TWENTY-TWO floors up and the wind is howling outside the thick plate-glass
windows of Andrew Moss’s creaking office. It is all a bit unnerving. But
apparently the moans and groans of the building are due to the design of a
tower that withstood the blast wave of an IRA bomb 15 years ago.
“If it’s not moving, that’s when you have to worry,” laughs Moss, the new
chief executive of Britain’s largest insurance group, Aviva.
Moss may be blasé about Aviva’s swaying head office, which looms over the City
of London’s insurance district, but he has plenty more to worry about.
Even before he moved up from finance director on July 12, the sharks were
lying in wait. Aviva’s share price has been sluggish ever since the company
embarrassingly bungled an unsolicited £17 billion bid for the rival
Prudential in March 2006. In recent months, City whispers that the £17.9
billion Aviva could be a break-up target for rapacious hedge funds have
hardened into a series of speculative analyst notes claiming that up to £9
billion in value could be unlocked by selling or demerging the general
insurance business.
Moss’s first big task is to ensure that such suggestions remain just chatter.
To succeed he needs to convince the doubters that Aviva’s composite model,
which combines big businesses in both life insurance and general insurance,
still works. It’s quite a challenge for a chief executive who, as the
sceptics point out, is a respected number-cruncher, but is unproven with
little direct operational experience.
Moss is stocky and measured, his delivery composed but determined. Yet behind
a slick exterior, you sense he is intensely competitive, ready to roll up
his sleeves and do battle.
His sporting past is the giveaway. At Oxford, where he studied law at Christ
Church college, he played rugby, mixing it in the scrum as hooker.
Disappointingly, he missed out on a blue. “I was too small,” he laments. “It
was partly that and the advent of a South African guy who came up in my last
year. The usual story, but he remains a good friend,” he laughs
good-naturedly. “Actually the week I got dropped from the team, I met my
wife. I have always regarded it as a good trade-off.”
Moss’s fanatical interest in rugby has rubbed off on his two sons. The elder
has played for the England under19 team and is contracted to play for Bath.
The younger son is “pretty good” and would like to reach the same heights.
“It’s fantastic. One of my great pleasures is watching them play.”
Insiders say Moss has injected a new energy at Aviva. By most accounts, he has
made a confident start. Within three months of being announced as chief
executive, a choice that surprised many, he shook up the management team,
leading to the departure of Patrick Snowball, the combative former tank
commander who was head of UK operations and seen as his main rival.
“He [Moss] is very measured, very clear and very safe. The big question is
over his leadership since he has never run a business,” said one senior
industry executive.
Moss is far too diplomatic to comment on the rivalry with Snowball. “I think
there has been a generational change at Aviva. Richard [Harvey, his
predecessor as chief executive] has moved on. Patrick has moved on. It
leaves the way for a new chief executive to lead a new team in a new
direction.”
As for the botched bid for Prudential – for which Harvey took the blame
although Moss was also heavily involved – it is all history. “We wanted it;
they didn’t. Unfortunately, there was a period when it became a public
matter.”
So could it be revived? After all, it had some logic. “You can’t expect me to
comment on that,” he says. Anyway, he has been adamant that big deals are
not a high priority.
Ask him the break-up question and he pounces. “Look, the first thing I would
say is that we are in the year 2007. It has taken well over 200 years to get
this company to where it is. So, you have to think pretty carefully about
breaking it up. We have been really very clear that we believe the composite
model is exactly the way forward for a large insurance concern like us.” Put
more simply, Moss says the cash thrown off from the general insurance
business is the “natural fuel” for growth in the life operations.
So is he frustrated by the break-up specula-tion? He sighs. “No, it doesn’t
frustrate me. But we need to make sure we articulate the message so people
do understand it.”
Which brings us neatly to Moss’s big bugbear: clarity. “I’m obsessive about
clarity, I really am,” he says, leaning forward. “As for the people who work
in this company, it is really very, very important to me that they know what
they are doing, why they are doing it and how it fits into the rest of the
company and its objectives,” Moss says, repeatedly slicing the air with his
hand to make his point. “If someone is doing one job and you walk across the
floor and there is another person doing the same thing, well that to me is
criminal.”
Moss is a latecomer to the insurance game. Although he studied law, his
father, a solicitor in Hampshire, convinced him there was more money in
accountancy and Moss joined Coopers & Lybrand. Accountancy was always
going to be a stepping stone and Moss left “pretty much as soon as I
qualified”, taking the plunge into banking first with Midland, then Citibank
and finally 12 years at HSBC where he held a series of finance positions,
rising to chief financial officer of the investment-banking division.
In 2000, with Moss in his early forties and his good friend Douglas Flint
showing no signs of moving on as HSBC’s finance director, it was time for a
change. Lloyd’s of London, the insurance market, came calling, offering him
the finance director’s job.
“It was a big decision for me, but in career terms it was the best thing I’ve
ever done. It was pastures new, a fascinating new job in a market that had
sustained a lot of losses through the late 1990s.”
Within a year, Lloyd’s was plunged into crisis by the September 11 attacks.
Moss was handed the “fascinating task” of managing the aftermath and
evidently takes pride in the market emerging “stronger than arguably it ever
has been” two years later.
However, as soon as Richard Harvey approached him about joining Aviva as
finance director, there was no doubt Moss would join the insurer, which he
did in May 2004. “Lloyd’s is a market. It’s not quite the same as having
your hands on the management of a unitary company. And that really appealed.
Frankly, if the UK’s biggest insurer knocks on your door, it’s a no-brainer,
given the prospects this company has.”
So did he always have his sights on the top Aviva job? Apparently not. The
first six to nine months were all about tackling the steep learning curve of
insurance. “This sounds like a truism, but I always wanted to do a good job
in what I was doing. I always believed if you did that, other opportunities
would open up. My career is a classic example of that.”
According to one investment banker who knows the sector well: “Moss is the boy
who done good. Many people did not expect him to get this far. For me, the
Lloyd’s finance post was a bit of a nonjob.”
Ten days ago, Moss unveiled a strategy, dubbed One Aviva, to deliver profits
and growth by driving the group’s existing businesses harder. Aviva, with
operations in 27 countries, has strong positions in key markets such as UK
life insurance, but this has not always led to superior returns. Then there
are concerns about the pace of growth in life insurance given that Aviva’s
main strength is in arguably more mature European markets and its Asian
business is still small. And the jury is out on Amerus, the American
business bought last year, despite an impressive hike in first-half sales.
For years Aviva has been run as a set of relatively independent units. Under
the Moss regime, it is all about joined-up thinking – from transferring
product ideas between markets, allocating capital better,
squeezing out more costs, to creating a single global asset-management
business. “It is a global marketplace. And if you do not work in a more
joined-up way you are going to miss opportunities. There are huge
opportunities over the next 10 years. People are fighting tooth and nail. We
are playing a game and we have to play it to win.”
Aviva is the fifth-biggest insurer in the world and Moss says its “global
footprint” is going to get even bigger. Half-year operating profits may have
dipped by 8%, but that was largely down to £235m losses from the recent
floods. Life-insurance profits were strong, growth was solid in Europe, a
series of big distribution deals with banks were sealed while Moss reckons
the scepticism over Amerus is “dissipating”.
So what drives him? “I have a high degree of curiosity. I love the fact that
you learn something new every day when you come into the office. That’s what
I enjoy as well as working with very good teams of people.”
As for relaxation, it is the rugby, golf, the family and gardening –
although the gardening doubles up as an aid to strategic planning that you
won’t read about in any management textbook. “I know it’s pretty sad. I have
a nice John Deere tractor, which is quite a heavy-duty thing. But there’s
quite a lot of mowing to do in my garden in Kent.” So it’sa glorified mower
then? “Oh no, it’s a bit bigger than that. I have always done quite a lot of
my thinking mowing. There’s so much noise that it actually blocks out
everything else,” he laughs. “Some people do strategic thinking while
shaving, I do it mowing.”
ANDREW MOSS’S WORKING DAY
THE Aviva chief executive always wakes up at 5.30am. “It’s just the body
clock,” says Andrew Moss. If he is in Kent, he commutes by train. If in
London, he walks to work from his flat in Wapping. “I arrive at the office
at anything from 7.15am to 8.30am.”
He tries to go the gym three or four times a week, usually before work. About
60% of his time is taken up with internal meetings, 20% with external
appointments while 20% is reserved for thinking and planning. Moss sometimes
leaves the office by 6pm. But in busy periods he leaves much later. His
evenings are often spent entertaining or at industry dinners.
VITAL STATISTICS
Born:March 10, 1958
Marital status:married with four children
School:Marlborough College
University:Christ Church, Oxford
First job:trainee accountant at Coopers & Lybrand
Salary package:£533,000 plus £744,000 bonus last year
Homes:Kent and east London Cars:midnight blue Bentley
Continental GT and midnight blue Mitsubishi Shogun
Favourite author:John Irving
Favourite music:‘everything from The Doors to Mozart’
Favourite film:Gladiator
Best gadget:John Deere tractor
Last holiday:skiing in the Canadian Rockies
DOWNTIME
ANDREW MOSS relaxes by playing golf and watching rugby. “I think I’m like most
people. I work and spend time with my family and friends. What I enjoy most
is being at home on a Sunday and having lunch with my four kids and a bunch
of their friends. To me that’s a lot of fun.”
Gardening – from growing vegetables to landscaping the grounds at his Kent
home – is also a hobby. “It would be bigger, but I’m afraid I don’t get very
much time.”
Weekends are often spent watching his children play sport – his youngest
daughter captained the football team at Christ Church, Oxford.
