For much of his 20s, London insurance was nowhere on George Dagnall’s (pictured) horizon. He spent 10 years in the Army, serving in Afghanistan and Iraq as a sniper.
An injury sustained from an IED blast in Afghanistan, which later manifested during special forces selection, abruptly ended his plan for a full military career following his first hip surgery. A short spell in intelligence work followed, a deliberate move, he said, because “no-one would employ a sniper” in civilian life.
His route into insurance came almost by accident. A friend invited him to an “insight day” at Lloyd’s; he turned up assuming it was Lloyds Bank and found himself instead in the underwriting room. The experience was intimidating enough that he initially ruled it out. Later, over late-night drinks, a market practitioner told him he was “exactly the sort of person” they would want in the industry; that was enough to persuade him to explore it properly.
What followed was an old-fashioned apprenticeship-by-network. Based in Somerset at the time, Dagnall took three-hour train journeys to London for single coffees with brokers and underwriters. He never asked for a job, only for information, and gradually built the trust that led to an offer from JLT. He joined as a broker on a placement scheme and, as he notes, was its first non-commissioned officer to gain a placement with the Lloyd’s Military Network.
Following three years as a Broker in JLT and Marsh he moved into specialist risk consulting at AnotherDay, a firm staffed by former intelligence officers, Flying Squad detectives and academics and focused on translating complex risk into insurance terms. The business was later acquired by Gallagher, giving him first‑hand experience of two major integrations, JLT, Marsh and then Gallagher’s acquisition of the consultancy.
A chance meeting with the founders of crisis specialist Hotspot Cover at an event in Warsaw led to the next shift. He joined to lead product and operations, became COO and helped the business grow rapidly by tightening operations and, crucially, by behaving more like advisers than transactional intermediaries in a market where high-risk covers such as Ukraine were increasingly difficult to place.
He remains a nonexecutive director of Hotspot Cover. Today, however, his main executive focus is SPS Global, part of US based security firm Concentric, where he serves as director, head of insurance.
SPS sits in a part of the value chain that is often treated as an afterthought: assistance and response. Its teams and partners are the ones that, in practice, implement kidnap and ransom response, active assailant support and personal accident assistance on behalf of insurers and their clients.
Dagnall believes that what happens after a loss is becoming as important to buyers as the size of the cheque. For corporates and high net worth clients operating in fragile environments, the question is less “what is the limit on my personal accident cover?” and more “who will get me out and keep me alive if things go wrong?”
That shift in emphasis is bringing assistance providers and insurers closer together. Dagnall spends much of his time in the city, sitting with carriers and brokers, reviewing books and policy structures. The aim is to feed operational insight, what genuinely happens on the ground, back into wordings and product design, so that cover reflects the real risk rather than historical assumptions.
Like most senior market figures, Dagnall is routinely asked about artificial intelligence and digital transformation. His scepticism about the current hype is unusually blunt. The claim that AI is rapidly making the world more productive, he suggests, is not borne out by the broader economic picture. It can act as a convenient explanation for job cuts in an era of contraction.
That does not mean he dismisses digital change. On the contrary, he argues that the industry will fall behind if it fails to engage but he rejects the instinct to “hand everything over” to AI. Instead, he favours a granular, process led approach: identify tasks that can be automated with limited error tolerance; implement change in small steps; prove each element works before moving onto the next.
His experience at AnotherDay bears this out. The team built two platforms before the AI surge and he learnt first-hand how technology is pieced together, which is important to understand if you want to apply it, not forgetting how “credible” it is especially when looking at geopolitics and data. More broadly, he is watching the emergence of digital underwriting platforms with interest, including markets where pricing is system generated rather than set by individual underwriters, but believes the technology still has to earn its place risk-by-risk.
At SPS, Dagnall’s digital agenda has three main planks. The first is using AI sensibly to support strategic assessments across different parts of the business: as a tool to frame issues and synthesise information, not a substitute for expertise.
The second is a wholesale rebuild of the firm’s risk management platform. Having previously served as a product owner, working closely with developers, he is acutely aware that the underlying architecture has to be designed with future evolution in mind. In a previous role, he discovered mid programme that the legacy platform simply could not support the developments planned, a painful but instructive lesson.
The third strand is customer facing. SPS is building an online environment through which clients can buy and manage membership products, notably its GEAR membership, without going through a traditional sales process. For the high net worth and corporate clients the group serves, that membership can include emergency evacuation and security assistance in higher risk territories. Dagnall is keen that any digital frontend is genuinely intuitive, not just a thin layer over internal complexity.
Looking back on earlier projects, he is clear about what he would do differently. Ambitious multifunction platforms that try to “do everything” may look impressive on a pitch deck but can fail in practice if frontline users do not fully understand them. Adoption, he notes, is often quietly poor even when meeting room feedback is positive, because teams lack confidence in their ability to integrate and operate new tools. His mantra now is to “build the base that can take you to the end, but don’t build the end on day one”.
One of Dagnall’s more striking ideas sits slightly to one side of SPS, in his non‑executive work. After years advising NGOs and their insurers, he has become convinced that the humanitarian sector is structurally disadvantaged by traditional insurance buying.
At present, he points out, individual organisations go out separately to brokers and carriers, pay brokerage on each placement and see any underwriting profits flow out of the sector. At a time when major donors have cut budgets and large development agencies have faced funding crises, that leakage is increasingly hard to justify.
Drawing inspiration from the UK terrorism pool, Pool Re, he has been working with GISF, an NGO member body, on the concept of aggregating humanitarian organisations into a single cell captive structure. Premiums would still be paid for risk transfer, but underwriting profit and investment return would accumulate within the humanitarian “family”, to be recycled into services, risk management or the insurance of harder to place exposures.
For such a model to function, a digital backbone is essential: a platform on which member organisations can standardise data, connect programmes, and transact into the captive. The technical work involved, from harmonising wordings to aligning appetites, is substantial, and much of his energy has gone into that unglamorous but necessary groundwork: analysing existing programmes, identifying commonalities and designing for the majority while allowing for tailored endorsements at the margins.
Running through Dagnall’s account is a recurring theme: the cultural gap between traditional insurance thinking and the way technologists operate. Developers, he said, are relentless in tracing the root cause of failure: if a feature breaks, they will not accept “it just stopped working” but will insist on reconstructing the path that led to the problem.
Underwriting and broking cultures, by contrast, have often been more forgiving of opaque processes. That becomes expensive when businesses attempt to digitalise. If a user cannot explain what they clicked or changed before a system failed, the firm ends up paying senior developers to spend hours or days reverse engineering the error.
For smaller and mid‑sized firms, which do not have large QA teams, this makes “upskilling” non‑technical staff essential. Frontline users need enough understanding of how systems behave to describe issues clearly, test changes and recognise when a process might be brittle. Without that, digital transformation quickly degenerates into a costly cycle of fixes and workarounds.
SPS’s work is most visible when geopolitics erupts. Shortly after Dagnall joined, the Iran, Israel confrontation escalated sharply. From his perspective, the event was not a surprise; watching what he calls “the system behind the system”, the underlying political and strategic currents made some form of flare‑up feel inevitable.
The firm had already been speaking to clients about the developing situation. Once events unfolded, the assistance operation moved into full crisis mode. On the insurance side, SPS acted under existing kidnap and ransom, special risks and personal accident arrangements, dealing with insured travellers and expatriates in the Gulf and surrounding region. Parallel to that, the firm fielded ad hoc requests from clients without dedicated cover but keen to move staff out of perceived danger zones.
Co‑ordinating evacuations from cities such as Dubai, Abu Dhabi and onward routes via Oman required local partners, constant monitoring of changing border and visa rules, and careful expectation management. Dagnall is quick to puncture popular images of helicopters and daring extractions; most evacuations are prosaic, logistically messy and expensive.
The episode also underlined, in his view, the importance of prearranged membership or insurance solutions. High net worth clients who regard per annum fees as excessive can be surprised by the cost of bespoke evacuation at the point of crisis, when aircraft and security teams are in short supply. For him, events in the Middle East and elsewhere are likely to normalise the idea that “crisis insurance”, emergency medical and evacuation support, is as fundamental for globally mobile individuals and organisations as buildings cover is for property owners.
For all the focus on systems and strategy, Dagnall’s life outside work is still defined by endurance and risk. He continues to train regularly and likes to have at least one major physical challenge on the horizon. The most substantial to date was a 3,000mile row across the Atlantic from La Gomera in the Canary Islands to Antigua, completed with three crewmates as part of an ocean rowing race.
The crew raised funds for two causes: a bowel cancer charity and Head Up, a veterans’ mental health charity he cofounded with fellow ex-service personnel. The project took years of weekend training and logistics; for long stretches, he jokes, life consisted of “row or work”.
After that crossing, he allowed himself a rare six month spell of relative idleness, before returning to a more sustainable balance. Away from formal challenges, he reads widely on politics and geopolitics, an extension of the curiosity that underpins his professional work and makes a point of escaping London at least once a year for the mountains of Scotland or Yorkshire.
It is, he admits, a return to landscapes he once cursed as a young soldier on windswept exercises in Scotland or Wales. The difference now is perspective. For an insurance market grappling with geopolitical shocks, climate risk and technological upheaval, that combination of hard experience and long view may prove useful.
