Jill Beggs took the long way back

Before Jill Beggs was asked to run Everest’s reinsurance division, she was a college student meeting a recruiter. Prudential Reinsurance was interviewing at Gettysburg. She wanted a business career, had studied in Spain and liked the idea of a company with an international reach. In 1992 she joined as a financial analyst supporting underwriters. The work put her close enough to underwriting to become curious about doing it herself.

A move into the international department gave that curiosity a territory: Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay. The Spanish minor came in handy. So did the willingness to leave familiar surroundings. Insurance, often imagined as a life conducted entirely under fluorescent lighting, had given her a reason to pack.

In July 2025, Beggs became executive vice president and CEO of reinsurance at Everest. Between the first job and that appointment lay nearly twenty years at Munich Re, an innovation incubator, a specialty insurance business and a return to her original employer. The route helps explain the executive now responsible for deciding which risks Everest should take, and on what terms.

A Spanish minor with a working itinerary

At Gettysburg, Beggs studied management with a finance concentration and minors in mathematics and Spanish. She was Delta Gamma’s treasurer and a student orientation leader. A junior year abroad in Seville helped develop an appetite for other cultures that later found a professional outlet in international insurance.

Her recollections of college include a course on Chinese and Japanese religion. She valued the broader thinking it encouraged. That is a revealing detail in a career usually described through underwriting appointments: the education she remembered extended beyond the subjects that could be entered neatly in a finance résumé.

By her Munich Re years, travel had taken her to Europe, South America, Africa and Asia. She described the different perspectives and pace of change she encountered as energizing. The attraction was also practical. Working inside a global business meant she could call a colleague elsewhere in the world and learn something useful. Curiosity had acquired a company directory.

“It’s challenging to be in a traditional industry, at a traditional organization, and push for change.”

Jill Beggs, reflecting on her Munich Re work

The underwriter gets an incubator

Beggs joined Munich Re in 2002 as a property underwriter. Her responsibilities grew to include property underwriting management and specialty lines. Ocean marine, surety and political risk appeared in her portfolio. These are different ways for events in the wider world to arrive on an underwriter’s desk, each with its own questions about exposure, price and responsibility.

In August 2015, she was appointed head of New Strategic Markets. The job included the company’s innovation practice, corporate communications and its US property and casualty cross-platform team. She also joined Munich Re America’s leadership team. The change widened her remit from managing existing business to helping the organization work out what it should build next.

That combination matters. An innovation unit inside an established reinsurer has to connect new ideas with people who understand how insurance actually works. Beggs brought experience in underwriting to a role that required cooperation across the organization. The institutional knowledge accumulated in her earlier jobs was now part of the equipment for attempting something different.

Her incubator work included insurance on demand, autonomous vehicles and the sharing economy. Each raised questions for a business accustomed to established categories. Who is using an asset? For how long? Under what circumstances? A new business model can make a familiar insurance assumption suddenly look rather elderly.

When the plan met the property market

In April 2019, Beggs became president of excess and surplus lines at Munich Re Specialty Insurance. It gave her a chance to build a business serving risks that need more specialized underwriting. By August 2021, the unit had ten products, a team of 35 and more than $200 million in gross written premium.

The instructive part is how it got there. General liability was the first product, but the market proved less favorable than expected. Property had been scheduled for later. The team moved it forward, hired people and launched in about two and a half months at the start of 2020. Property subsequently represented roughly half the book.

A plan had encountered the market and been amended accordingly. There is a useful modesty in that sequence: the original timetable did not deserve preservation simply because someone had written it down. The business needed a product customers would buy at a price that made sense.

Returning with a wider field of view

Beggs rejoined Everest in November 2021 as senior vice president and head of North America reinsurance. The geographic brief covered the United States, Canada and Bermuda. She reported to Jim Williamson, then group chief operating officer and head of reinsurance. Coming back meant bringing experience from another large reinsurer and from building a primary insurance operation.

That second perspective is useful in reinsurance, whose customers are themselves insurers. Someone who has helped launch insurance products has had to consider the needs of brokers and policyholders as well as the capital behind the promises. Beggs’s route had given her experience on both sides of that commercial relationship.

In February 2024, she became the reinsurance division’s executive vice president and chief operating officer. Her responsibilities now encompassed the worldwide portfolio: treaty, facultative and specialty reinsurance, together with Mt. Logan. The returning North America executive had acquired a global operating remit.

The July 2025 CEO appointment formalized the next step. Williamson, by then Everest’s president and CEO, pointed to her expertise and collaborative approach. Beggs emphasized the team’s capabilities and its clients. Her brief includes North America, international operations, global facultative, global specialty and Mt. Logan Capital Management. The job calls for decisions across businesses whose risks arrive in very different forms.

Her title is specific: CEO of reinsurance. Everest Group’s president and CEO is Williamson. Keeping the distinction clear helps explain the scale and character of her assignment. She leads a division within the wider group, with its own portfolio, relationships and obligations.

A rideshare app has an insurance problem, too

There is another stop on Beggs’s professional map that initially looks less predictable. She joined Lyft’s board on December 31, 2023, also taking a place on its audit committee. A rideshare company needs software, drivers and passengers. It also needs insurance. The latter has a habit of becoming conspicuous whenever its cost rises.

Lyft explicitly valued her operating experience in the insurance market. At her appointment, Beggs called insurance an essential safeguard for people driving and riding with the company. The connection to her earlier interest in the sharing economy is straightforward: here was one of those business models, operating at scale, with an ongoing need to manage risk.

The announcement included a less corporate detail. Beggs, who lived in New Jersey, appreciated Lyft’s reliability for family members and used it for airport trips to her next adventure. Board appointments rarely offer much room for a travel habit. This one managed to fit it in.

“Insurance is a critical part of the rideshare model”

Jill Beggs, on joining Lyft’s board

The value of a difficult question

Beggs has also written about what makes an insurance career meaningful. In a 2022 essay, she described noticing agreement among industry newcomers and veterans at an executive conference: they wanted work that benefited society. She connected that purpose to helping people and businesses recover when things went wrong.

Her practical proposals were familiar activities that require actual time: bring different perspectives into decisions, pair younger colleagues with experienced leaders and ask uncomfortable questions. She argued that fear of failure and resistance to change could cause leaders to miss opportunities. For a business paid to assess risk, that is an especially interesting management problem.

She has served as executive sponsor of Everest’s DEI Council and Veterans Employee Resource Group. Her recognition includes Business Insurance’s 2023 Women to Watch award and APIW’s 2026 Insurance Woman of the Year. APIW highlighted her work supporting colleagues and developing others, alongside her underwriting and business-building experience.

These activities give her emphasis on collaboration a more concrete setting. An invitation to contribute, a mentorship relationship and a difficult conversation are small organizational decisions. Repeated across a business, they determine whose information reaches the people responsible for making larger ones.

Growth still has to earn its place

As reinsurance CEO, Beggs has continued to tie opportunity to underwriting discipline. Speaking on Aon’s September 2025 reinsurer panel, she stressed the need for sustainable margins, responsible structures and a memory for past mistakes. She also argued for extending meaningful protection to people exposed to risks they could not adequately cover.

By December 2025, she was describing a more competitive market heading into 2026, with additional capacity seeking business. Her response emphasized expertise, consistent communication and protection shaped around individual clients. She identified geopolitical instability, climate volatility, cyber threats and technological change as challenges testing traditional models.

The tension runs through her career. New markets need people willing to try something. Insurance promises need people willing to inspect the terms. Beggs has worked in an incubator, built a specialty operation, returned to reinsurance and joined a technology company’s board. Each assignment has required both an interest in what comes next and attention to what might go wrong.

Her first international underwriting territory offered seven countries to learn about. The CEO role offers a larger set of questions. The career between them shows why she would want the view.