In Person: Adrian Saunders spells out his top priorities for Ecclesiastical

Ecclesiastical's commercial director on his role, profitability, growth and restructuring at the insurer

Saunders’ time at Ecclesiastical has seen real momentum build for other key areas, such as assets of the UK – arts and culture, museums, galleries, opera houses, business and leisure and hotels.

He is also promoting education for its broker business. The focus is on independent education with a growing interest in further education colleges. 

Schemes
Another area of growth is schemes business. The company has in excess of 90 schemes in the UK market covering veterinary surgeries, holiday homes, parish councils and more.

“I want us to say to our broker partners – ‘let’s not try and pigeon hole ourselves’. Talk to us about the business that your clients need and we can tell you very quickly with our expertise whether that's a risk that we can underwrite,” adds Saunders.

“That way we hopefully add more value to our brokers because we are open to a far broader conversation.”

He continues: “In the two years that I have been here this is what I have been developing in terms of how we better and more consistently engage with the broker market. And how we increase our share of business that brokers control in our niches.”

This was one of the reasons why he created the new head of broker distribution for UK general insurance that Chris Withers has occupied since August this year.  

“Chris has a real estate background and came in particularly to do some work in that area. As our broker engagement piece has developed he started to get more involved in projects and then that recently became a full time formalised role,” he notes. 

“An important role because he is responsible for our network strategy, overseeing our engagement with our brokers and a chunk of the sales team report into him.”

Planning
Saunders has already started to focus on the New Year.

“We started thinking about 2017 due to the fact that we launched our select broker programme in 2015.

“We didn't have a broker programme for key brokers until then. We've run that for two years and that isn't a long time but the market moves quickly.

"We're in the process of reviewing what select 2017 might look like so we can bring that to market by the end of this year.”

Ecclesiastical, which Saunders says is a “great brand” and has “equity in the broker market” is known for being charitable.

The company recently made a £5m charitable grant and achieved its three year objective of making a £50m grant by 2017 through the Allchurches Trusts.

Cycling
Recently, Saunders mixed his love of charity work and cycling together.

He cycled across Vietnam and Cambodia at the beginning of the year. 

“Cycling was fine it was everything else that went with it: food, lack of sanitation, and the accommodation. Personally those were the things that were challenging, but you knew that was what is was going to be like.”

There’s a typically candid afterthought, he smiles and nods signalling that he is glad to be back in the UK working with “people that he likes”, sussing out new opportunities for the broker market.

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