iNED Forum: Supporting and Governing Transformational Change

Join us for the fifth of our 2025 Programme of iNED Forums, hosted by BDO 

Supporting and Governing Transformational Change
The insurance industry is embarking on a period of unprecedented change. This is being driven by a combination of factors: customers seeking better service levels and innovative products; margin pressures creating the need to drive down expenses to protect returns; and regulators requiring businesses to be operationally resilient in the face of an ever growing cyber crime threat. These factors and the perceived opportunities of deploying modern technology including AI have resulted in more and more firms launching major change programmes. This creates a challenge for insurance industry Boards.

This iNED Forum will explore the Board’s role in supporting and governing such transformational change programmes in order to deliver successful outcomes. It will be held in person at BDO’s office on Tuesday, September 16th. The presentations will draw out the challenges of providing good governance and oversight of complex change programmes. We will hear about: the perspective of the programme manager; the mindset of the regulators; and the variety of roles the Board may choose to adopt.

This will all be grounded in a series of real-life transformation challenges that the speakers have faced, including some of the most complex instances of transformational change seen in UK financial services in recent years. There will be ample opportunity for delegates to question the speakers on the merits of different levels of Board involvement and intervention, including a Q&A session.

Learning Objectives
By attending this event, delegates should be able to:

• Describe what can go wrong on complex change programmes and common root causes which lead to issues.
• Explain how Board intervention can get programmes back on track and what can delay such intervention.
• Articulate the key performance metrics and early warning indicators that maximise the chances for a successful programme.
• Identify the key challenges in delivering transformational change programmes and the questions NEDs should be asking at the Board.

Speaker(s)

Nicola Ball
Financial Services Advisory Director - BDO

Nicola is a Director in BDO’s Financial Services Advisory team, focusing on regulatory and compliance matters across the insurance sector. She has over 17 years’ experience helping firms navigate regulatory change and deal with regulatory and compliance matters such as Consumer Duty and Operational Resilience. Nicola has worked with firms managing significant change and transformation to consider regulatory considerations, appropriate governance and the role of the Board. She has also managed a number of regulatory Skilled Person (s166) reviews for the FCA and PRA, including reviews which have included consideration of change programmes/management.

Graham Handy
Partner, BDO

Graham leads BDO’s Insurance, Advisory and Actuarial teams, providing commercial leadership, strategic perspective, and external momentum to BDO's overall Insurance Industry Sector presence.  His functional focus is on finance, capital, and risk management, particularly in the insurance/wealth management arena. This stems from over 30 years' experience engaging with insurers across the globe on financial, operational, and strategic challenges in ever-changing markets.  He has built multiple large teams of professionals across the world and provided counsel to a wide range of business leaders. The strongest results have always come from a respect for individuals’ unique styles and experience.

Mark McAleer
Director, BDO

Mark is a Director in People Advisory Solutions (PAS) leading the organisational solutions practice, which encompasses organisation design, workforce planning & analytics, organisational change management and people due diligence. He has considerable experience working as a consultant on major transformation programmes and large ERP implementations across multiple sectors including Oil & Gas, Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Banking and Insurance. He has also worked with a DCMS funded body.

Len Sinclair
Non-Executive Director and Board Adviser

Len is an experienced Board Advisor, Non-Executive Director and Board Risk Committee chair, and currently serves on the Boards of FS businesses in the UK, Ireland and Germany. A qualified Banker, he has c40 years experience in the Financial Services sector, in a range of Executive and Consulting Partner roles. In his executive career, he was the CRO of a Wealth Management, fast growth FinTech and Group Head of Operational Risk for a major Global Bank.