September 21, 2023

We All Win When Diversity Is Achieved

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Pursuing Better Together with Mark Lomas Transcript

Arch Insurance International Pursuing Better Together Podcast: Mark Lomas

Arch Insurance International

Hello and welcome to the latest in Arch Insurance International’s Pursuing Better Together Podcast Series. Today I’m delighted to have the opportunity to talk with Mark Lomas. Mark is Head of Culture at Lloyd’s having joined the corporation in January 2022, and in this role is responsible for all aspects of its strategies related to culture, engagement, wellbeing and equality and diversity and inclusion. During his career, Mark has delivered numerous highly successful diversity and inclusion projects across the UK and internationally for organisations across many different sectors. He has previously held senior equality and diversity positions at BBC, the Law Society of England, Wales and prior to joining Lloyd’s, at HS2, the UK’s transport leveling up project. He is also a published author on the topic of equality and diversity, having authored the Law Society Equality and Diversity Risk and Compliance Toolkit, which assists law firms to comply with regulation. Mark, first of all, thank you very much for making the time to join us today.

Mark Lomas

Oh, thank you. It’s a real pleasure.

Arch Insurance International

I wanted to start by trying to get as it was a better understanding of the overall scope of that role of Head of Culture at Lloyd’s, can you just give us a sense of what effectively falls under your remit?

Mark Lomas

I suppose easiest way is to divide it kind of between the internal and external focus. So internally, I’m responsible for employee engagement, wellbeing, diversity and inclusion and also leadership capability sits in my strategy arena, although managed by another team. And then externally, I’m responsible for ensuring compliance with the Lloyd’s Oversight Framework Principle 13, which is culture. So essentially, regulation of the market around non-Financial Conduct diversity, inclusion, etc.

Arch Insurance International

And as you said, that’s a fairly diverse role, isn’t it?

Mark Lomas

I mean, it can be challenging, you’re, you’re dealing with a myriad of stakeholders in the London Market, or Lloyd’s market, all who have their views. But I think the benefit of it is, and when I was Head of Diversity, I had a lot of different organisations and a lot of negotiation to do with the people that ran employee engagement or wellbeing or organisational values or leadership capability. I don’t have to do that negotiation anymore, they’re all levers that I have to pull. It makes the job a little bit easier to do, because you have all those balancing factors.

Arch Insurance International

And of course, as I mentioned there, in the introduction, you’ve held several equality and diversity related roles across many different sectors. How then, did you find it moving into that unique market environment that is Lloyd’s?

Mark Lomas

Yeah, fascinating. Each sector is quite unique but when you really get under the skin of it, they all kind of have the same problems, right? It’s talent, it’s how do we make the most of our talent, it’s how do we become more efficient, more innovative, etc. So although there are unique aspects, the underlying issues are pretty much always the same. I think moving from HS2 where I was managing the sort of diversity and inclusion performance of a massive supply chain, which was from huge companies to small companies, was very good preparation for moving to the Lloyd’s market. And then obviously, a marketplace isn’t the same as one where you have you know, contractual requirements that govern what you do. However, Lloyd’s has oversight responsibility over managing agents, etc. So, I’m used to working in an ecosystem and I think that has helped. One of the ways that culture diversity has progressed in the in the Lloyd’s market is kind of been responses to issues that have come up. And therefore you could say it’s had a kind of a one plus one plus one approach. Oh, you know, Bloomberg came up to deal with gender, Black Lives Matter came up to deal with race etc. And I think what we tried to do since 2022, is ensure that our culture strategy is broad, addresses all the diverse groups but really has an eye on the prize for insurance, which is more innovative products, and ensuring that we have the talent that we need, because the simple truth is, insurance is bottom of the pile in terms of careers in in the financial sector. So insurance has to shed the reputation that it has acquired, and build a new reputation built on all the things which are superbly special about the Lloyd’s market.

During my coming up to two years in January, that’s gone pretty fast. But in my 18 months at Lloyd’s, I’ve had the opportunity to do quite a lot of outreach with kids and employability stuff, just a test what do people know? What did they think of us? And the reality is the talent know very little about us. So, what do you know about Lloyd’s? Oh, yeah, yeah, the people with a black horse? Or aren’t you a pharmacy? No, no, we’re not. And you talk to parents, and they know very little about insurance, apart from, their experience with car or house insurance. When you can describe in simple terms, how Lloyd’s facilitates business all around the world, that is of interest to people. When you start talking about the global nature of careers, that you could start in East London and work in East Africa. I’m from Bermuda, it’s a centre of reinsurance. People really start to get excited. And then when you explain to them that look, it is less elitist than investment banking. It’s got a better work life balance, but you can have a brilliant career and make good money in insurance. Eyes are open. But for too long, the Lloyd’s market ecosystem was able to survive via kind of referrals and who knew about it and we can’t really afford that way of operating anymore, because talent has so many more choices now and there’s so much more information available. So, we have to be far smarter about the story we tell and more intelligent about how we go and target the talent we need for the future which will come from all communities.

Arch Insurance International

This talent challenge is very significant for the Lloyd’s market. Do you think that there is therefore a greater onus on Lloyd’s to when it approaches diversity, that it approaches it or it should approach it in the widest possible sense?

Mark Lomas

Yes, it has to because it’s just good business sense. But within that, we have to recognise that for some groups there are more barriers to entering the market than for others, maybe because it got less connection with the market. Or, for example, the history of Lloyd’s and its ties to transatlantic slavery are something that you have to overcome when communicating with communities and we launch our kind of research and our response to those issues on the 8^th November. So, we do have to recognize, we have to take the broadest possible approach and yet within that we have to be targeted at where we understand the issues are arising. An example of that is, there was an Insurance Insider article published a few months ago that said there are very few CEOs CFOs or chief actuaries that are women in the Lloyd’s market and to an extent that was that was true. And we’ve collected the data on that and on talent pipelines and succession and we can see for actuarial and finance, five years out the gender pipeline will pretty much fix itself if the figures are right. Between 40% and 50% of those people who are successors to senior roles and actuary and finance are from diverse backgrounds.

Arch Insurance International

Just on that subject, because you you’re touching upon a few of the initiatives and few of the areas of focus that you’re helping to drive and sort of conducting research around. What are some of those successful initiatives? What are the things that are gaining traction in the marketplace at the moment?

Mark Lomas

Yeah, the most successful initiatives are those that deal with specific issues that arise from the data that we collect. So, an example is the Accelerate programme that we run, a professional development program for ethnically diverse individuals in the market. Fantastically successful, really good conversion rate into new opportunities, promotions, etc. and that’s just won an L&D award for being one of the best programmes in the UK. That’s a great example of designing a programme to deal a very specific issue. And we have, you know, we have a number of those initiatives, for example, we had an issue with the collection of diversity data across the market and we built that into the oversight framework, and then provided a diversity monitoring toolkit on how you do that. And in the last few years, the number of managing agents collecting ethnicity data, as an example, has gone from 76% to 94%, so nearly complete market coverage. It is about understanding where specific issues are, and then putting specific solutions in place. And upcoming this year, when we collected our markets policies and practices return or MPNP return, which is all the diversity data across the market, one of the things that became obvious was that between 37% and 40%, of firms were doing schools or university outreach, and that’s it. Well, we’ve got this fantastic festival called Dive In, where we engage 1000s of people every year. So, we’re piloting a volunteering and outreach aspect to Dive In this year called Dive Into Insurance, where people will be able to sign up for volunteer and outreach events, through the Dive In website – a massive schedule, with the opportunity for more than 1000 people to undertake outreach and volunteering. And that’s about getting that story of insurance and careers in insurance out there to a wide spectrum of communities, with all kinds of people from different disciplines in different levels across insurance. And that’s where I think, the market has an advantage. When we work together on things and leverage our power for the greater good, we make progress far quicker.

Arch Insurance International

I suppose it fits very nicely with our theme of Pursuing Better Together. How easy is it to inspire that collective action that’s needed on the DEI front, given the nature of the Lloyd’s market?

Mark Lomas

You have to spend a lot of time on stakeholder engagement. The Lloyd’s market is an ecosystem, but that ecosystem is large companies, small companies, it’s brokers, it’s managing agents. So, you do have to take your time to understand what kind of a solution is going to work and how you can bring those things to life, and therefore it can take a while to get, consensus is probably the wrong word, but something akin to it. But once you have that, then the power of the London Market is and the Lloyd’s market is pretty powerful, people get behind it, you can really see things start to move and participation increase. So, I’m pretty positive about the ability of the Lloyd’s market to fast forward its progress over the next few years through understanding where our issues are where we can take collective action together. And by doing that, then we move the dial for everyone.

Arch Insurance International

In terms of moving that dial, where would you say we’re seeing the strongest progress being made at present and what areas require greater investments in action?

Mark Lomas

So, we’re seeing pretty steady progress around gender both in the overall workforce and in leadership. Our last MPNP return showed that the market as a whole was at 32% women in leadership, and we need to get to 35% women in leadership, that was the target for December 2023. When we ran the maths that would require an additional 120 women leaders, this year in a market of 48,000 workforce, which is very possible. But the rate of progress has been increasing from half a percent a year to a percent a year to now 2% a year. So we can see that as the practices across the market start to improve, and the recruitment practices and talent and succession practices are improving maybe too slowly for my particular liking, but they are improving, we see the rate of progress increase. Momentum is building. Ethnic minority representation at all levels is increasing. Since I’ve been here, it’s been a bit more than 2% a year. But there are areas which require far more focus. Our data tells us that most organisations aren’t really doing much around disability. But organisations are interested in social mobility. It’s interesting that disabled groups are the least socially mobile of any group. So, you would hope as firms and companies develop their approach to social mobility that they take these issues into account. And then you know, the market has become far more inclusive of LGBTQ+ populations and we can see that through our culture survey results. So, things are improving, the market is changing, it’s about picking up that pace of change.

Arch Insurance International

How important are reporting requirements in ensuring greater transparency to maintaining this momentum that we’re achieving around DE&I?

Mark Lomas

It’s absolutely key. If you don’t have data, at best, you’re working off observation. At worst, you’re working off anecdote, or personal experience. Data is hugely important, it allows you to target effort where it’s needed most. And when people asked me well why do we have to do this? Why is diversity data important? I always give them the example of your Tesco, right? You’ve your Tesco card and you’re using it at the checkout. Well, they know who you are, they know your age, they know what products you’re buying, they know when you come into the store. Diversity information not only tells you what’s working, but it tells you who it’s working for. And if you have it at a granular level, it can help you understand how you change it to be more effective. That is the same for a recruitment or a talent process to a product and sales mentality. That data gives you access to all that information. So that’s why for me an evidence-led approach is incredibly important. It enables much faster progress.

Arch Insurance International

I wanted Mark just to return briefly to something you mentioned earlier, something which is of course on the horizon, which is the next Dive In Festival. From your perspective, how significant, how important is the impact of this event now becoming for the market?

Mark Lomas

I think Dive In is the number one, diversity and inclusion brand in financial services. It’s incredibly important for a couple of reasons. Number one, it helps to raise awareness, it enables discussions. It’s an open forum. It’s global now, it started in 2015 in London, and now it’s in nearly 40 countries, over 35,000 participants, participants actually come from 97 different countries, which is nearly half the globe. I kind of describe it as the Glastonbury for D&I, it is an incredibly important event and initiative but like all things, Dive In has to evolve, it has to evolve to tackle some of the data and the issues which we know are in the market. And we made a number of changes to Dive In this year. But primarily, we don’t want Dive In to just be three days during the year, where we have a brilliant conversation and then we go back to our day jobs. We want Dive In to become the talent brand for the Lloyd’s market. And we’ve got to start with the talent that’s in our own market and in our culture strategy, we talk about being becoming a destination for global talent. Well Dive In is one of the best ways to start that because we have fantastic global talent but we’re not connecting, as well as we could do. So this year, after the main Dive In festival finishes, we’re launching Dive Into Reverse Mentoring, which will connect global talent with leaders across the Lloyd’s market for reverse mentoring sessions, which will continue after the festival closes for six months. And then in the UK, like I mentioned before, we’re piloting Dive Into Insurance, which is our volunteering and outreach, which will give people opportunities to do things on an individual level or with their companies, which make an impact in changing the perception of insurance. And over time, we will continue to iterate Dive In, so that there are a couple of really specialists deep Dive In session a year. So, it is incredibly important and it’s something that’s been incredibly successful and we’re looking to evolve over the next couple of years so that it stays extremely relevant for the next 10 years.

Arch Insurance International

Yes. And are you finding sort of appetite for these initiatives increasing year on year?

Mark Lomas

Yeah, absolutely. Everyone is coming to the realisation that actually, this is about the sustainability of the market in the broadest sense. You can look at engineering, for example and you can see what happens when you don’t have enough skills coming into a particular market, the cost of that labour, the cost of those skills increases. So it is about the sustainability of the Lloyd’s market and then as we move to a world, which is far more digital, which is far more complex, where the risks are far more interrelated globally, we can see that every day, we recognise that we need talent that reflects that. Because that’s how product innovation happens and I think that is for the Lloyd’s market, why it’s existed for 300 years. It’s always been able to respond to the needs of a changing society, however, our rate of change has fallen behind the rate of change in society. And so, by focusing on our talent, ideas, innovation, and using inclusion as a way to unlock all of that, which is what Dive In’s theme is about this year, there’s no loser in that. And therefore, I think it’s a message which resonates with more people. This is a time for the Lloyd’s market to expand, we know some of that expansion is global. This is a great time to be thinking about talent and using our inclusion practices to draw in that talent from around the globe.

Arch Insurance International

It’s coming back to our theme of Pursuing Better Together which has been perhaps a theme running through our conversation, but I wanted to ask on a personal level. What does that concept of Pursuing Better Together mean to you?

Mark Lomas

It’s really interesting because when we talk about some of the things that we do market-wide, we talk about for the greater good, which is exactly the same right, pursuing stuff together. For me, what it enables is faster progress and it enables collaboration. So, it enables companies to say, actually, we recognise we all do better when there’s a wider variety of talent available. Our costs get lower if we’re talent and succession planning effectively. This inclusion stuff is just good business. And I think that really does help a variety of companies, whether it’s small, medium, large, understand, actually this is a we win area. I can win as a company or as a team but actually, we as a market, we as a sector, we begin to do better if we’re working together, and therefore, pursuing some of these aims in a collaborative way, means that progress happens faster. And because of that progress, we all benefit. The people that work in this market, we’re responsible, we’re the ones that can change the perception of this market. We’re the ones that have the power to go and spend an hour volunteering or talking to a young person about a career in this in this market or this sector and completely change their view of what’s available to them and what careers are available to them. We all have the power to demand that our organisations have inclusive practices. And we all have the power to move between organisations that offer better policies and practices. So, we all win when we do this.

Arch Insurance International

I think that’s a very positive and a very powerful message to end our conversation on today. A huge thank you from Arch Insurance International for speaking to us today.

Mark Lomas

Oh, my absolute pleasure, and thanks for the opportunity.

Pursuing Better Together with Mark Lomas

As the Dive In festival nears, we speak with Mark Lomas, who oversees market-wide efforts to improve diversity and inclusion at Lloyd’s.

Positive change is happening in terms of diversity, equity and inclusion across the Lloyd’s market — it just needs to accelerate, says Mark Lomas.

In his role as Head of Culture at Lloyd’s of London, Mark is responsible for diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I), employee engagement and wellbeing; and ensuring compliance with principle 13 of Lloyd’s Oversight Framework, which focuses on the elements needed to create an inclusive, diverse, high-performance culture.

Mark has been with Lloyd’s since January 2022, after a career of more than 15 years of delivering on DE&I projects for organisations including HS2, the BBC and the Law Society.

As he explains during the discussion, a high value must be placed on data to identify what needs to be fixed and to monitor progress in building a more inclusive workforce.

“If you don’t have data, at best, you’re working off observation – at worst, you’re working off anecdote, or personal experience.”

“If you don’t have data, at best, you’re working off observation — at worst, you’re working off anecdote, or personal experience,” Mark says. “Data is hugely important as it allows you to target effort where it’s needed most.

“At a granular level, it can help you understand how you change your approach to be more effective. An evidence-led approach is incredibly important as it enables much faster progress.”

What the data is telling him now is that market participants are moving gradually in the right direction. Women occupy 32% of leadership roles, according to the latest survey of the market’s 48,000-strong workforce. Ethnic minority representation at all levels is increasing, with the rate of improvement in these areas having increased to about 2% or more annually.

Culture surveys have also shown the Lloyd’s market becoming more inclusive of the LGBTQ+ population. However, some areas, such as disabilities, need more attention, Mark says.

Close to 40% of firms conduct outreach to schools or universities, reflecting efforts to expand the talent pool. “We can see that recruitment, talent and succession practices are improving, maybe too slowly for my liking,” he says. “Momentum is building. It’s about picking up that pace of change.”

Dive In, the annual three-day festival to engage the insurance industry on DE&I, takes place on 26 to 28 September. Launched by Lloyd’s in 2015, it has grown into an international event that involves about 35,000 participants from nearly 40 countries. Mark describes Dive In as “the Glastonbury for D&I” and argues that its impact must go beyond raising awareness.

“We want Dive In to become the talent brand for the Lloyd’s market. We’re looking to evolve, so it stays extremely relevant for the next 10 years.”

“We don’t want Dive In to just be three days during the year, where we have a brilliant conversation and then we go back to our day jobs,” Mark says. “We want Dive In to become the talent brand for the Lloyd’s market. We’re looking to evolve, so it stays extremely relevant for the next 10 years.”

Among the efforts to create lasting impact, Dive In will launch six months of reverse mentoring sessions, connecting talent with leaders from across the Lloyd’s market, after the festival concludes.

The theme of this year’s festival is “Unlocking innovation: the power of inclusion”. Mark believes that many employers are embracing DE&I as a business benefit, particularly in terms of access to talent and the ability to develop relevant products.

“When you don’t have enough skills coming into a particular market, the cost of those skills increases,” Mark says. “It’s about the sustainability of the Lloyd’s market. And as we move to a world, which is far more digital and complex, and risks are more interrelated globally, we need talent that reflects that, because that’s how product innovation happens.”

Lloyd’s’ collaborative approach to DE&I for the greater good exemplifies pursuing better together, Mark says.

“A variety of companies understand that this is a ‘we win’ area,” Mark says. “As a market, we do better if we’re working together, pursuing some of these aims in a collaborative way. It means that progress happens faster. And because of that progress, we all benefit.”

About Arch Insurance International Podcasts

Welcome to Arch Insurance Insights podcasts, available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

During our Pursuing Better Together series, we’ll hear from luminaries both inside and outside of the insurance industry about how they have “pursued better” within their chosen professions.