Kevin Thompson represented Ireland in his youth as a cross-country and mountain runner and still clocks 10-12 kilometres several mornings a week in Marlay Park in south Dublin, before arriving at his desk at Intact Insurance Ireland in nearby Dundrum.
“I’m a bit of an introvert by nature,” says the chief executive of the company, formerly known as RSA Insurance Ireland. “I find the run a great time for reflection and for setting me up for the day ahead. It’s amazing how you can sort things out in your head on a run.”
Having lost out to Zurich Insurance Group in March in the race for RedClick Insurance – even if Thompson declines to confirm the bid that would have propelled Intact Ireland from number six to number four in the Irish general insurance market – he still sees scope to grow market share.
“We’ve an ambition to be in the top three by 2030. We believe we’ve a good, strong, organic game plan to get us there,” he says of the company, which has a 7.5 per cent market share of gross written premiums. “But the customer will ultimately decide who wins. We want our customers to be our advocates, we want our people to be engaged, and we want to be the most respected company. I believe if we follow that course we’ve got a good chance.”
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It follows the rebranding of the business last year by its Canadian parent, Intact Financial Corporation, which acquired most of the London-based RSA Insurance Group in late 2021.
It also comes nearly 13 years after an accounting scandal at RSA Ireland that sent shock waves through the UK’s oldest insurance group.
But Thompson is clear the company will not be chasing a podium position at any cost.
“Intact is a values-driven organisation. Our people know that our values come before chasing financials – and that we think long term. That keeps you in check,” says the 57-year-old.
“When we talk about growth, we talk about profitable growth. We retain a strong focus on underwriting discipline, our pricing sophistication, our deep claims experience and our customers’ experience. We won’t deviate from that.”
Profits surged 59 per cent at Intact Ireland last year to €17.7 million as a decline in earnings from its main business of insuring households and businesses was offset by a boost from its bond investments portfolio, according to the company’s latest annual solvency and financial condition report.
Profits on its insurance underwriting fell almost 40 per cent to €13 million hit by the impact of Storm Éowyn, the most expensive insurance event in Irish history, that January.
ATHLETICS
Thompson is a native of Limerick, growing up in the city suburb of Southill. “It was a great place to grow up, with great people, but had its social challenges. So, my father sent me to an athletics club on the other side of the city, Limerick AC, where I came across my first mentor, coach Bill Logan,” he says. “He had a great saying that I still use to this day with my people, that ‘you’re only as good as your next race’.”
Logan died in early 2025.
As a member of the Irish under-23 cross-country team, Thompson found himself sharing a house in London with other Irish athletes in 1988, a few years after leaving school.
He ended up landing a job with US life and pensions group Lincoln Financial’s UK unit, starting off in customer service, before training to be a life insurance underwriter. He also moved to competing at senior level for Ireland as a mountain runner during this time.
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After 12 years in London, Thompson moved to Dublin to become chief underwriter with a cross-border life company Citigroup was setting up. He subsequently secured a general manager opportunity with Allianz’s international health insurance unit in Dublin in 2002.
“I had four fabulous years there, where I ultimately ended up looking after all their client service and claims functions,” he said.
But for Thompson to get to the next level, he knew he would need to be accountable for a business’s financial performance. A break came in 2006 when US insurance giant AIG’s Alico Life unit in Ireland was looking for someone to set up a business selling employee benefit products across Europe.
Following the near-collapse of AIG in 2008, Alico was sold to MetLife.
Thompson had already become CEO of Alico in Ireland before the 2010 deal and would – along with members of his management team – leave the combined business within months of it going through.
He did some consultancy work after the exit and joined the board of a Norwegian managing general agent – an intermediary between insurers and brokers.
In 2012, he was encouraged by industry figures to take on the CEO role in lobby group Insurance Ireland (then known as the Irish Insurance Federation).
It would make him the public face and voice of the industry during a prolonged period of heavy losses, driven by a surge in injury claims and raised questions over the sector’s ability to price risk. This was followed by sharp premium increases and severe criticism from consumer advocates and politicians.
His time at the industry group – which he ran until September 2019 – also saw a concerted effort by the Government to reform the insurance sector. It included the commissioning of a report by former High Court president Nicholas Kearns, which found in 2017 that the average compensation award for whiplash in Ireland was almost 4½ times higher than in Britain; the setting up of a National Claims Information Database (NCID) in the Central Bank of Ireland to increase transparency in the sector; and the initiation of legislation that would give rise to the Judicial Council, which set guidelines in 2021 that brought down personal injury awards.
“It was certainly one of the most turbulent periods for the industry and consumers,” says Thompson. “But that actually made the job fulfilling. It was incumbent that we had a strong voice – and solutions to bring to the table. Because you need a strong industry voice as well as strong voices at the regulator and in the area of policy in Government to get things right, ultimately, for the consumer.”
Minister for Justice Jim O’Callaghan in January published the outline of a planned amendment bill that would extend the review period of judicial guidelines and compel the council to consult the Personal Injuries Resolution Board (PIRB) and “other stakeholders” when carrying out the assessment. This follows the Minister backing down last July from asking the Oireachtas to rubber stamp the judiciary’s plans to hike awards by almost 17 per cent, following resistance from insurers and business lobby groups.
While this opened up the risk of judges making increased awards outside of the guidelines while the PIRB remains bound by the current framework, Thompson said it has not led to widespread increases in litigated cases. “You see pockets of it from time to time, but I haven’t seen much evidence of a trend,” he says.
Still, he said that he remains surprised by how many cases continue to go through litigation, with annual NCID reports consistently showing that injured parties get little extra compensation by going down the legal route compared to settling through the PIRB.
“All this does is drive more cost into the system,” he says. “This is ultimately borne by consumers.”
Insurers blamed a spike in spare parts and labour expenses for an almost 15 per cent surge in motor premiums – according to Central Statistics Office data – between the end of 2022 and last summer. Premiums have since come back by a little over 2 per cent.
Thompson says flood coverage is the key reform issue right now, with a Central Bank report in 2024 highlighting that owners of 5 per cent of properties were struggling to get insurance against flooding. Minister for Finance Simon Harris said last month that his officials were “engaging with multiple stakeholders on the development of a long-term strategic approach to the provision of flood insurance”.
Thompson thinks Ireland will end up with some form of Government-backed flood reinsurance scheme similar to the UK’s Flood Re plan, funded by an industry levy and also supported by protection bought in the global reinsurance market.
“It would be hugely important to get something over the line,” he says. However, he says it’s just as important for the State and individual property owners in flood-risk areas to continue to build up defences against flood damage. “Investment in adaptation is not keeping pace with what we’re seeing on the climate change front,” he says.
RSA SCANDAL
There was no bigger basket case in the Irish industry when Thompson was Insurance Ireland CEO than RSA. In late 2013, the insurer’s then chief executive Philip Smith and two other individuals were suspended amid concerns about how it timed the setting aside of reserves for large insurance claims.
The company was found by a subsequent Central Bank investigation to have under-reserved for a series of large loss claims. This artificially inflated its profits. RSA Insurance Group would commit more than €500 million of capital to the Irish unit over the next 2½ years to repair its balance sheet.
The Central Bank fined the firm €3.5 million in late 2018 and barred Smith last December from holding a senior financial role for 13 years. It decided against imposing a fine on Smith, for fear that it could push him into bankruptcy.
The debacle resulted in leadership change at the top of the UK-based parent RSA Insurance Group and a painful period of restructuring – including a £775 million (€899 million) share sale, job cuts, and the sale of operations in Latin America, eastern Europe and parts of Asia.
The hangover contributed to years of share price underperformance relative to peers, before the group received a £7.2 billion bid from Intact Financial and Denmark’s Tryg in late 2020. It represented a 51 per cent premium to its market value immediately before the news.
Tryg would end up taking RSA’s Scandinavian units, while Intact secured its key Canadian asset as well its businesses in the UK, Ireland and some niche markets in continental Europe.
Thompson joined RSA Ireland in late 2019, succeeding Ken Norgrove, whose turnaround leadership – after being hired from Zurich Insurance in 2014 – had impressed folk in headquarters enough to put him in charge of its Scandinavian operations.
We have momentum in the business at the moment
— Kevin Thompson
Following the disruption of the Covid-19 pandemic, the inflation crisis and years of aligning the business with its new parent, the Irish company – and other parts of the former RSA group, now all led by Norgrove – were rebranded last October under the Intact banner.
While the UK business has exited personal insurance lines since the takeover, the Canadians have backed a dual personal and commercial strategy in the Republic.
“We have momentum in the business at the moment,” he says, adding that Intact is allowing the unit to reinvest in its business and giving it speedy access to resources elsewhere in the group.
He cites the 123.ie retail business as an example. When Thompson started looking to improve the unit’s digital offering in 2023, he was able to tap the team behind a tech overhaul at the parent group’s Belairdirect retail brand in Canada.
“We were able to deploy that at a fraction of the time that it would have taken us to build it ourselves,” he says. “Our 123 business is performing very, very well.”
RISK APPETITE
Intact Financial Group said in its most recent annual report that the Irish business has broadened its risk appetite across its commercial insurance. It launched seven new products last year, expanded further into the hotel and entertainment sectors and insourced certain work to close claims faster.
“I think our rebrand has helped us a lot to energise our commercial lines business”, especially with brokers, he says. “That’s where the focus is now.”
The recent deal for Zurich to buy RedClick – a business that started off as Quinn Insurance three decades ago – has stoked talk in some quarters of a need for more consolidation in a sector that has nine major players with market shares between 4 and 17 per cent, according to Insurance Ireland data, and has had to deal with a surge in capital and regulatory requirements in recent times.
“People are constantly talking about consolidation. We’re in a mature market,” Thompson says.
While he said it wouldn’t be a surprise to see more, he adds: “You could equally see another hiatus before something happens again.”
Might Intact Ireland’s Toronto parents look to offload the business – which has about 650 employees across Dublin, Galway and Belfast – if it doesn’t achieve its own growth targets over the coming years?
“No. Our parent loves this business. We’re achieving growth, we’re achieving profitability, we’re achieving our objectives.”
The 2013 accounting scandal at RSA Ireland subsequently gave rise to allegations at the Employment Appeals Tribunal of a workplace ruled by fear that resulted in staff feeling unable to escalate issues or concerns.
Nevertheless, Thompson is clear about his own management style.
“I believe that no matter what level you are in the organisation, you should be able to approach anybody at any given moment,” he says.
“The most important thing for me as a leader is to create a culture and a tone where people can quietly knock on my door – or their boss’s door – and be able to say there is a difficulty or a challenge. How you respond has a big influence on the business. But that’s my job.”
CV
Name: Kevin Thompson
Job: CEO of Intact Insurance Ireland
Family: Married, with two children
Lives: Skerries, north Co Dublin
Hobbies: Loves running, and has represented Ireland on the international stage. “I competed for Ireland under-23s in the 1990 Westathletic cross country championships in the Netherlands. By chance, Catherina McKiernan was on the women’s under-23 team that day and finished third. She was destined for an outstanding athletics career, my journey led to insurance.”
Something you might expect: He’s a big follower of Irish athletics and Limerick hurling.
Something that might surprise: “I spent a summer working in a meat plant as a very young man. If you need a gammon boned and rolled, I’m your man.”
