Podcast: Reid and Clegg present Double Indemnity – episode 13, CII’s Matthew Hill

Catching up with hosts Stuart Reid and Toby Clegg, the CII boss looks back at his career, which spans 20 years at the civil service, such as at the Cabinet Officer and the Department for Culture, Media & Sport, and regulation jobs including at the Gambling Commission.

Joining the CII just over two years ago he now leads an international organisation with 125,000 members – two-thirds of which are in insurance.

He admits he came in at a ‘choppy water time’.

“I’m lucky enough to be able to look back on a career that is full of things that I am really proud of, but there is very little that I’m more proud of than seeing the restoration of a really healthy, exciting relationship between our personal finance members and our general insurance members.

“It really is a joy.”

Having worked across a wide range of sectors, his career has frequently overlapped with insurance.

Since becoming the CII chief, he has seen from the insurance community an “incredible passion and richness about what we do” and urged “we’ve got to find a way of bottling that and getting it in front of young people”.

On sticking his neck out about insurance’s “sort of modesty to a fault”, he told the hosts: “It’s not false modesty, I think it is a very attractive characteristic. It is this modesty. It is very rooted in people and colleagues and peers getting on to make business work.

“And I think that is wonderful.

“But I think one of the side effects is insurance is very bad at talking about itself in exciting terms.”

Catch up on the entire series through our bespoke Double Indemnity page, which includes recent episodes featuring:

• Tom Kirkland, founder and CEO of Cameron Specialty
• Vivek Banga, managing director of Polaris
• Dame Susan Langley, the Lady Mayor of the City of London

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