Tower Insurance

Tower Insurance appointed Michael Skeens as Chief Operations Officer in a newly created position, effective immediately

Leadership read: Tower creating a net-new COO seat, rather than backfilling an existing one, is the operationally significant detail. It means the executive structure that carried the company through its recent remediation and digital-investment cycle was running without a dedicated operational layer between the CEO and delivery functions. Adding that layer now commits Tower to a more formal separation of strategic direction from execution accountability, which changes how decisions on claims processing, technology delivery, and underwriting operations get made and escalated. For a 150-year-old insurer that has been navigating Pacific weather-risk exposure and a multi-year core systems rebuild, that structural shift carries real weight. This is one of twelve leadership-change signals we have tracked across comparable periods, though the related set here is geographically and sectorally diffuse, spanning retail, fintech, resources, and healthcare, with limited direct insurance-sector comparables. The more relevant pattern sits in Pacific and ANZ insurance more broadly, where carriers have been adding operational and transformation leadership as climate-driven claims volatility forces faster decisions on pricing, provisioning, and customer-service capacity. Across insurers at this stage of operational restructuring, the functional pressure concentrates in a consistent cluster: claims operations leadership with technology fluency, data and risk-modeling capability that bridges actuarial and operational planning, and program delivery leadership that can manage core-systems modernisation without destabilising live customer-service operations.

curated · 2026-05-24 · context →