Head of Home, Pet & Travel Underwriting

At Direct Line Group, we're shaping the future. With a mission to make insurance easier and better value for our customers, we embrace change in all its richness and variety. It's not just what we do; it's how we do it. We bring our whole selves to work every day and embrace fresh thinking - after all, Britain is constantly changing and to protect the nation, we adapt with it. Across our diverse brands - including Direct Line, Churchill, Privilege and Green Flag - change takes many forms. We appreciate the knowledge and skills that each one of us brings to the business. It's hard not to be inspired by the things that make us unique. Boldness, curiosity and enthusiasm go a long way. And they're helping us transform the industry we lead. This is a fantastic opportunity to lead the Home, Pet & Travel Underwriting teams within Personal Lines. You'll be responsible for managing the underwriting performance of these businesses as well as driving forward development of new capability to ensure we stay at the top of our game. In this role you will be leading a team of highly motivated and skilled underwriters and will support the wider Personal Lines business in delivering against our business priorities. Underwriting is one half of the Pricing & Underwriting function so you and your team will work closely with Pricing to ensure we deliver optimum outcomes. But it's not just our Pricing colleagues you'll be working with?As underwriting touches almost all areas of our business, your day will be varied and fast paced with engagement across multiple and different teams proving expert underwriting input across the Group. And, as the Head of Home, Pet & Travel Underwriting, you'll be part of the Underwriting leadership team driving the team from strength to strength. What being a Head of Underwriting - Home, Pet and Travel involves: * Contribute to the creation, implementation, maintenance and control of the Underwriting strategy to drive forward delivery of business plans, including business metrics and key customer metrics. * Deliver expert technical and analytical underwriting support to achieve performance targets and the Underwriting strategy including leading and contributing to delivery of change within Pricing & Underwriting and across divisions. * Develop and maintain optimal underwriting footprint across all channels for Home, Pet, Travel & Legal products. Ensure adequate control of underwriting risk appetite (including development and implementation of UW rule changes). * Continuously optimise and improve risk exposure, KRI and root cause analysis reporting across all Underwriting metrics. Identify areas of underwriting improvement or ensure mitigating actions are taken as a result of root cause analysis of data. Ensure appropriate reporting is in place across relevant trading and risk forums * Ensure appropriate Underwriting controls are in place and followed with respect to testing, implementing and adhering to wider company risk appetite. * Develop and maintain optimal underwriting question set, Underwriting rules and appropriate use of internal and external data at Underwriting touch points to maximise risk assessment, optimise quoteability and control application fraud. Implement change as required within agreed timescales and ensuring that impacts of change are understood * Ensure impacts of both Technical & Margin Pricing developments and changes in Pricing capability on Underwriting are understood and optimised as appropriate. * Develop and embed new underwriting techniques and processes that drive business understanding and maintain and improve profitability to enhance stakeholder confidence and performance. * Develop and maintain the Personal Lines product suite, ensuring adequate control of risk whilst understanding impact on customer satisfaction. * Liaise with a wide variety of teams in order to shape, own and deliver your teams underwriting strategy and Underwriting change working effectively with the wider Underwriting team, Category teams, wider Pricing and Underwriting teams and other areas. Use your knowledge, negotiation skills and specialist underwriting knowledge to deliver upon objectives and grow shareholder value. * Identify and drive forward opportunities to develop the business as a result of changes in market & consumer trends * Manage, lead and develop a team of underwriting analysts * Educated to degree level or with significant experience in the Underwriting area, along with experience in the general insurance market. * Ideally ACII qualified or equivalent professional qualification * Strong and proven people management experience Rewarding you is really important to us, as well as offering a competitive salary and generous holiday entitlement; you can take advantage of a wide range of benefits. The best part is you can pick and choose the benefits to suit your own lifestyle, but also pass on some of the savings to family and friends. Here are just a few we have on offer: * A competitive salary, benchmarked against our competitors, which will grow as you do. * Pension 9% of your base salary, you can choose to contribute less or more than this, and anything you don't wish to put in to your pension you can take as cash instead! * Private medical insurance (anyone can choose this through our flexible benefits scheme, and managers receive this as standard) * Attractive holiday entitlement * 50% off our Home, Motor and Pet insurance * Free Travel insurance * Free Green Flag breakdown cover * Flexible rewards including Life insurance, income protection, critical illness insurance, personal accident insurance * Retail card, with discounts at big name retailers * My Discounts - a discounts website for all our employees, with great discounts, cash back savings and offers across hundreds of brilliant high street brands, travel, tickets, gym memberships and much more.