How staying true to herself saw Vicky Carter rise to the top of her profession

Vicky Carter, Chairman of Global Capital Solutions, International at Guy Carpenter and double award winner at last year’s Women in Insurance Awards, has today been announced as the keynote speaker at the inaugural Women in Insurance Live conference.

I had a chat with her about her take on the diversity debate, what she thinks is required to make the industry more diverse and whether firms actually believe in it or are just toeing the line ...

“I’ve always been myself and I’m not going to let people change me.”

That attitude has, over a 40-year career, seen Vicky Carter rise to the top of her profession. As well as her ‘day job’, Vicky is a member of the Council of Lloyd’s, member of its Nominations and Governance Committee, Chairman of the Lloyd’s Charities Trust, Trustee of the Sick Children’s Trust and a board member of the Lloyd’s Community Programme. Oh, and she was the first ever female founder of a Lloyd’s broker.

To have gained this level of success and respect among her peers must have been tough, to say the least.

“I’ve always worked in a male dominated environment and the fact that you come into it knowing that, you work around it,” she says.

“As a female, I probably had to work harder to prove my capabilities, but I had to ensure that people knew that I got there on my ability.”

As a woman at the top of insurance, Vicky is still a rarity but thankfully, the industry is now awash with diversity and inclusion initiatives, but Vicky is adamant these must consider diversity in all its forms or they will fail.

“The statistics show that the industry clearly does not reflect the diverse make-up of the society we operate in, but a lot of people only focus on the male/female issue. It needs to be broader than that – it should be diversity of thought, ethnicity, background, sexuality, everything. That is what it’s all about,” she says.

She believes there is a certain inevitability about change in the industry, that internal and external pressures mean businesses have no choice but to address the diversity issue. But do they mean it or are they just toeing the line to protect their public image?

“I’m sure there are people doing this reluctantly because they probably feel they need to be seen to be doing it but then there are those who genuinely understand that diversity makes for a better organisation.

“It just makes business sense to have views and thoughts across all the different characteristics that make up your customer base.”

The drive for this must, she believes, come from the leadership of a business but even where genuine commitment is lacking, the generation of recruits coming through now simply won’t be willing to work in a backward-looking organisation. It will be a form of natural selection.

"Nothing is easy in this life – you have to create your own opportunities"

But what of individual responsibility to push for change? Surely, we can’t just sit back and expect it to be done for us?

“Having a voice is important. At the end of the day, if somebody gets in your way, then it is down to you to decide - either leave the organisation or work round it.

“Nothing is easy in this life – you have to create your own opportunities,” she says.

She concedes that for many women and minorities, this is easier said than done, and that the confidence that would be admired in a male can be perceived as something else entirely in a woman.

“It is difficult. If you speak out and you have a strong view you can be seen as aggressive or hard-nosed, but you should be able to speak out,” she says, admitting that even today she can sometimes feel somewhat intimidated in doing so.

While she believes that genuine cultural and organisational change is the solution, Vicky does have a firm belief that disruption from outside the industry is going to make change inevitable.

“There are huge opportunities coming out of disruption. It’s a changing world and environment and we have to ask ourselves how we are going to adapt to that. We need to change our mindsets and cultures along with the services we provide.”

And from that, she believes, the final, irresistible impetus for cultural change will come.

Vicky will open the inaugural Women in Insurance Live conference by arguing that while disruption in all its forms poses a real challenge to the industry, if harnessed, it also presents a great opportunity for insurance to move into the future.

To hear Vicky and the rest of the conference line-up explore how we all have the opportunity to change insurance for the better, sign up here.