Insurance and reinsurance group Hiscox has appointed a new Chief Information Officer (CIO), naming Ian Penny, previously CTO of Barclays in the role.
At Hiscox, Penny will be in charge of the Group’s IT, with a team of 300 under his leadership and will report directly to CEO Bronek Masojada.
Penny replaces Interim CIO Gareth Wharton who is joining a new Hiscox cyber risk related initiative.
Masojada commented on the hire; “Ian’s appointment is an important step in our evolution. We continue to invest heavily in our rapidly-growing retail businesses, and Ian will be critical to a number of significant multi-year business and IT transformation projects which will power our future growth. I have no doubt that his diverse experience, including with Chase.com, a high-traffic banking website, at Bear Sterns supporting their dealing rooms and with Barclays in cloud computing, will prove invaluable.”
At Barclays, Penny was responsible for IT infrastructure development and has led the bank’s cloud computing initiatives for three years.
Before that, Penny held the role of Global Head of Distributed Engineering and Architecture at investment bank JPMorgan and was based in the United States for seven years, where he worked on designing platforms for risk analytics, developing cloud architecture and tools, and high-volume customer channels. Penny also previously worked at Pfizer and Goldman Sachs.
Penny commented on his new role; “I am pleased to be joining Hiscox at a time when there is significant investment to support the business evolution. Technology will be a core partner in the execution of the strategy, whether that be digital customer journeys or data analytics, and I look forward to getting started.”
Penny has also worked closely with venture capital and will have exposure to insurance technology startups as a result, which will be an important avenue for Hiscox to explore as the InsurTech wave accelerates.
