QBE Finance
Leadership Team
Leadership Team
Leadership Offsite
London | March 2026
Global FLT
It was wonderful spending three days with you in London.
Thank you for the trust and the opportunity to partner with you to help QBE achieve greatness.
Importantly, we'll follow up shortly with a request for your feedback and insights - giving you a day or two to reflect (and to get home).
Regards,
Russell
Re-entry Messaging
This is a draft; it is important that you shape this in your own voice, for your own team…
How we feel returning from the offsite
Three days well spent. The leadership team leaves London energized, more aligned than many of us expected, and clear on what we are going to do and why it matters. The word that came up more than once was licensed — licensed to lead differently, to move faster, and to hold the function to a higher standard. That is the spirit to carry into your first conversations with your teams.
What we worked through
We gathered with a clear purpose: to sharpen our direction as a finance leadership team and agree on how we move forward together. That meant honest reflection on where we are, what the business needs from us, and what needs to change in how we operate.
The big themes were capital, performance, and building a finance function that is genuinely indispensable to the decisions that shape QBE's future. This is not a new direction. It is a deliberate doubling down on the things we have always believed — with greater specificity, more urgency, and less tolerance for the things that slow us down.
Our opportunity. We have an opportunity to help QBE achieve greatness.
This is not a throwaway line. Andrew has spoken about QBE being on the edge of greatness, and the finance function is not a spectator in that ambition. We can play a central role in getting there. To do that, we are focused on three things:
- Simplify and automate — deliver fast, accurate, and efficient financials. This is the foundation. We already do it well. We are going to do it smarter.
- Partner through insight — become the function that facilitates better business decisions, not just reports on them. Doing this will make us an indispensable business leader. There is significant untapped potential in the data and insight we are sitting on, and the business wants us to unlock it. We don’t just deliver reports and dashboards; we enable and line people up to make decisions happen - faster and better than ever.
- Unlock enterprise value — apply capital discipline and performance focus in a way that delivers a superior ROE and positions QBE to grow as a stronger company and enviable competitor in the industry.
And we will work really hard to make this the best place to be.
What our teams will notice
The signal you want to send is simple: we are going to move faster, trust you more, and be sharper about expectations. That means more future-focused conversations, clearer criteria for what we need when decisions come our way, and less tolerance for meetings and processes that consume energy without creating it. Ask your teams what they would take off the table if they could. You will not be short of ideas.
On AI: we have pockets of genuine momentum, including a growing community of AI champions. We want to connect those efforts and share what is working. More on that shortly.
The right tone
Your teams will borrow their confidence from you. If you walk back in uncertain, they will be uncertain. Walk back in with what you actually feel right now — energized, aligned, and clear on what you are going to do. That is the message. Not a script. A posture.
If you have any questions, you know where to find me:
Russell@TheAmbitionCo.com
Call or text /WhatsApp +1.917.5263501