Constructing a cohesive operating model – Gallagher Re’s Mowery

When Lara Mowery joined Gallagher Re as chief commercial officer, she stepped into a role seemingly characterised by complexity.

With a global remit and a constantly shifting market environment, her task at the reinsurance broker was not just to manage product strategy but to create structure across a sprawling business.

That challenge has meant building a matrix that links client needs, capital, technology, and regional insights, all into one cohesive operating model.

“The role is fairly broad in some ways and still evolving,” she says. “It’s fitting into an infrastructure that the Gallagher Re leadership team has given a lot of thought to; how to adapt a structure in an environment with a lot of moving pieces and challenges.”

At its heart, Mowery’s remit is about marrying global product strategy with local client insight.

She leads the build-out of the firm’s global product and practice groups, each designed to “have all of those inputs from the regions on the ground but also form a central mechanism… where we have line of sight into what the specific product development needs are, leveraging efficiency and innovation.”

The goal is a more interconnected operating model: connecting product development, capital insight, client needs, and technology investment into one streamlined framework.

“It’s focused on looking at a global product, such as property or casualty, and running those as a business within Gallagher Re,” she explains. “You want to understand client needs and how the product must evolve.”

In Mowery’s view, this approach is necessary because the challenges facing the reinsurance industry cannot be solved in silos.

“The reinsurance business is pretty inefficient when you look at other parts of the financial sector,” she says. “One of the things that creates that is the lack of a standardised reinsurance data model.”

Establishing such a model has become something of a personal mission.

“You really have to have collaboration, across competitors in some cases, in order to get to a place where you’re changing the business for the better, for everybody. Creating greater efficiency in common tasks expands the time available for innovation.”

This is particularly urgent in today’s environment, where reinsurers have pulled back from frequency-based covers that were once commonplace, especially in property.

“There was a pretty drastic change in the way reinsurers were willing to offer property coverage,” she says. “That created a gap for companies who were more reliant on lower-attaching, frequency-based solutions. And when that went away, there was a real need to connect with reinsurers… to meet capital management and frequency management priorities.”

One answer is the expanding use of parametric solutions. Gallagher Re has a dedicated team exploring new capital sources and innovative structuring methods.

“Parametric is something that’s developing on both the insurance and reinsurance side,” Mowery says. “Where traditional solutions just don’t fit, parametric can broaden the appeal to both buyers and sellers.

The softening reinsurance market might bring pricing relief, but for Mowery, it also signals an opportunity. “Innovation at any time through the cycle is critical,” she says. “But when the market softens, you are pushing on an open door.”

Mowery sees innovation through several lenses: product design, capital access, portfolio modelling, and efficiency.

“We’re just at the beginning stages of figuring out how we bring AI efficiency to the business. But it allows us to spend more time solutioning, instead of working to understand what we have in the first place.”

An example is AI-assisted contract scanning, used to surface coverage gaps more quickly.

“As a manual or word-of-mouth process among the product groups, it’s time-consuming,” she says. “But with AI, you’re spending your time on solving, not searching.”

Clients may not see these processes, but they’ll benefit from the outcomes: improved insight, faster decision-making, and more tailored capacity.

“The client might see a much more easy-to-digest framework for looking at price points at various levels of capacity,” Mowery explains. “They won’t necessarily be able to tell that came from an AI solution, though.”

For Mowery, innovation isn’t just about the shiny front-end. “One of the areas I think is critical is mitigation,” she says. “It’s not sustainable to keep charging more or telling clients to retain more risk. There has to be more investment in the things that reduce losses.”

That includes physical risk improvements, like hail-resistant roofing or fire-retardant materials, but also better financial incentives to drive change. “If the insurer says to the customer, ‘Do these three things and you’ll get a 20% credit,’ and the reinsurer gives a credit in return; that creates motivation across the chain.”

Digital transformation also means cutting back on inefficiencies that plague the data supply chain. Too often, information is manually re-keyed at each stage – broker, reinsurer, client – introducing duplication and errors.

“It’s just stupid,” says Mowery. “There’s substantial duplication of effort in the process. Aren’t there better ways of sharing that information? The answer to that is yes.”

She believes trust is built through transparency, not abdication of due diligence.

“If everyone has the right terms and conditions in the system, it’s easier to validate and verify. That doesn’t need blockchain, just structure and access.” Reinsurers are increasingly embracing this.

According to Gallagher Re’s Insurtech team, 150 technology investments from (re)insurers took place in 2024, a significant up-tick from the 107 in 2021, previously the peak.

“This level of investment from within the industry underscores the growing commitment to driving solutions through innovation and applies across areas such as distribution, underwriting, operations, and claims,” she says. “It’s foundational work that’s starting to deliver results.”

But technology alone doesn’t erase friction. “If we send over analytics work already completed, the reinsurer might not agree with the view of risk. But at least they’ve got better transparency into where the data came from, and how the loss pick was calculated.”

Despite the messy middle, Mowery is energised by the sector’s mission – and its evolution.

“The environment we’re in is very high profile when it comes to evolving risk metrics,” she says. “Whether it’s geopolitical uncertainty or the rise of AI – it’s dynamic.”

And in that context, she believes reinsurance’s purpose needs reasserting.

“The mission of insurance and reinsurance is to produce solutions and to bring capital to bear on what’s happening,” she says. “I’ve told my kids: ‘Without reinsurance, your favourite store doesn’t exist, you’re not flying on holiday – it’s essential work.’”

And she believes the reinsurance industry is up to this task. “I’d say we’ve done a good job overall of being innovative and responsive – and thinking about how to meet the changing needs of the environment.”

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