Inga Beale
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 15 May 2016
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the business woman, Inga Beale.
She has been the CEO of Lloyd's of London since January 2014 and was the first woman to hold the post in the 325 years since the insurer was founded in 1688.
She is the middle child of a Norwegian mother and an English father and grew up in Newbury, Berkshire. Her career in insurance began in London in the early 1980s, but she tired of the predominantly male culture of the industry and left the City in 1989 to go travelling for a year. On her return she worked for the Prudential and then for GE Solutions, the insurance arm of General Electrics, where the work took her abroad.
She left GE in 2006 to turn around a failing Swiss company, before joining the Zurich Insurance Group. Her last role before joining Lloyd's as CEO in 2014 was as chief executive of Canopius, a privately held Lloyd's insurer.
In 2015, she topped a power list of the world's leading 100 LGBT executives. She is openly bisexual after coming out in 2008 and has been married to her husband since 2013.
Producer: Cathy Drysdale.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4. |
| 0:06.0 | For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast. |
| 0:10.0 | For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk. |
| 0:17.0 | Radio 4. My castaway this week is the business leader Inga Beel. She runs Lloyds of London, the first ever woman to hold the post in the insurer's |
| 0:42.0 | 328 year history. |
| 0:44.0 | Measuring risk is her specialist skill |
| 0:47.0 | and has taken her to the very top of her profession, |
| 0:50.0 | but it's tempting to think it's served her pretty well |
| 0:52.0 | in her personal life too. |
| 0:54.0 | Eight years ago, having invested a lifetime's hard work in the highly traditional male-dominated world of insurance, |
| 1:01.0 | she took a chance and came out as bisexual. In years gone by that might well |
| 1:06.1 | have crippled a career. Instead her timing and temerity only burnished her |
| 1:10.5 | reputation. She's been hailed as a refreshing force in a business |
| 1:14.3 | world striving to become accessible and relevant. She says inclusion is the |
| 1:20.4 | foundation of innovation and having an open accepting and diverse workforce will enable us to succeed in a changing and challenging world. |
| 1:29.0 | So welcome in Gabile. Highly accomplished, doubtless very, very hard working and yet you are I guess the |
| 1:37.2 | poster girl for diversity. I wonder how that feels. There feels like there's a lot of pressure on me I have to admit but it's a wonderful |
| 1:46.1 | pressure and I've been working in insurance for 34 years and never ever did I imagine when I started out in the 80s that I would |
| 1:57.5 | reach a position like this that I could be such a role model and when I started I didn't have any female role models and I just |
| 2:06.4 | think gosh how my life might have been different if I had and now here I am I |
| 2:11.0 | can be one of those and it actually feels fantastic and and the pressure then |
| 2:15.6 | comes from being expected not just to perform in your job not just to be very very good |
... |
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