Georgina Davis on her journey and 'smashing' growth targets
07/10/2025
In her first interview since taking up the post of head of regional market for the Midlands, South West and Wales at Zurich, Georgina Davis tells Insurance Age about the goal of smashing the 30% growth target and her route to the “coming home” role.
Interview and article published originally by Insurance Age, to view this please click here.
Davis was promoted in May, and has been tasked with delivering the gross written premium growth across SME and mid-market.
It is an interesting time, and even more challenging, given rates are falling, she acknowledges.
“It’s super exciting. I see it as an opportunity for sure,” she says. “We’ve obviously got big growth targets. I don’t want to just hit them. I want to smash them.”
The plan includes using data and insights on quote and strike rates to deliver service and build relationships with the brokers to win in the market.
“We know that having a meaningful first contact with a broker drives a lot more value, and within 30 minutes of the case coming in we’ll allocate it to an underwriter, and then we’ll proactively call the broker within 24 hours,” she says.
Leadership
When Zurich appointed Davis, it praised her strong leadership, fresh perspectives and external broker relationships as the perfect combination of skills to fulfil its growth strategy.
Asked to reflect on what these are she lists energy and passion: “No matter what I do, I can’t help but be authentic, and I do truly believe that’s helped me engage with people from all walks of life, and no matter the seniority or the role that they’re doing, and that’s helped me develop relationships over the years and be a strong leader.”
Davis says her other strengths are her “work ethic and resilience. You know you’ve got to practice what you preach as a leader, and nothing can get in the way of my resilience. I will keep going, and I will always be there for my team and empower them and support them.”
Youngest
When Zurich announced her promotion it noted she had become its youngest ever regional head. The achievement is something she has two viewpoints on.
She is hoping to show apprentices and graduates what is possible in the insurance industry. “I hope I can be a strong mentor for them, as I’ve had throughout my career.”
Davis accepts the “age thing” of being the youngest ever is of interest: “I really want to show younger people just starting out in the insurance industry, or wanting to develop from all walks of life, that with the right amount of drive and determination, it’s possible to challenge the status quo that probably exists in our industry a little bit and maybe across other industries.”
“I feel like we’re a little bit conditioned to believe that age or experience equals the best talent,” she says. “But I think it’s fair to say that having a more diverse workforce or leadership team actually breeds innovation and a refreshed mindset, which I think is really important in this industry.”
Journey
“I learned very quickly that relationships have to be at the heart of a business for it to be successful.”
Davis, who had not previously considered insurance, moved into the sector in 2018 at Vulcan Inspection Services, part of British Engineering Services, which had spun out of RSA, with the leaders receiving backing from private equity house Inflexion.
She remembers it was a “great time to join” the firm in the West Midlands and with the flat management structure she had plenty of access to senior leaders and “realised the importance of really strong mentorship”.
Leap
“That’s where my love for insurance in the industry really began,” she shares. Within a year she had progressed from the entry level administration post to be business development manager for Vulcan going out to see agents.
The big leap, in terms of engaging with brokers, came in 2021 still as a BDM, but this time for all of BES. It was a rapid rise, and Davis reflects it was due to the business going through huge growth and “because I threw my hat in the ring” for every opportunity.
Team
Two more job titles were to follow: strategic relationship manager for seven months into 2022, and then group head of broker and affinity partnerships from July the same year.
In this fifth position, she started having people report in to her – a team of six BDMs and a couple of remote relationship managers. Between them they looked after all brokers across the nation.
“I was actually leading a team of people that were all older than me, which was an interesting dynamic,” Davis says. “My only way of being a leader is to be me and to be authentic. And that’s how I got my team to buy into me and to ensure that, as a group, we were aligned in what we were trying to achieve.”
Zurich
Having built a strong network, the shift to Zurich came ten months later in April 2023 as head of broker proposition and distribution.
“I had the autonomy to transform Zurich’s approach to trading with regional and independent brokers across the UK, which I thought [was] amazing.”
A huge part of the remit was Zurich Club Blue, which launched a month after Davis came on board with the aim of enhancing trading relationships with independent brokers by supporting their businesses and people. The first goal was to get it off the ground and into the market, but the main part was to listen to feedback and see how it could evolve.
“[It] allowed us to explore different distribution channels that we hadn’t before,” she says, citing networks as an example. Zurich, which has relationships with the likes of Hedron, Cobra and Bravo, moved into partnerships with three appointed representative networks during her time.
Scale
Davis admits she had been hesitant initially to move from a relatively small private equity backed business to somewhere of Zurich’s scale, wondering if things would take too long to happen in a global company.
“But that couldn’t have been further from the truth,” she says. “We can make decisions quickly, we can innovate, and we’ve got the right people to do that.”
The national role meant travelling a lot working with brokers, regional heads and sales teams as well as SME leader Jacqui Kelly and mid-market boss Morgan Lyons, to whom she now reports.
“One of the biggest parts of my job was bringing Zurich stakeholders with me to make sure that they were alive to what our regional distribution goals were,” she says.
Adding: “It’s important that our UK regional brokers feel connected to Zurich at all levels.”
Home
From a broker perspective what she found is “it’s your relationships and your reputation that really matter”.
Which all leads to – as she previously put it – the “coming home” to Birmingham and dealing with brokers in the city, Midlands, South West and Wales.
Her experience already is that she has inherited “a phenomenal team ”of talented people. With 50 underwriters, leadership and sales, the headcount currently stands at 60 and “we’re still recruiting”.
Davis says: “We’ve got a really strong breadth of knowledge and expertise, and people that really understand the local markets and the local businesses that we’re there to support.
“I do feel there’s a huge amount of untapped potential that I want us as a team now to explore and embrace.”
Highly competitive
Last month, Insurance Age’s regional review of Birmingham found a highly competitive broker market in a city full of opportunities and investment. According to the University of Birmingham’s 2024 economic review of the region, the professional and financial services sector is the largest sector, making up 34.9% of the total gross value added.
The region was previously a manufacturing powerhouse for the UK, but it is now the fourth largest sector in the Greater Birmingham area. In 2022 the sector was 10.5% smaller than it was in 2019.
The area has “massively changed and evolved” Davis says.
Bristol
Birmingham is the bigger of the two offices she runs, the second being Bristol, which Zurich opened a few years ago. “We’re expanding that still, it’s important to be close to brokers locally,” she stresses.
The South West and Wales has its own unique needs, she notes, flagging the hospitality sector as particularly strong.
“It’s important that our underwriters have a local knowledge and truly understand the sectors,” Davis says.
Trust
The first few months have been spent getting to know the teams and understanding the market.
“We have got the foundations of some really solid relationships, but I feel that there’s so much opportunity to build on it and turn it into mutual growth.”
The mantra will be “how we show up as the Zurich team locally, really matters”, as she commits to being even more visible and active in the markets, “so brokers feel connected to us”.
Future
So what are Davis’ goals?
“Short term, it’s to be successful in this role and to make sure that our team is successful,” Davis replies.
“Long term, it’s important to me that I make a difference, and I would like to continue to use the passion that I have to try and support and attract younger talent, whether that be mentoring or going and speaking in schools, making sure that people know about the fabulous opportunities there are in this industry that I was wasn’t aware of.”
“I was brought up to reach for the stars, so I’m going to continue to work my socks off and keep really strong, talented people around me that I take a lot of inspiration from, and who knows, maybe one day…”
