Kerrie Kelly is preparing to travel halfway round the world to take up her new job as director-general of the Association of British Insurers (ABI), the trade body for the life and fund management industries. Ms Kelly, 53, will be relocating from her native Australia to replace Stephen Haddrill in February.

At least the ABI has given Ms Kelly, who will be leaving her role as chief executive of the Insurance Council of Australia, three months to sell or rent out her home and make appropriate family arrangements. She will be bringing her husband, a businessman, with her to the UK, but will leave behind four grown-up children.

Placed by Taylor Bennett, the headhunter, she will take on one of the most high-profile lobbying jobs in the City or Westminster. ABI members represent about 90 per cent of the providers of insurance policies in the UK, itself the largest protection market in Europe and the third-largest worldwide. The ABI also speaks for insurers as company shareholders, owning among them 15 per cent of Britain’s stock market.

Mr Haddrill had to be as comfortable with negotiating the finer points of good corporate governance with the boards of blue-chip companies as he was with pressing ministers to spend more on UK flood defences and crack down on uninsured drivers. He is leaving the ABI to become chief executive of the Financial Reporting Council, which oversees the Combined Code on company governance. Maggie Craig, the ABI’s director of life and savings, who was tipped by some as a potential successor to Mr Haddrill, will be acting director-general until Ms Kelly arrives.

On the face of it, Ms Kelly’s background makes her ideally suited to the task: most recently, she co-ordinated the industry’s response to the Victorian bushfires in February and damaging storms in Brisbane in December.

Trained as a solicitor and barrister, Ms Kelly began practising in 1979, spending the next 11 years in commercial law, including work in insurance, restructuring and mergers and acquisitions.

In 1990 she became senior manager of retail banking at ANZ Banking Group. After a year’s secondment to a family business in 1992, Ms Kelly took on a public sector role, advising the New South Wales Roads and Traffic Authority for two years. Before joining the Insurance Council of Australia, she worked for several trade bodies, including the Financial Planning Association of Australia.