kinds of symptoms if you wish. Now, a different way. Looking at your question is putting aside the past, putting aside why it is that we are here today. There are many good reasons to do so. But not to say, okay, where it is that the world is going, what is the future? And here, I think understanding that data, quantification systems are just going to be all over the place. So tolerance for slack, tolerance for batches as opposed to real time is going to be zero. And you need to be very cheap, very lean on what is it that you can automate and where you can accept the automation won’t answer your needs. Here I think the creativity and the amount of know-how is critical. I think in this process the difficulty is, I don’t know what you see with your clients Juan, it’s not so much the blue sky thinking. The risk I think you can have is that you can have a lot of very bright people, pright ideas, I find the organisations fail in the way they embark on the organization, in a way they define the pace. So many organizations have had the right idea at the wrong time or have had the right idea but managed wrongly the pace to get there because the pace depends on adoption, it depends on maturity of the market, depends on maturity of the customers, depends on maturity of the regulators as well. And that I find is often the right discrimination performance criteria is to say, do you go about it at the right pace, being sufficiently innovative, creative, crazy at times, but then disciplined and accepting of constraints in the short term. And that pace for me is the key management factor.
Juan de Castro: I've really enjoyed this session. I think we've done a very early, the first section of the podcast has been a very personal one, which is probably a slightly different type of episode than I typically do, but I thoroughly enjoyed learning from your point of view and experience. And we've gone all the way then to the end of the podcast where we've talked about change technology and the role of insurance in the world. As always, it's a pleasure catching up, talking to you, Laurent, and thank you so much for joining me today.
Laurent Rousseau: Thank you, Juan. Thank you very much.
