Experience in practice.

Separating a business is rarely just a transaction. A UK insurance operation had to become independent from a US parent while remaining fully operational and regulated. More than 150 applications, 100 vendors and shared data and services had to be disentangled against a fixed deadline. The challenge was to establish the right operating model and technology boundary without creating unnecessary cost or disrupting the business.

A recently acquired business was struggling with a new underwriting platform and a demanding financial close. The parent wanted to replace the system; the business wanted to defend it. The review deliberately stepped away from the technology argument and examined the operating model, processes, data, manual workarounds and reporting. The evidence showed that the core issue was not simply the platform. It was the way the business was operating around it.

A major transformation was already £2 million into a 24-month programme, yet the business was still taking more than six weeks to close the month. Finance and Actuarial were spending their time preparing data rather than analysing it. The first decision was to pause the programme for 30 days. That created the space to understand what had gone wrong, reset the operating model and regain control before committing further time and money.

A 64-person international technology function was delivering neither the projects the business needed nor the reliability it expected. Trust had deteriorated, decisions were concentrated at the top and a culture of blame had developed. The response did not begin with an organisation chart. It began with the business: understanding demand, capability, leadership and delivery. The result was a redesigned function with clearer accountability, stronger capability and a more effective relationship with the wider organisation.

A profitable insurance group was considering further growth while its leadership team questioned the cost and complexity of the existing operating estate. With multiple divisions, business models and Lloyd’s operations, scale was not the only issue. The real question was where complexity created value and where it simply created overhead. The review examined the economics of growth, diversification and the choices required to build a sustainable model.

A UK run-off business viewed its technology function as a significant cost centre. But it also owned a policy administration platform and the complete capability to develop, support and operate it. Instead of treating cost reduction as an exercise in making the function smaller, the work asked whether the capability itself had value beyond the organisation. The answer created a different commercial proposition: turn an internal capability into something that could serve a wider market.

The organisation wanted to demonstrate AI adoption, but the business problem was less clear than the technology ambition. Rather than begin with vendors or use cases, the work started with the outcomes the business actually needed and the data required to support them. The result was a more practical path from AI enthusiasm to useful business capability — proving that AI is a tool, not the strategy.