Hiscox's group FD, Stuart Bridges

Bridges says we should expect more of the same in 2009, chiefly in Hiscox’s key High­Net-Worth, fine art, large property, kidnap and ransom, personal accident, errors in admissions policies, technology and media sectors. That’s a lot of hiring and expansion ­ but, of course, he is at pains to point out that nothing will be done with complete abandon. He is keener on teams than business acquisitions, because he believes prices are still too high.

“We have the opportunity to buy or gain teams and we are very keen to do that in the lines of business we know and understand; the worst thing we could do is to believe suddenly we’re experts in lots of different business lines and branch out into them,” he explains. “There are some businesses out there I’d like to buy, but it would mean paying a lot of goodwill, so it’s not as valuable to us as getting the teams.” And Hiscox is a cash buyer.

No time to speculate
Bridges doesn’t come across as a show-off. He will concede that he has “achieved a lot in a very short space of time”. But his chairman Robert Hiscox hasn’t been shy about what he thinks the business can do in 2009, commenting in Hiscox’s interim results this August that “there is no reason why the second half [of 2008] should not be good, barring the extraordinary” and lambasting the banks for doing “unparalleled harm to the world economy”, while the insurance industry “has not been seduced by the culture of leverage.”

Well, not the ones that stuck to behaving like insurers and resisted playing speculators. Bridges grinningly admits that has meant “a few boring years” ­ grinningly because that, he says, “has put us in a position where life is going to be anything but in the next few years.”

Boring, however, has not meant static. In the decade Bridges has done this job, he has become more deeply involved in group strategy and has presided over the group expanding from one office in the City of London to a business spa nning 13 countries. He has kept costs reined in by plumping for joint ventures with smaller, expert rivals in various geographical locations, to expand its reach.

He led the 2005 redomicile of the firm to Bermuda, the UK's first listed company to do so, taking advantage of the island's offshore tax haven status and its growing reputation as a centre for the lucrative reinsurance market due to its geographical proximity to the US.

That move marked its expansion into international business and now that its US business is its growth engine, this decision looks especially fortuitous.

An engineering graduate, Bridges has worked at senior and board level across both major listed firms and privately-owned companies ­ prior to joining Hiscox, he spent one year as chief executive at Lowri Beck, the energy metering services company.

He came to the insurance world with zero knowledge of that market, but a CV packed with two decades in corporate finance. He ran financial markets groups for Arthur Andersen in London and Chicago in the 1980s, before moving onto structuring mergers and mezzanine debt for property firm Richard Ellis and three years in the mid-1990s at Henderson Investment Management. There, he had his first crack at the FD role, where he “effectively” did that job while serving as a director of a quoted property investment trust.