‘The Long Game’ Brian Duperreault on the Voice of Insurance Podcast

The latest guest of the Voice of Insurance is ‘insurance royalty’ and got his step up from another industry legend, Hank Greenberg, and is the only insurance CEOs to have run one of the world’s largest insurers as well as the industry’s biggest broker.

There are interviews, then there are interviews, and an expansive conversation with a titan of the re/insurance industry, such as Brian Duperreault, is not one that deserves to be cut short, shoe-horned or restricted to a soundbite about the here and now.

The latest episode of the Voice of Insurance runs to nearly an hour but is one of the most compelling podcasts you’ll hear from the insurance industry this year, so is well worth your time. Host Mark Geoghegan describes Duperreault as “insurance royalty”, and he’s not wrong.

Having begun his career at AIG, Duperreault transformed ACE from a Bermudian upstart into a major global player. He then ran broker MMC and set it on the road to a radical recovery, later founded re/insurer Hamilton Insurance, and then returned to lead AIG, helped it get a spring back in its step. He has now founded Mereo Advisors in probably one of the most difficult funding environments for balance-sheet businesses in his long career.

Unlike most episodes, this one begins with Brian’s unique childhood background, his deeply held Catholicism, a single mother, education entrusted to nuns, with a senior priest and a childhood sports coach as early mentors and sources of inspiration.

Legendary former AIG boss Maurice ‘Hank’ Greenberg – who will turn 100 in May 2025 – was another transformative influence along the way. When the two worked for AIG it was still a small company, meaning Duperreault grew to know almost every senior manager in the company.

“Hank…somehow decided that he wanted to move me along in the organisation and saw something in me,” Duperreault recalls. “I always say that had I gone to any other company, I probably never would have risen to what I have risen to. It was Hank, pushing me, giving me more responsibilities, holding me accountable, and teaching me the business, incredibly important in my life.”

Otherwise, as the host playfully suggested, Duperreault might still be “crunching numbers in a basement” somewhere.

Greenberg also sent him to Japan, “a Fortune 500 company in its own right”, running a company of 6,000 employees and 20,000 agents. There a son was born – “made in America, assembled in Japan”, he jokes, quoting his wife.

Duperreault shared some leadership lessons learned along the long path of his career. “Playing the long game” is something he says can be hard, but necessary, as burning bridges or short-term strategies can be unsustainable, despite the pressures leaders may face towards short-termism, he notes.

Teams are not democracies, he notes, which cuts both ways – when a leader takes a decision, they are also accountable for it, rather than passing the buck to subordinates, he emphasises.

“Team is the most important thing; it’s the people you manage. They’re the most important thing, not you; you’re secondary, they’re primary. In other words, your success is defined by their success; you’re not successful if your team isn’t successful,” he says.

“You have guys who will take advantage of the team for their own benefit. I tried not to do that, and there are corollaries to that. For instance, you better listen to the team; you have to spend time with them, and you have to manage them. If you have the luxury of constructing a team, that’s fun, and how do you put those pieces together; and what’s the right diversity?” he continues.

“But sometimes you inherit a team, and there’s not much you can do about it. Can you maximize the team’s efforts? All of that is a leadership style, and that’s what I tried to do. I try to make the team first, give them credit, and your success then is longstanding, because if the team is only successful while you’re there, and then if you go away, it doesn’t work well, that’s not good, either, so you weren’t a good team builder,” he adds.

At ACE (nowadays Chubb), he led an acquisition of the property and casualty insurance businesses of CIGNA Corp. This was “radical and risky”, he admits, but relied upon the “100% in” support of his board and management team, who wanted to raise the bid, for example, to ensure the deal took place, but then having to cut thousands of jobs at a business that “we knew had problems” in order to turn it around.

 “It was like the Spartans at Thermopylae; they just kept coming and coming, and we had to cut a third of the workforce at the CIGNA P&C business. It was radical, risky,” Duperreault says.

“The risk of failure was significantly higher than other transactions that I’ve done. The street thought I was crazy. They really liked me until then… Then within a year or so, I went from crazy to genius.”