Climate Change is a trillion-pound opportunity
Interview with Bernie Hickman CEO of Legal & General Insurance
The actuary-turned-entrepreneur sees climate change as a trillion- pound opportunity — and lockdown has moved it up the priority list. Interested to find out more Magnetic CEO Jenny Burns, grabbed CEO of Legal & General Bernie Hickman, for a coffee and a chat for our book: you can grab a copy of the latest book here.
“I trained as an actuary but since qualifying I’ve tried to act as much like a non-actuary as possible. I did maths at university, and wanted to take that into a business context. I was more interested in business and how you make something that you can charge more for than it cost to make.
I do a lot of deep dives with my team, looking at the things I’m worried about and the ideas we need to understand, such as data science and analytics. We have people who are great at data science and they’ll want to prioritise the most interesting opportunity, whereas I want them to prioritise the most commercially impactful opportunity.
I don’t divide my time in proportion to the size and profitability of a division. I spend it where I think the future profits are going to be made. Currently I’m spending a lot of time on technology transformation in our US business as well as fintech and related areas.
The opportunity with climate change is clear. Trillions of pounds are needed to transition the world to net zero in the next 25–30 years. Our business is about joining up people who’ve got money — particularly slow, patient money — with great places to put it to work. Climate change fits the bill perfectly.
It’s not just providing the funding; it’s the convening power that we have as Legal & General. We’ve got expertise, we’ve got relationships with people from every sector, and we can open doors and get people together and talking.
Bernie became CEO of Legal and General Insurance in 2016
We can’t stand around saying, ‘Someone ought to be doing this’. Most of the technologies are developed enough to achieve massive steps forward. It needs every sector of society — government, third party and private sector commercial organisations — working to deploy at scale the technologies that already exist. Let’s try to make some stuff happen.
Magnetic has helped us do that. You have to carve out time from people’s busy diaries, and run a structured programme that focuses on delivering. Without that work we would be no further forward with the ideas we had about how we’d do more to address climate change. It’s made sure we put it up the priority list.
The fear was that Covid would distract from climate change. Actually, it feels like it’s focused people on it. We’ve seen the benefits of less pollution and lower emissions and seen it can be done. We could also do with scaring some people into action. It’s delivered a blueprint ideas that everyone needs to take on board. Stop burning fossil fuels, save the planet, save lives.
I try to keep focused on how we can deliver growth. That’s the constant theme, and the big challenge most businesses face. You can’t do it by throwing mud against the wall and seeing what sticks. You have to do it in a thoughtful way, with small investments to see what will work, testing and learning constantly.
I’ve always wanted to create small teams that are empowered to make things happen without having to navigate the bigger organisation. I was interested in how to get the start-up mentality, culture, action, delivery and pace.
That approach helped me to launch Legal & General into the equity release lifetime mortgage market. We acquired a tiny company and took it from doing no business to becoming a market leader with 25% market share in 18 months. We rebranded it, built an online quote-and-apply platform, and refreshed the whole business very rapidly.
The tech giants are good at analysing what in their culture enables them to deliver growth and innovation and to harness technology and data. How they harness people is impressive. When you spend time with someone who works at Amazon they talk about their 14 values — quite literally verbatim — in every conversation they have. It’s both impressive and slightly weird. It shows you the importance they place on culture.
My most challenging moments are when projects I think should work, don’t. You realise you’ve tried to be small and lean, and test and learn quickly, but still spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on something that hasn’t worked. That’s painful. It’s happened a few times, but I’ve learned from them.
I have deep respect for businesses which deliver innovation. Our most successful innovation is more incremental than big leaps. It hasn’t stopped us going for some big leaps, and we’ve kept learning from those, but the length of time they take is another painful area. We’re a big organisation and transforming is hard work.”
This is an exert from our business book, you can grab a copy of the latest book here.
Interview with: Jenny Burns, CEO of Magnetic. For more info on the work we do check out these links or get in touch at Jenny.Burns@wearemagnetic.com.
