1. Our turnover has continued its annual growth trajectory, increasing by 65% in the last 12 months. We are now truly a multi-million pound business.
2. Our client base has grown too – over 60% of the work undertaken last financial year was for new clients.
3. Our Team has grown by almost 25% and we are delighted to be able to call even more people ‘colleagues’ in our business, whether as part of our full-time team or Talent Pool.
4. Our service range has grown too – our increasingly wide range of specialisms include Operations, Claims, IT, Actuarial, Underwriting and Claims Controls and HR, alongside our traditional strengths in Compliance, Risk and Corporate Governance.
5. We have added Iain Bremner to the board as non-Executive Director which has really helped drive our growth.

The plan I mapped out for a business back in early 2017 is now being applied to our much broader range of services and benefitting a wide range of new clients. We are proud to call so many brokers, MGAs, insurers and members of the Lloyd’s market our clients.

Our growth has been driven by the recruitment of some highly skilled insurance market practitioners as part of our core team, working alongside our Talent Pool of subject matter experts that allow us to offer highly flexible solutions to clients. In the last 12 months we have made senior appointments with the recruitment of Lance Grant as Head of Operations and Niki Underwood as Head of HR. I’m also delighted to have welcomed Peter Houston in the role of Special Adviser, who is working closely with Lance to assist clients preparing for the BluePrint 2 market processing changes.

We’ve made some further important additions that really help consolidate the strength and depth of our compliance function, with Palak Bedi and Andrew Carrick both joining the team in recent months.

All of our recruits continue the underlying ethos for our business model of only employing people who have themselves worked ‘in-house’ in the roles where they now provide advice and support to our clients.

We have also strengthened our traditional service offering with new Heads of Compliance and Risk that are both now committed to joining us in early 2023. Both are well known, well-respected and have held those functions at insurance firms with good track records. They will bring significant depth and experience to the services we provide in those areas of specialism and round out our Team’s experience across brokers, insurers and the Lloyd’s market. I look forward to being able to introduce you to them in a few months’ time.

It is testament to the skill, expertise and temperament of our Team that we now have more of them engaged with clients than at any previous time in our history. We know that you, our clients, have choices and as such, we take much pride in our ability to attract and retain some of the best people in the market to work with us and our clients.

In the last year, we have worked with clients headquartered in 10 countries, spanning 3 continents – Europe, the Americas and Australasia – many trading on a truly international basis. It has been wonderful to watch our reach grow, supporting new clients as they navigate the complexities of multi-jurisdictional trading arrangements and helping them find suitable solutions.

We’ve helped clients with a broad range of issues at every stage of the lifecycle, including:

• many Brexit-related applications to the UK regulators requiring assistance with the application itself and to be operationally ready for authorisation,
• preparing clients for and assisting with regulatory reviews,
• ongoing retainers to support functions under stress due to resource shortages including compliance, risk, operations and IT,
• working with clients wanting to get new businesses underway,
• preparing clients for new financing,
• assisting on the full panoply of regulatory changes including PROD, Fair Value, Consumer Duty and changes to the AR Regime amongst others,
• assisting a multi-billion dollar client with the delivery of changes to their operating model arising from an internal reorganisation across four jurisdictions,
• the parameterisation of Internal Models and the development of more efficient and effective ORSA processes,
• acquisition due diligence work,
• developing and implementing full risk frameworks for insurers including within the Lloyd’s environment,  and
• the integration of acquired businesses.

In each case we have helped to implement the internal plumbing as I call it. That is, the functioning operating models, whether for a part of the business or for the firm as a whole. For many of these we have utilised more than one of our subject matter experts to deliver the solutions required by the client. The testimonials and feedback we receive from clients continues to be one of my greatest sources of pride.

It remains my firm belief that ICSR should stand out from the traditional consultancy firms and, as we enter our new financial year we are spending some time making sure that our business model and our values that have got us to this point are not diluted by future growth. In an environment where culture is increasingly a regulatory matter for so many of our clients, we as a firm take our own culture very seriously.

It is for that reason that we have no timesheet, billing or sales targets. Our focus is on ensuring our staff are not incentivised in the wrong way, but remain focused on delivering to our clients the service they should expect and the outcomes they require.

When I started the business, my focus was on serving the needs of insurance firms looking for support navigating their regulatory, compliance, governance and risk challenges. The business was named with that in mind – Implement Compliance Solutions & Resources. Three of those words continue to do justice to our ethos as a firm, but increasingly, ‘compliance’ has become just one of many strings to the collective bow that is wielded by the team. As such, we have taken the decision to evolve our brand and we will now simply refer to our business as ICSR. The logo has been simplified to reflect this. Many of you reading this will have contractual relationships with ICSR – we have not changed the legal entity, only simplified the trading style, which is, in reality, how most people have always referred to us.

Alongside the growth in range of services that we offer, the type and needs of the clients we work with has also evolved. We now advise clients at all stages of the traditional corporate lifecycle, from start-ups seeking authorisation, through firms growing with new products and entering new territories, to firms undertaking corporate restructuring or involved in sale and acquisition processes all of which require assistance reviewing or adjusting their operating models.  Where historically our client base was mainly brokers, MGAs, Insurers and mature Lloyd’s businesses, we are now also working with an increasing number of businesses in Lloyd’s or considering whether to join Lloyd’s as SIABs, turnkey syndicates or moving from being a Syndicate to Managing Agency.

We pride ourselves on the collaborative nature of our team and its ability to pool knowledge to the benefit of our clients. That ability of our wider team to collaborate is one of the aspects of our business model that gives me much pride. Our objective is to do so in a way that allows our clients to benefit from having access to a broad pool of experience. That pool of individuals now represents in excess of 1,000 years of relevant expertise at your disposal, a figure that includes almost 350 years of compliance expertise, almost 250 years of risk expertise and over 250 years of IT / Operations expertise.

The library of templates and our experience building and implementing operating models or generally troubleshooting allow us to deploy solutions much faster, and more efficiently, as a result of this collaboration and teamwork. They are the foundation from which we are able to create bespoke solutions for our clients, delivering efficiencies in service and cost through our expertise and experience dealing with the issues firms face. Most importantly, however, the operating models we help to deliver are designed and built by people who have operated similar businesses before, not career consultants who have never worked in an insurance business.

Historically, the perception would be that the level of talent we have brought together might all be London based. The reality is that our approach to flexible working, based around client needs, means that we now have resources across the length of the UK, from Scotland and the Hebrides to the Channel Islands. Combined with our approach to flexible working, it has allowed us to tap a much wider pool of expertise. We also have an expansive network of firms across the globe we have used over the years whom we can call upon when the need arises and have put this to good use in the past 12 months to the benefit of our clients.

With growth comes change. Something that so many of our clients recognise. And with our own growth comes our own change. 12 months ago, we took our first permanent office space in Lloyd’s famous building in Lime Street. This month, we moved to a larger office in the Lloyd’s building as the needs of our team outgrew the space available. You can now find us in Room 795 – do let us know if you plan to visit and I will make sure there is fresh coffee or tea available for you.

I’d like to conclude my own reflection with some words of thanks. Firstly, to the team who have helped create and build the business I mapped out back in early 2017. Some of the team have been with me on the journey for a considerable part of that period and others have joined more recently. Without them, the business would not exist. Secondly, I want to express my gratitude to those firms who have trusted all of us at ICSR to help them navigate their challenges. Your trust is one of the most precious things to this business and we will never be complacent with that trust.