Grant Thompson

Head of Underwriting

Experience and expertise

Grant Thompson is Head of Underwriting at Zurich Municipal and Engineering, where he leads underwriting performance and strategy across the business. He is responsible for ensuring Zurich Municipal and Engineering continues to deliver sustainable growth, technical underwriting excellence and provide a strong proposition to customers.

Grant is a highly experienced insurance executive with more than 20 years in the industry, having held senior underwriting and leadership positions across major insurers and managing general agents. Before joining Zurich Municipal in 2026, he served as Trading Underwriting Director at Geo Underwriting, where he led multiple underwriting businesses, having responsibility for trading performance, capacity delivery and strategic growth. He has also held senior underwriting leadership roles at Victor Insurance and MS Amlin.

Throughout his career, Grant has developed deep expertise across a wide range of commercial insurance classes leading businesses focused on Personal Lines, through into SME, Mid Market and Corporate. He has a strong track record in underwriting transformation, organisational development, digital innovation and building high-performing teams. His experience spans multiple distribution channels, from direct and e-trade models through to broker and delegated authority relationships. Recognised for his ability to combine technical underwriting expertise with strategic business leadership, Grant is passionate about achieving growth through enhanced underwriting capability.

In conversation with Grant Thompson

Grant shares why he believes underwriting is both a science and an art, the importance of building strong customer relationships, and gives his perspective on the exciting role AI could play in the future.

My name is Grant Thompson, and I'm the Head of Underwriting at Zurich Municipal and Engineering.

My team is responsible for the strategy, appetite, pricing and general proposition that we deliver to our customers. They support through different lines of business and essentially give underwriters the tools they need to do their day-to-day trading.

For me, underwriting is a blend of science and art. You need to have strong technical disciplines, but you also need to balance that with the ability to trade and build relationships, and that's a challenge I enjoy. I enjoy learning about customers and their industries and what they need, and then providing a proposition and a product to them.

I always joke with my friends and family that insurance makes the world go round, and I do actually believe that. In our segment, without insurance, people wouldn't be able to take risks. Public sector organisations wouldn't be able to buy buildings or invest in new vehicles for their fleets, and charities wouldn't be able to serve the communities they support while mitigating risk at the same time.

For me, one of the most exciting things coming forward is AI. It's not only about how it can support our customers with better service propositions, it's also about how it can support our teams and underwriters in adding more value in their day-to-day roles. For me, it's about putting people first. If AI can enable that, then that's great, and it will have a positive downstream impact for our customers.

Underwriting is the mechanism that helps organisations mitigate risks, serve their customers, and do so in an economical and sustainable way.