Influential Women in Captive Insurance: Adele Gale
Adele Gale, Deputy managing director & group head of ILS, Robus Group
Adele Gale is a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants and leads the insurance-linked securities (ILS) and longevity practices at Robus. With more than 10 years in insurance management experience, she was involved with setting up Guernsey’s first rated catastrophe reinsurer, first cat bond listing and first securitisation of Takaful insurance policies, as well managing more than 100 special purpose insurers.
Gale is the deputy chair of the Guernsey International Insurance Association.
How did you get started in the captive insurance industry?
I qualified as a Chartered Accountant with KPMG in Bristol, auditing bancassurers with the London financial services audit team. When I decided to move back to Guernsey insurance management was the natural career choice and after 10 years working predominantly on structured solutions and ILS I joined Robus (shortly to become SRS) where I had the opportunity to work with more captive clients and prospects.
In the last 18 months my role as chair of the Guernsey International Insurance Association has allowed me to work closely with Julia Graham, Richard Cutcher and the Airmic team, which has been fantastic.
Who inspired you or acted as a mentor in your career?
I have been lucky enough to benefit from many helping hands, inspiring individuals and mentors in my career—Peter Child, Steve Britton, and Richard Paris-Smith to name three.
What do you think deters people from entering the world of captives?
I am absolutely passionate about creating career pathways into the insurance management industry for school-leavers, graduates and career-changers. In my opinion the single biggest barrier is the perceived, and to some extent actual, complexity of this sector.
Finding ways to engage talented individuals for long enough to explain our industry and the opportunities it can provide is the challenge. In 2023 we ran an immersive workshop for 17-year-olds in which teams were appointed to the business development department of an insurance manager for the afternoon and had the task of presenting a feasibility study to the board of a fake company named Ethica Shipping.
We had the regulator, Zurich and lots of local industry professionals taking part in character. We will be running the event again on October 3, 2024 and a video can be found here: NextGen|GIIA.
How can mentorship and sponsorship programmes be designed to better support the career development of women?
Mentorship is a personal thing, my female mentors have been from outside the insurance industry and have been women I’ve approached or asked my line manager to approach on my behalf to ask for their insights and help.
I think it is hard to roll out programmes which match mentors and mentees successfully. Initiatives such as Captive International’s Influential Women List are vital to highlight the many talented women in the industry. In 2023 we launched the Women in International Insurance Network (WIIN) in Guernsey with more than 30 founding members.
WIIN has created a safe space for women to network and I’m excited to see what direction the network takes in the coming years.
In what ways can companies in the sector create a more inclusive culture that actively promotes gender diversity at all levels?
To promote diversity, companies should provide their staff with access to psychometric tools and leadership coaching which helps them understand and be confident in their style, their strengths and the value they bring to their team.
In my experience talking in a classroom environment about different team members’ styles is a very effective way of diving beneath divisive labels such as gender to reveal the truth that you need a whole host of different skills within any team and that diversity feeds productivity and innovation.
Companies can adopt policies and lobby for regulations which promote gender equality such as free childcare and equal parental leave for both parents, establish networks and connections among disadvantaged groups and shine a spotlight on their employees in such a way as to create a diverse pool of role models.
“To promote diversity, companies should provide their staff with access to psychometric tools and leadership coaching.“
What challenges are gender-specific to women in the captives industry?
When I accepted my first job in insurance management just 15 years ago I was warned by a family friend that it wasn’t an industry a woman would generally do well in. A lot has changed in that time but the social constructs of a “leader” in the captives sector, as in most industries, remain subtly and mostly inadvertently discriminatory.
What solutions would you like to see?
Asking people to acknowledge the privilege they benefit from and to embrace a scary world of equity of opportunity for all, remains fundamental to getting the best out of every member of our industry, which makes good business sense to do.
What are your ambitions?
My ambition is to bring new products to market and deliver innovations to our industry, to continue to build WIIN and our career pathways with students to encourage more new talent with diverse backgrounds, viewpoints and skills to come into captive management.
Click here to read Captive International’s first Influential Women in Captive Insurance publication, celebrating the women transforming the captive sector through their sustained excellence and leadership.
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