When Fiona Mayo joined Hiscox as CMO, in 2022, she had never worked in insurance. For the first few months she was afforded the luxury to ask a lot of the simple questions. And that’s where the most interesting answers lay. Because people who know the industry had stopped asking them long ago.
That moment captures everything Fiona believes about the value of an outside perspective. And in an industry that has historically circulated the same talent, her experience is worth examining closely.
“If you want different outcomes, you need different inputs. If you keep hiring the same people, you’ll keep getting the same answers”
Sector Experience is a Proxy, Not a Predictor
The assumption that financial services demands sector-specific hires is one that Fiona challenges directly. Her own path, starting agency-side before joining Vodafone, then SSE, and now Hiscox, crossed multiple regulated, low-interest categories. She didn’t experience each move as the large leap others often assume it to be.
“Every industry I’ve worked in is largely the same,” she says. “Low-interest category, people locked into a contract, shopping around once every twelve months. A new set of acronyms, but beyond that, nothing particularly surprising.”
What travels, in her view, is craft: good judgement, curiosity, and problem-solving. And she’s direct about where the real constraint sits; with the briefing process itself.
“Or is it headhunters that are risk averse?” she asks. “It’s easier to put forward someone who has proven they’ve done the exact job before than to put forward a wildcard.”
The irony is that the sector-experienced candidate has a leg up in the interview. They can talk the language, reference the market, appear the stronger fit. But Fiona’s argument is that appearances deceive when what you actually need is someone who will ask the questions everyone else stopped asking long ago.
Archaeology, Not Invention
Fiona once came across a chart ranking consumer categories by natural interest. Her entire career, she realised, had been spent in the bottom three. At Hiscox, she inherited a blank sheet of paper, less budget than the competition, and a clear sense that constraint would force braver choices.
The brief Fiona created was simple: make small business owners feel seen, not sold to. Rather than the smiley faces and generic reassurance that fill most insurance advertising, the campaign ran straight at what people actually worry about at 3am, using humour not to distract from fear, but to defuse it.
“Trust doesn’t come from being bland,” she says. “It comes from being believable. Strategy is about choices – and most insurance advertising plays it safe.”
But creative ambition was only possible once Fiona had identified what made Hiscox worth believing in. The method: speaking to a lot of people, getting under the skin of their claim’s stories, really understanding what makes Hiscox special – it’s secret sauce….
“You could just go back to the brand of old and there was a lot there, that was very valuable” she says, “but things move on and we also needed to modernise. Archaeology, not invention.”
What she found – and what hadn’t been articulated before – was a promise that already ran through the culture: Hiscox sees the people behind the policy. The proof of it wasn’t in a campaign deck. It was in claim stories like the customer whose tree fell on his office… and of course they replaced his garden office, but also sent a new oak tree in the post too”
The measure of success, she says, isn’t only commercial. What she values most is watching the work take off on LinkedIn, small business owners sharing it unprompted, saying: “this is so true.” That’s when you know you’ve got something.
“It’s archaeology, not reinvention. You dig deep into what makes you special – and modernise it.”
Compliance as Creative Partner, Not Gatekeeper
Fiona doesn’t buy the idea that regulation kills creativity. If anything, operating in a category people don’t naturally engage with means you have to work harder. -And she’s candid that her career has become a specialism in exactly these kinds of categories.
At Hiscox, the claims department – that includes many trained lawyers – became a critical part of the creative process from the very beginning, not a tollgate at the end of it. The brief gets stress-tested at source.
The results are campaigns that stretch while standing up to scrutiny. A direct mail pack written by a child, complete with a pie chart of imaginary risks – mermaids flooding an office or a slime meltdown at the factory – required genuine legal interrogation: would Hiscox actually cover these things? A copyright campaign that deliberately infringed the branding of Specsavers, Weetabix and Cillit Bang took a year to produce, requiring sign-off from each brand and, formally, a pound paid to each.
“It’s not a big battle, not a big arm wrestle,” she says. “The claims department are always our first port of call. They’re now entirely used to us asking: would we pay out if there was a slime meltdown in a factory? They became a critical part of the creative process.”
The Team Behind the Work
Fiona is clear that no single hire profile explains distinctive output. What matters, she says, is the cocktail.
Her team includes people who have been at Hiscox for nine or ten years: commercially sharp, deeply fluent in the business. Critically, they are not sitting still. There’s something entrepreneurial about the culture, people who get on with things, roll their sleeves up, don’t wait around. That quality exists regardless of tenure.
“You can’t have all fresh-faced newbies,” she says. “But if you keep hiring the same people, you’ll keep getting the same answers.”
For brand and creative roles, she actively recruits from agencies. Not because the work is beyond client-side candidates, but because agency people are wired a certain way – used to stepping forward and owning things. She says it’s the single best piece of advice she would give anyone early in their career: put your hand up, offer to do whatever it is, and the opportunities will follow.
What completes the picture is something Fiona describes as distinctly Hiscox: genuine autonomy. Leaders are hired, set a strategy, and left to get on with it without constantly having to justify what they’re doing internally.
“I keep looking over my shoulder,” she admits, “thinking surely someone’s going to intervene. But no. You were hired to do this. You’ve set the strategy; you’re delivering on it. If every company’s exec team acted that way, they’d get so much more out of their people.”
The Opportunity Ahead
Ask Fiona where insurance is headed and she doesn’t frame it as a threat. Agentic AI will, in her view, fundamentally change how products are developed, how they’re priced, how they reach market, and how consumers behave, and she thinks insurance will lead the charge on it.
“This time next year, we’ll be in a completely different world,” she says. “None of us can imagine what that might be. And that’s not a blocker, that’s an opportunity.”
The question occupying her mind isn’t whether it will happen. It’s how to get ahead of it.
For C-suite leaders in financial services, that’s the provocation worth sitting with. The organisations that will define the next decade won’t be those that react to the shift. They’ll be those already asking how to shape it.
