Simon Waine: Homing in on ‘advice led broking’ and ‘client obsessed’ talent in Gallagher’s corporate division

Simon Waine, managing director of broker giant Gallagher’s recently formed corporate division, is taking stock.

He was promoted into his current position in November 2025 when Gallagher decided to restructure its UK retail business around key client segments rather than geographies. This saw the broker establish two distinct divisions – a commercial arm focused on mid-market clientele and a corporate branch tailoring to large businesses.

It is this latter division – complete with around 400 staff – that Waine now has responsibility for, encompassing the management of “large and complex risks” within Gallagher’s real estate, public sector and education practices.

Speaking exclusively to Insurance Times, Waine confirms that his department has “a huge opportunity” for success because geopolitical and economic volatility is steering corporate demand for “more advice led broking”.

He continues: “We’re in a place at the moment where people are crying out for advice led broking – and we’re positioning ourselves to provide that.

“[Corporates] want [an insurance] placement. But what sort of placement? How much risk do they want to take? How much risk don’t they want to take? They’re looking [at] what their claims profile is. How do we change that claims profile to make them more appealing to an insurer?

“This is what clients are telling us they really want and you’ve got to adapt to do it. I don’t know what other brokers are going to do about that, but it’s not my problem.”

This focus on being a trusted advisor for businesses aligns with Waine’s definition of the large companies that fall into his divisional remit. He explains that, for him, “a corporate client is [one] that needs advice and probably doesn’t need that off-the-shelf solution”.

In order to deliver his ambitions around providing more “advice led broking”, Waine explains that he is “trying to improve our bench strength” by recruiting relevant and knowledgeable talent into his part of the business.

He adds that he is not working to any set volume parameters in terms of how many professionals he is seeking to hire, but instead the focus is firmly on attracting “really good, really talented people who are client obsessed”.

Waine says: “We’re looking to bring in people from other brokers who have got that level of experience, that level of gravitas. We’re trying to improve our bench strength, so we need more people to do that. We want to get out there talking to more prospects, so we’re bringing people in to help us do that.

“We’re just trying to take really good, really talented people who are client obsessed. I want us as a business to be client obsessed. If you’re client obsessed, we won’t go too far wrong. Everything else takes care of itself because you’ll be wanting to understand [clients’] risk, you’ll be wanting to put [insurance] programmes in place that protect them, [you will want] to go with them on that journey.

“Being client obsessed is the type of people that we want to bring in. We don’t really want people who just want to sit in the corner and just roll a book over.

“We’ve got quite a few people in the garden at the moment waiting to join us, so that’s a good start. But we’ll just keep talking to all the opportunities that are out there.”

Staff driven service

Waine’s emphasis on having the right talent in place is a key component of his plan to deliver high quality service for Gallagher’s clients, building on the initial ambitions of the original restructure project.

“The idea of the corporate division was to take all the corporate business that we have at the moment [and] consolidate it into one place with people who live and breathe corporate clients,” he explains.

“The idea was around how do we give our clients the best level of service and how do we give them the best options? So, putting the corporate team all in one place has given us the best chance to do that.

“It’s about talent, not geography.

“If I’ve got a client in London making widgets and the best person in terms of looking after widget manufacturers is [based] in Newcastle, the person with the most experience of looking after the fleets of widget manufacturers is in Leeds and the team that [is] really good at handling the claims around [widget manufacturers] is in London – I can put a team together that basically gives that client the best of everything.”

Career course

Talking of talent, Waine’s own journey into broker leadership has seen a sector pivot and opportunities via acquisition – an opposite experience to the commonly discussed trend in UK general insurance of talent fallout, where senior leaders opt to exit businesses after their current employer has been acquired, often to set up their own firm following post-M&A disillusionment.

Waine was a bank manager at NatWest for 13 years between 1987 and 2001. However, at age 27, he experienced his own disillusionment of his job role, believing that the bank was promoting an ethos of “it doesn’t matter if the client needs it, you just sell it to them anyway”. He then wanted to leave his safe senior banking position because “you have to have morals in life”.

Hitting the newspaper job adverts, Waine applied for a Bermuda-based insurance role – which he was not offered – before being approached by a recruiter for a broker job, divisional director at Lark Group.

“At that stage, [Lark Group was] about 50, 60 people and [it] wanted to grow – and I knew how to help businesses grow,” Waine says.

After a 10-year tenure with Lark, Waine was approached by broker Heath Lambert’s former chief executive, Adrian Colosso, to establish a new team within the business. Waine accepted, only to unexpectedly find that the broker was purchased by Gallagher just six months later – in 2011.

Although he was initially nervous that he “may have made a mistake” with the Heath Lambert career move, Gallagher quickly reassured Waine that it saw his potential.

He says: “[Gallagher] just sat down with me and said ‘look, we can see you’ve been bought in to build a business, we want to give you [that] opportunity to build a business, so we’ll back you, we’ll give it a go and see where we end up’. This is where I’ve ended up.

“[When] you work for a larger company, you can stay there a long time and do lots of different jobs – and that’s where I think the opportunity is.

“One of the things that, as an industry, we have to get better at is giving people opportunities to do [different job roles]. When you’re looking at what [employees’] personal development plans are, what they want to achieve, I think we could all get a bit better [at] saying ‘maybe you could go into reinsurance’, [for example].

“What we tend to do as an industry is to say ‘oh no, you stay in our world’. I think we just sometimes have to put the person first. There are opportunities there, but as an industry, we could probably be better at helping people find those opportunities.”

Being in a ‘lucky place’

Waine admits that he has “done a bit of everything” since joining the Gallagher fold, taking full advantage of the opportunities presented to him.

For example, he did a stint as the broker’s national sales manager, as well as a 10-year chunk heading up its London office, where he was tasked with taking “seven offices all operating independently” and turning “them into one cohesive team” – this combined function ended up generating £20m in income, he adds.

Following this, he accepted a regional managing director job in 2019 to lead Gallagher’s London and south east division, before the November 2025 restructure took him into his current role, reporting in to Nick Harris, Gallagher’s UK and Ireland retail chief executive.

Throughout this career trajectory, Waine has moved into job roles that he confesses he did not aspire to hold initially – however, every rung on this career ladder has brought him closer to today’s position, one he is “passionate” about.

He tells Insurance Times: “I’m really passionate about this.

“I think it’s a massive opportunity with a lot of client prospects out there who we can help and I’m just determined to bring the team in to enable us to do that. I think I’ve ended up in a lucky place.”