Women in reinsurance
PrOFILE Name:
Lara Mowery
Company: Guy Carpenter & Company Job:
Managing director, head of global property specialty
Timeline: 2007—ROLePlay (owned by Guy Carpenter)
2005—i-aXs (owned by Guy Carpenter)
1997—Guy Carpenter’s Global Property Specialty Practice
Lara Mowery leads Guy Carpenter’s global property specialty practice group, which has responsibility for understanding all aspects of the property reinsurance marketplace and providing the framework for the direction of Guy Carpenter’s thought leadership and tactical execution of its property initiatives.
She has also played a key role in the development of i-aXs®, the
firm’s award-winning data management platform and ROLePlay, its global catastrophe transaction and analysis platform.
Mowery has more than 20 years’ experience in the design and placement of a wide variety of property reinsurance programmes. She specialises in creating solutions for particularly difficult risks and is credited with developing several ‘best practice’ tools and contract clauses, in particular for the Florida marketplace. She also has extensive experience with residual markets, including working with the Florida Hurricane Catastrophe Fund in various capacities, Florida Citizens and its predecessors the FJUA and FWUA and consulting for entities in Hawaii, Texas, Louisiana and New York in the US.
She has also advised government-sponsored catastrophe facilities in Mexico, Taiwan and Turkey, as well as with the World Bank. Prior to joining Guy Carpenter, Mowery worked at E.W. Blanch Co and its sister company, Paragon.
Two highlights of her career have involved breaking new
ground. “The first was the successful design and launch of a unique reinsurance solution and leveraged expertise I’d spent years developing in Florida,” she says. “The second was the implementation of our award-winning data management
platform. There are several applications that provide similar functionality now but at the time there wasn’t anything else that combined a robust business intelligence platform with full mapping capabilities.”
Her biggest challenge has been knowing which opportunities
would provide her with the best development path in her career. “I’ve had several chances to do things that were very different from what I was doing at the time. Taking a risk on certain opportunities has given me a unique skillset and proved to be a great benefit, but you don’t know when you take a chance if it will work out. Most of my decisions to jump off the cliff have worked out well, but not all of them. Then you have to take what you can from these situations and work toward something new.”
Mowery’s current aim is to find the next unique experience that delivers new challenges. “The industry is evolving right now in significant ways,” she says. “This brings great opportunities to find spots to push the boundaries of how the industry works and to contribute to where it’s going in the future.”
May 2014 | INTELLIgENT INsUrEr | 33
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