Consistency is Key, So is Boldness

I’ve been at Arch for over 18 years. When I started, I was one of 205 colleagues. Now, Arch Insurance is 1,500 strong and growing.

When I joined Arch we were a new company and not a very recognizable carrier. Now we have brand recognition and a foundation of trust with our partners. We’re known for being consistent and conservative, with smart underwriters that our clients can depend on.

Being Wise about Saying Yes

Pursuing Better Together is inclusive of our relationship with colleagues and clients. It is our way of saying: We want to work with you and help you be successful.

We want to be able to take on new business, and we have the depth and breadth of expertise to do the work to the standards we are known for. We always want to know more about our partners and how we can help them be successful. With different partners come different businesses that need to be serviced, and we always want to bring people in who can help us understand the insurance needs of different businesses. We strive to hire people who have different vantage points. This allows their diverse educational backgrounds and industry experience to look at the function of insurance from a wider lens.

Our growth, for the most part, has always been organic. We have had success when we work to grow with our business and our colleagues together. We nurture and build our talent and let our customers know that we are growing in this healthy way to support their needs.

We Don’t Want To Be the Biggest, We Want To Be the Best

For 20 years, Arch has been what I would call a “bottom line” company: we don’t want to be the biggest, but we do want to be the best at what we take on. With the current market conditions, we are ready to grow and maintain our underwriting discipline to be profitable. Right now, we have the opportunity to expand, and we want to do that intentionally.

“We encourage movement that isn’t just up, but also left and right, lateral moves that diversify an employee’s knowledge and experience base.”

I love my job at Arch because I have relationships with employees in every unit in the company. My team and I get to help these employees attract other fantastic professionals. Having connections to the employees is important to the strength of the organization, since it helps to promote transparency and trust. Working in environment of trust allows us to focus on being successful, and progressing from mistakes instead of assigning blame. This is how we retain our colleagues and help them build a rewarding career here.

Growth Does Not Mean Biting off More than You Can Chew

We encourage career movement that isn’t just up, but also left and right. Lateral moves can diversify a colleague’s knowledge and experience base, creating a pool of leaders with a wide lens of experiences to inform their decisions and direction.  

I am an example of this career movement. In the 18 years I’ve been here, I have both taken risks and had people take risks with me. This led to opportunities and growth for Arch and for me and allowed me to move from recruiter to head of HR, with many roles in between.

For me, growth is about not being afraid of “biting off more than you can chew.” If you want to grow, there has to be a space between where you are and where you want to be, and the idea of traveling through that space could feel scary.

A personal example for me at Arch is when we expanded into the Philippines. I raised my hand for the opportunity even though I had never been part of an international expansion before. We had to learn the local laws and culture to be able to attract, hire and retain people to grow our operations there. It took time and effort to build the trust and transparency required to do this. At the outset, there was no promise of success, and yet, without taking the chance, we would never have realized the rewards of growing.

Consistency is Key, So is Boldness

At Arch, we are known for our thoughtful and consistent underwriting. Being consistent in our work makes fertile ground for ideas and inspiration that is bold and can be truly transformative. Being bold means taking risks. How do we draw out boldness and make the risk worth it?

We purposefully put in place structure for bold ideas to be drawn out and shared. I am proud of our culture and our Values. In a way, the Arch Values are synonyms for each other, and yet, they are realized in different ways, based on who you are and the job you do. When I think of our values, I don’t want to quiz people on what they are, but instead I see colleagues living the behaviors and translating them into the language of their actual job.

Whether you are an accountant, an IT professional or an underwriter, you want to be collaborative, meticulous and boldly seek ideas. The “why” of these values is not to embody them because we are told to, but because they work to drive business, to keep us successful, and to nurture colleagues who have the satisfaction of making a difference. This is why Pursuing Better Together is a shared goal amongst all of us at Arch.

Peter Danza

EVP, Human Resources
Arch Insurance | Jersey City, N.J.

Work at Arch

Search for open opportunities with Arch.

What We Do

Learn more about our offerings.

Pursuing Better Together

It’s an approach that encapsulates how we do business.

Find Us on LinkedIn

Keep up with current events and job postings.