Britain’s decision to leave the European Union should not be used to roll back progress on gay rights in the workplace. That’s among the views voiced by Lloyd’s CEO Inga Beale in the video above. Beale, 53, spoke during an interview with Yahoo Finance editor-in-chief Andy Serwer at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
After last year’s Brexit vote, “maybe a few people were feeling this was an opportunity to have a slightly different stance” on inclusiveness, Beale said. “We’ve got to stop that; we don’t want a world like that.”
“We want to be a totally inclusive world, whether it’s your racial ethnicity, whether it’s your religious background, whether it’s your sexual orientation. The idea is that we want to have an inclusive society, and I think it’s so important that that’s what we aim for,” Beale said.
Beale, who is openly bisexual, is the first woman to head Lloyd’s in the insurance company’s 328-year history. She became CEO in 2014.
Beale said the company’s response to Brexit includes finding a city in Europe where it can establish a subsidiary that gives it access to the Continent, the source of 11% of Lloyd’s revenue.
“The EU is a very important market to Lloyd’s, and we’re going to lose access, we’re going to lose those trading rights to those EU countries once the UK exits the EU,” she said. “We want to find the right place with the right infrastructure, right regulatory environment, right regime that understands the complexity of the nature of the risk that we take on,” she said.
That said, Beale is not overly concerned about the effect of Brexit on Lloyd’s financial health or the status of London as a financial center of the world.
“Lots of Lloyd’s business, for instance, comes from elsewhere in the world,” she said. “The US is our single biggest market—over 40% of the business that we write in the Lloyd’s market comes from the US. That’s not going to change with the Brexit. So London is still going to have a very important part to play.”
Looking ahead, Beale is focused on grappling with the challenges and opportunities that artificial intelligence and other technologies present. “How are the risks changing that we’ve got to insure for these businesses? That’s our biggest challenge out there,” she said.
“We used to be very focused on an earthquake happening, you know, a big hurricane coming in and, of course, those are dreadful incidents and we provide insurance for those,” Beale said. “But now we’ve got to think about a cyberattack. Everything’s technologically advanced, everything’s interconnected. What does that mean? How do you add up an exposure to a cyber event? They’re our new challenges.”
