The Interview
Breaking the mould
Paymentshield’s Tim Johnson has had some interesting and rather unexpected experiences in his life. Sarah Davidson finds out more
Exciting, daredevil, adventurer. Not words you’d associate with a man in insurance. But Paymentshield’s chief executive Tim Johnson has a few surprises hidden in his past. And yes, amazingly, they are insurance-related.
“I had lunch one day with Pierce
Brosnan because we were doing insurance for GoldenEye and he sat down with blood on the side of his face and dirt everywhere,” says Johnson, remembering his days at Aon before he joined insurance specialist Paymentshield. He is full of these anecdotes. “Tom Cruise got a spot one time and so they couldn’t film for about four days. I remember seeing the claim form. The daily cost of running the film set was, for the sake of argument, £80,000 because you’ve got all grips there, the lighting directors, the stage crew and the director. “So he sat in his trailer for three days,
they’re racking up costs of £80,000 a day not filming, wasting time, sat on location. It was in a desert I think from memory. So that was £240,000 they wanted to claim for.”
The list goes on: a Michael Jackson concert in Bombay, a couple of Grand Prix in Suzuka in Japan, a Ryder Cup in Spain. And he gave it all up for mortgage payment protection insurance? “It was sexy but wasn’t that interesting and as a sector of the industry, it’s not enormous. People either stay in it for life as a lifestyle broking job, or they go off and do something else,” he explains. Something else started eight years ago when Johnson met the chairman
of Towergate, Paymentshield’s parent company.
“They bought Paymentshield about five years ago in October 2006,” explains Johnson. “I was chief executive of Towergate underwriting when I started, then I was CEO of CCV which was a venture capital type business doing acquisitions, so I bought a lot of GI brokers.
“That was a lot of adrenaline, deal making and I loved that. I did that for about three years and then two years ago at the beginning of July, I went to run Paymentshield.”
That brings us to where we are now. After the thrills of Hollywood does the world of general insurance and mortgage payment protection insurance measure up?
“I do miss it but you’ve got to replace it with something that’s equally interesting but different, if that makes sense,” he answers. “We bought an insurance portfolio from Bradford & Bingley about a year and a half ago and if we could do some acquisition work in Paymentshield, I’d do it now but the reality is that it’s quite a small sector.”
AfTer The sTorm So expansion is on the cards but organically. Following the payment protection insurance mis-selling scandal, Paymentshield’s core business selling MPPI was hit and while Johnson defends the product to the hilt he recognised that the company should be designing products other than this to meet
44 mortgage introducer OCTOBER 2011
consumer demand and need. Short-term income protection underwritten by Cardif Pinnacle was what they came up with.
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