Well, goodness me.

He grins boyishly, clutching his Fulham Football Club mug of tea, and plonks himself down in a cream leather armchair, quite oblivious to the strange tangent he has shot off on. Around him, an acre of glass-walled offices, part of a smart new City of London block, stands empty — everyone has gone to a conference in the Midlands. Cowdery, 42, a short, paunchy bundle of energy, has enough loquacious enthusiasm to fill the lot.

And he has good reason to be bouncy right now. Bristol-born Cowdery has made a mint from the insurance market, this month tying up a deal to merge his Resolution Life start-up with the Birmingham-based Britannic Group, creating a £2 billion insurance giant — Resolution — whose shares will begin trading next month.

Cowdery, installed on top as executive chairman, will have a chunk worth £72m — probably more, as grey market prices already indicate a likely hike upwards in the company’s value.

How has he done it? By taking a risk, of course. He walked out of a good job with the American giant GE’s insurance arm to set up Resolution Life last year. It was all based on the hunch that a fortune could be made, targeting the esoteric sector of closed life-assurance funds — policies that lie neglected because the sellers have stopped selling, discouraged by slumping markets, low consumer take-up and more stringent capital requirements.

Cowdery’s idea was to buy them up from insurance firms keen to offload, then run them better and gain economies of scale. “I’m a salesman,” he says, trying to explain his motivation, “but I’ve always had that intellectual curiosity about what makes the sector tick.”

He speaks with the occasional Bristol twang — “oi can do Zomerzet too,” he laughs — and at times, especially when cod-philosophising about opportunity, he sounds unnervingly like comedian Ricky Gervais.

Business, he reckons, is a river. “You don’t want to be too confused by small bends, because if you go far enough up-river, you will just see that” — he holds up a straight hand — “and that’s where I am. Which way is the river flowing, guys? It doesn’t matter, because ultimately it’s going to end up here.”

He nods. You half expect to see Gareth from The Office nodding beside him.

But the Cowdery enjoying his share of the limelight now is rather different to the one others have seen working his way up the insurance market. There he has a reputation as a pugnacious, entrepreneurial manager, built like a rugby hooker but blessed with an uncanny instinct for sensing what will sell.

He started — no A-levels, no university — as an insurance salesman in Cornwall, before working in consultancy, developing insurance products. He went on to set up an insurance business for the Rothschild family, working with Scottish Amicable then moving to GE. But he never lost that self-starter’s knack for spotting a chance. In the grey world of insurance, Cowdery is a maverick whose time has come.

“Clive is different,” says Charles Alexander, president of GE Europe, “and people will react to it in different ways. He is interesting and fun and energetic, and if that’s controlled and channelled, that’s fine. The good thing is, he recognises that, and is not afraid to do sanity checks on his own decisions.”

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