Across all of its individual businesses, IAG has helped customers manage risk for over 160 years, forming the heart of IAG’s Purpose, to ‘make your world a safer place’. IAG’s investment in tech procurement to drive customer experience, simplification and agility over the last five years means it is well positioned for the future. IAG’s trusted brands, supply chain scale, deep data assets and financial strength are key attributes that provide consistent competitive advantage.
Helping drive that continued push for excellence, Claire Ledder, CPO & VMO for Procurement, Partnering & Commercial (PP&C) at IAG, brought over a decade of CFO experience in the FMCG space to her role when she joined IAG in 2018 tasked with developing commercial insights to fuel business success.
Building a centralised team
Ledder identified that IAG was increasingly reliant on its partners to support the multinational insurer’s strategic objectives, noting that third-party risk required a more holistic view when managing that partner landscape.
“We had the opportunity to build a new team drawn from four legacy environments,” recalls Ledder. “I initially ran a PP&C team for the technology division only and we had a separate team that looked after partnering which sat under the CFO. We also had a standalone corporate procurement team which handled governance and non-technology procurement under the CFO. Finally, we had a strategic sourcing team, which was filled with contractors and consultants doing our major deals.”
The business needed to transform to improve the end-to-end connection around supplier management and third-party management to be able to continue to manage risk efficiently. “There were points within our processes and deliverables where ownership wasn’t clear,” recalls Ledder. Keen to combat a siloed approach, she saw an opportunity to upskill and embed new capabilities for commercial and partnering in one unified function. “Now, we can rely on our procurement team to negotiate a contract and focus on only paying for what is actually delivered.”
“We’re now able to tackle sourcing and contracting with an end-to-end approach capable of measuring the value delivered while managing our partners and keeping that relationship live, from start to finish,” explains this innovative procurement leader.