The Lapham Group Lands CEO for Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety
April 18, 2018 – The Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS) in Tampa, FL has named Roy Wright as its next president and CEO. Craig Lapham, CEO of executive recruitment firm the The Lapham Group, conducted the search. To ensure a smooth operational transition, Mr. Wright will work with current IBHS president and CEO Julie Rochman, who will remain a resource for the organization through her retirement at the end of June. Mr. Wright assumes his role on April 25.
Eric Nelson, vice chairman of the organization and head of the search committee, said Mr. Wright was an ideal fit for the role. “After conducting an exhaustive nationwide search, we are confident that Roy has the right blend of experience, vision, and leadership skills to accelerate IBHS’ progress toward tangibly reducing the terrible losses Mother Nature inflicts each year with wind, hail, wildfire and other perils,” he said.
Mr. Wright comes to IBHS from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), where he most recently led the agency’s resilience, risk management, risk reduction and flood insurance programs – all of which helped increase public understanding of natural hazards, and assisted individuals and communities in protecting themselves against injury, death and property damage. Previously, he served as CEO for the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP). He led the reinsurance and risk transfer program that helped financially support the NFIP in the wake of last year’s record-breaking storms.
IBHS is a non-profit dedicated to researching and promoting effective strategies to strengthen homes and businesses against a variety of natural hazards. The organization is wholly supported by the property insurance industry.
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“Institute findings and guidance about how to better defend against severe weather are already increasing the resilience of the built environment,” said Craig Tillman, IBHS board chairman. “We are now focused on broadening the impact of IBHS work to benefit vulnerable communities across the nation. The members and directors of IBHS are fully committed to supporting Roy and the fantastic IBHS team as we execute on that vision.”
Veteran Search Consultant
Mr. Lapham has been CEO of The Lapham Group since 1997. Under his leadership, the firm has conducted senior executive search engagements on a global basis for Fortune 100 insurance clients and smaller emerging insurance/ financial services firms across both property & casualty and life insurance. This includes board of directorship and CEO search engagements, as well as executive searches across finance, risk management, legal, claims, actuarial, underwriting, technology/ digital and marketing/ distribution.
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Mr. Lapham recently sat down with Hunt Scanlon Media to discuss the assignment and take us through some other searches now underway at the New York City-based recruiting firm.
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Craig, what type of leader was the Insurance Institute looking for?
The CEO search committee of the IBHS board of directors was seeking a highly successful insurance industry executive possessing significant depth of multifunctional property insurance industry experience and the ability to enhance and expand the organization’s research initiatives focused on commercial and consumer building safety and resilience. In addition, the incoming CEO needed to possess outstanding communication and presentation skills with the ability to effectively represent the IBHS to its property insurance industry membership base as well as external constituents within government, media, academia and the general public.
What made Roy the right match?
Roy Wright was uniquely suited for the IBHS CEO role given his broad-based experience at FEMA serving as CEO for the National Flood Insurance Program for which he led close to 1,000 full-time employees across multiple functions such as actuarial, analytics, underwriting and claims, and generating close to $5 billion in revenue and serving 5 million policyholders across more than 22,000 communities. In this role, Roy gained a sophisticated perspective on resilience, risk management, risk reduction and flood insurance programs to include interfacing directly with the property insurance and reinsurance industry as well as across multiple government agencies and committees. He brings immediate credibility to the IBHS CEO role from both an insurance industry and government perspective.
“The incoming CEO needed to possess outstanding communication and presentation skills with the ability to effectively represent the IBHS to its property insurance industry membership base.”
Can you share some other recent search work that you are currently engaged in?
A recent and highly relevant search just successfully completed by our firm is the COO for leading risk management analytics provider Advisen. Similar to the IBHS search, our client was seeking a proven insurance industry executive capable of enhancing the value of the corporation’s research and data collection to the P&C insurance industry. Both searches were addressing an increasingly common theme in the insurance industry – how do you leverage proprietary research and information/data collection to better manage risk. At the end of the day, both organizations share a common goal of developing the most effective research and data/analytics sets to allow their customers and constituents to more effectively manage risk.
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Contributed by Scott A. Scanlon, Editor-in-Chief; Dale M. Zupsansky, Managing Editor; Stephen Sawicki, Managing Editor; and Will Schatz, Managing Editor – Hunt Scanlon Media
