P&C Leadership Spotlight

Employee Spotlight

SCOR Business Solutions is the direct insurance branch of SCOR’s P&C business, offering a range of comprehensive insurance products to address large commercial clients’ evolving insurance needs worldwide.

In 2024, Claire McDonald was appointed CEO of SCOR Business Solutions, which she is leading with a vision to further grow in the direct corporate insurance market, to ensure SCOR Business Solutions maintains its leadership position in the energy segment through transition, and to expand specialty lines of business.

Before joining SCOR, Claire navigated various roles across underwriting, operations, and sales. She began her career in 1987 as an underwriter at the Allianz Group in the UK, where she worked in Commercial Lines and Property before specializing in Onshore Energy. From there she had the chance to move to operations, where she was able to work on more varied projects with local and global teams, culminating in the role of Global Head of Operations for AGCS. Upon leaving Allianz, Claire was appointed Managing Director for the UK and Ireland at HDI Global SE before a move back to underwriting when she was appointed to the Executive Board as Chief Underwriting Officer responsible for Property, Engineering, Marine, and Risk Consulting.

“Moving from underwriting to operations wasn’t an obvious choice for many, but each step in my career has felt like an organic step up – or sideways – from the last,” she said. “I’ve also rotated between local, regional, and global roles during my career, which has given me an appreciation of how people work in different countries and cultures.”

As CEO of SCOR Business Solutions, Claire is responsible for overseeing all SCOR Business Solutions underwriters and for creating and delivering a clear strategy that prioritizes growth while contributing to an overall diversified, balanced, and profitable P&C business.

“SCOR Business Solutions is not a standalone organization. It’s very much part of P&C,” she said, “and it’s quite interesting sitting within that reinsurance context.”

And, here, she believes her insurance background is a huge advantage: P&C Reinsurance and SCOR Business Solutions, while complementary, serve very different roles and work with different types of clients. Where P&C Reinsurance brings risk sharing and capital solutions to insurance companies, SCOR Business Solutions works with corporate clients to offer direct, often tailor-made, insurance solutions for operational and project risks.

“At SCOR Business Solutions, we are orientated around global product lines and really run as a global team. I think that is a differentiator in this sector compared to some of our peers,” she said. “And we’ve got a very wide range of products, which means we can look to manage the cycles among that product range while leveraging the team’s wide range of expertise.”

For example, SCOR’s New Energy Practice allows the teams to coordinate expertise from diverse areas such as onshore and offshore energy, cyber, construction, political and credit, casualty, liability, and others to create custom solutions that meet a client’s specific needs in facing the energy transition. By providing end-to-end coverage – from project financing, original equipment manufacturing and credit risk transfer to project construction, operation, and decommissioning – the New Energy Practice ensures that the Group’s clients are protected at every stage of their energy transition journey.

“Our clients do still want to be treated individually,” she said. “After all, it’s individual companies with unique sets of challenges. We have considerable technical expertise within our underwriting teams that enables us to really understand what’s going on with our clients and suggest coverage solutions that could be meaningful.”

Claire sees a huge potential for growth at SCOR Business Solutions and moving forward she has three key goals: growing the teams’ presence in the direct corporate insurance market and other key markets, solidifying SCOR Business Solutions’ leadership position in the energy transition, and expanding on specialty lines offerings.
To do this, she is focused on providing her teams with the tools and resources they need, establishing a strategic roadmap together, and then giving them the space they need to accomplish these goals.

“My leadership style is to work towards what is best for the Group,” she said. “I want to try and leave an organization in a better place than how I found it and I want the people working with me to have the chance to grow. It’s really about getting to understand the people that I’m working with and what they’re looking to achieve. How can we match up their strengths with the goals of the organization – and how can we do that together?”

For Claire, now more than ever, this comes down to collaboration, diversity of perspectives, and Integrity.

“It’s a very complex world,” she said. “We work with many moving parts and no one person is going to know everything, so you need to be effective in terms of how you bring different voices in. That collaboration naturally brings a diversity of perspectives to solving or addressing an issue. Then, of course, you have to be doing things for the right reasons and that’s where the integrity comes in – all of which really resonate with The SCOR Way values.”

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