BLW is delighted to announce the appointment of Iain Stephen as Non-Executive Director.

Iain joins the BLW leadership team to focus on the company’s dedication to compliance and corporate governance, bringing a wealth of experience in this field in-house. Iain also has a strong track record of implementing quality management principles, providing efficient management reporting, and improving productivity.

Iain has over 20 years of experience in compliance and corporate governance, having worked across a number of businesses including The Consultancy Company and Sorrel Management Services Ltd. He joins BLW from Compliancy Services Limited, a regulatory compliance consultancy, where he was Founder and Joint-CEO from 2003 until the recent sale of the company to private equity firm Ethos Partners in 2021. Compliancy Services Limited successfully developed its consultancy offerings to cover all FCA regulated markets, enabling an extended range of firms to achieve FCA authorisation, offering regulatory compliance outsourcing and leading the business to the successful acquisition.

Earlier in his career, Iain founded Sorrel Management Services Ltd in 1998, where he worked as an independent consultant on large-scale projects such as the de-fleeting of Nat West Bank company cars. He also provided consultancy services for what is now one of the largest UK used car supermarkets.

Iain then joined The Consultancy Company in 2001 where, as Manager of the Financial Services Division, he identified potential clients for ISO9000 accreditation, delivering projects to both new and existing clients, including Surrey Geotechnical Consultants and K International Ltd, an international language service provider. This included undertaking benchmark analysis, demonstrating to ISO Standard the ability to gather, measure and analyse data as a base for the improvement of business processes and quality systems, and constructing policies and procedures to demonstrate quality processes.

Mark Greenwood, CFO and COO of BLW commented; “Iain has provided sage counsel to Brett Sainty and myself for over ten years now and I’m delighted to now be welcoming Iain to the Board of BLW.

An inherent weakness in smaller, independent brokers, is that they don’t always have the resource to dedicate the necessary attention to corporate governance and compliance. When these important functions are outsourced, it creates a gap between the business and that function, which can have an impact on the customer.

BLW have addressed this concern with the appointment of Iain, and we’re keen to share this strength with other smaller brokers who we feel should be as comfortable about corporate governance and regulation as larger brokers”.

In light of his appointment, Iain said; “I am very much looking forward to working with the BLW team. Having worked with Brett Sainty and Mark Greenwood for many years now, we are confident that we share common values over how business should be done. I’m very much looking forward to focussing on developing BLW’s already robust corporate governance and compliance processes and systems, and to sharing them with our broker partners.”

You can read about Iain’s appointment in this recent article in Insurance Age.