CFC’s head of innovation says the managing general agent is using carbon insurance to channel capital towards higher-quality climate projects, while preparing for AI to transform both risk and underwriting. George Beattie (pictured) also sets out why brokers remain central to CFC’s strategy, and how agentic AI could recast underwriters as portfolio managers.
Beattie did not arrive at CFC by way of a conventional innovation brief. He began his career at Willis Towers Watson in 2010 on a graduate scheme that rotated him through facultative reinsurance, product recall, casualty, kidnap and ransom, giving him an early view of insurance as a sector far broader than its public image suggests. He later moved full-time into product recall, joined CFC in 2015 to help set up a product recall team, returned to Willis in 2017, and then moved to Beazley in 2019 to restart its innovation function before being drawn back into CFC’s orbit after its chief executives heard him on a podcast and invited him to return as global head of innovation.
That route matters because it helps explain the way Beattie now describes his role. At CFC, his remit spans breakthrough innovation and product development. He said the first of those areas concerns products “the rest of the market hasn’t seen”, while another part of the job is keeping CFC’s existing portfolio current across its trading channels.
At the centre of the present agenda is carbon insurance, which Beattie said has been the principal breakthrough focus of the past two years. The intention is to introduce insurance products into the carbon ecosystem that can help direct capital towards higher-quality projects. He said that, in practice, means using insurance as an indicator of quality in a market that has attracted both justified and unjustified criticism, thereby encouraging banks to lend and buyers to purchase credits forward. CFC has already written close to $150m of coverage in the class, he said.
Beattie cast that as part of a larger argument about the role of insurance in climate finance. The carbon market, he said, needs to function properly because the broader climate fight offers limited options, and insurance can play a useful part within blended finance structures.
The next major area under review is AI risk. Beattie said CFC is working through two related issues: how existing products respond to AI exposures, and what residual risks may emerge that require standalone solutions. He drew a distinction between the effect of AI on insurance products and its role in operating capability, saying his own focus sits mainly with the former, while Chris Mullen, CFC’s head of data and AI, leads on implementation inside the business.
For all the industry noise around transformation, Beattie’s account was notably practical. He said CFC begins with business outcomes such as faster turnaround, stronger cross-sell and a better broker experience, then works backwards to determine what must change in process and data. That, he suggested, often leads to a familiar conclusion: the underlying issue is data quality.
That mindset is tied to a corporate culture he described as deeply contrarian. He argued that CFC’s origins in cyber, internet-based distribution and SME-focused specialty cover helped embed a habit of questioning assumptions. Even when no immediate challenger is visible, he said, the company behaves as though one is close behind, asking what a new entrant with a blank sheet of paper would do to succeed and how that might threaten the incumbent.
That philosophy also shapes distribution. Beattie said CFC has long directed its energy towards brokers, seeing them in practice as the first customer group it must solve for in order to reach policyholders effectively, particularly small and medium-sized businesses in the United States. In that context, he said, the first objective is to make the broker “look really good” and to equip them to sell more complicated lines with confidence.
He was similarly measured on automation. API-based distribution, he said, works well for simple business such as cyber, where underwriting can be done from relatively few data points because of CFC’s firmographic capability. It is less suited to liability-led products, where more intricate underwriting questions remain necessary. In those lines, the answer lies less in forcing straight-through processing than in reducing unnecessary friction through better portals, confirmatory subjectivities and sharper decisions about which questions matter.
Underpinning much of this is a sizeable internal technology function. Beattie said CFC has more than 130 people in technology, which he described as probably the largest team of its kind among insurers in London. The firm’s build-versus-buy logic is straightforward: buy where there are good off-the-shelf options, but commit internal development to areas that remain differentiating, such as agentic AI and firmographic data.
Beattie said the market has matured enough that some capabilities once regarded as highly differentiated, underwriting platforms among them, can now be sourced externally. The task, he implied, is to recognise early when a once-proprietary advantage has become commonplace and to move on before rivals catch up.
The most significant shift ahead, in his telling, is agentic AI. Beattie said underwriters still spend much of their day on tasks they dislike, such as opening emailed PDF forms, deciphering poorly completed documents and re-keying information into systems. He estimated that such activity consumes between 50 and 70% of underwriters’ time. The promise of agentic AI, he said, is to remove much of that manual burden and turn underwriters into something closer to portfolio managers, reviewing, validating and improving work already assembled with machine assistance, while keeping a human in the loop.
His wider argument was that this is not merely an efficiency story. Beattie pointed to a statistic he attributed to Aon indicating that insurance penetration as a share of global GDP is roughly 2% and falling. If complex and specialty cover can be distributed more quickly and with less friction, he suggested, the industry may have a chance to expand its relevance rather than fight over a shrinking share of economic activity.
CFC, he made clear, does not intend to wait. He said the company aims to be first to operationalise those gains and to demonstrate the benefits in volume terms.
Outside of work, Beattie shows a much more relaxed side. “One of my biggest problems is that I still think about these things outside work, and I struggle to switch off; it’s a bit geeky,” he admits. In his spare time, Beattie enjoys reading, particularly novels from the Warhammer 40,000 series, though he usually keeps that interest to himself. “I tend to keep that secret, but I’m revealing it for the first time now,” he says. Much of his time is also spent with his young children, who, he adds, keep him very busy.
