Before Katie Davies became the person asked to lead a property catastrophe underwriting business, she became the first woman to sit on the London Market Association’s US property committee. A committee seat is a modest object around which to build a career story. No ribbon is cut. No champagne bottle threatens a ship. Yet a seat tells you something useful: whose judgment is expected in the room, and whose has previously been absent.
Davies’s work concerns another sort of absence: the insurance capacity a broker needs and cannot readily find. Buildings exposed to natural catastrophes, projects still under construction and power facilities present different problems. Her career has moved through all three. The connecting thread is the work of understanding a physical risk well enough to assemble an insurance response.
She now leads JEM Underwriting Managers within Ryan Specialty. Her route there ran through a London internship, brokerage in two financial capitals, underwriting at Lloyd’s and regional management in Chicago. The titles grew more senior; the subject remained stubbornly tangible. Wind still has very little respect for a business plan.
An internship, then both sides of the desk
Davies graduated from Georgetown University with a bachelor’s degree in government and a concentration in international relations. Her insurance career began with an internship at Aon in London. She subsequently worked for Marsh in London and New York, broking power industry risks. Long before renewable energy became one of her executive responsibilities, power was already part of her professional vocabulary.
That beginning matters to the shape of the career. A broker seeks insurance for a client; an underwriter decides which risks to accept and on what terms. Davies worked in both roles. The distinction can sound bloodless until a difficult property account needs a home. Then the ability to understand the problem from either side of the transaction becomes rather practical.
At ACE, now Chubb, she underwrote US property at the AGM 2488 syndicate at Lloyd’s of London. She later became Midwest regional property manager in ACE’s global property operation in Chicago. The work crossed markets and job descriptions: placing risks, evaluating them, then managing a regional property business. Her experience encompassed excess and surplus lines, admitted insurance and programs.
During her Lloyd’s years came that first seat on the London Market Association’s US property committee. It is a specific milestone in a technical part of the market. The distinction belongs alongside her underwriting experience, rather than in a separate story about representation. In this case, the two occupied the same chair.
The business that began without a name
In 2009, Davies became president of Amwins Special Risk Underwriters. She stayed until 2018. Nine years in one presidency supplies a useful counterweight to the rapid sequence of later appointments. Before she was asked to help build another underwriting operation, she had spent a substantial stretch running one.
When Ryan Specialty announced her arrival in June 2018, the new property catastrophe facility did not yet have a public name. It was to be exclusive to RT Specialty and provide additional capacity for its brokers and their clients. It would underwrite a range of property exposures, with catastrophe risk an explicit part of the brief.
There is something revealing about being hired before the business has its name. The announcement described an intention and a leader, rather than a finished institution. Davies was appointed president and CEO. The assignment put the practical work of forming an underwriting operation ahead of the pleasing certainty of an established sign over the door.
JEM became the property business associated with that chapter. Today its remit includes real estate and personal property, business interruption, boiler explosion and machinery breakdown. Its customers are reached through brokers, agents and carriers. The enterprise Davies leads sits inside the insurance supply chain, where specialist judgment helps determine what coverage can be offered.
It is worth pausing over that position. An underwriting manager brings specialist work to insurance carriers and distribution partners. Ryan Specialty describes its broader model as combining distribution, underwriting, product development, administration and risk management. Davies’s part of this world concerns the detailed decisions that turn the promise of insurance into an available product.
The catastrophe is in the details
A look at JEM’s apartment criteria makes the job less abstract. Its January 2026 materials identify natural catastrophe exposures, including wildfire, and a geographic focus that includes Florida, California, Utah and Arizona. Submissions require property information and three years of carrier loss runs. Valuation data is run on every account. The romance of risk tends to encounter a spreadsheet fairly early.
These are business requirements, not personal quirks. They nevertheless illuminate what Davies’s leadership is attached to. An apartment building’s location, loss history, construction and value have to become information an underwriting team can use. A category such as “property” is broad enough to conceal the differences that decide whether an account fits.
natural catastrophe
builder’s risk
renewable energy
JEM also offers difference-in-conditions coverage addressing earthquake, earth movement and flood, with structural engineering support in house. Its deductible buyback program addresses another part of the problem: the amount an insured retains before coverage responds. These products approach property exposure from different directions. The details of the underlying policy still govern the result.
For a reader outside insurance, the useful point is how much design work sits behind a seemingly simple request to insure a building. The peril, the layer of coverage and the retained deductible are separate questions. Davies’s career has been spent in businesses where those questions form the working day, rather than the small print at its end.
A return to power
By 2020, Davies was president and CEO of both JEM and Technical Risk Underwriters, the construction specialist known as TRU. An industry profile that year also recorded her membership of Geneva Re’s underwriting committee, a joint venture between Nationwide and Ryan Specialty Group. Her responsibilities were extending beyond the operation that had brought her to the group.
In February 2022, Chris Burns became TRU’s president after serving as chief underwriting officer. Davies continued as CEO. The appointment placed another technical leader in the presidency while she retained the chief executive role. It is a concrete example of how the leadership responsibilities were distributed as the business developed.
April 2023 brought a return to the sector she had encountered as a Marsh broker. Ryan Specialty appointed Davies CEO of PERse’s North American operations, specializing in renewable energy insurance. Jeff Smith became president and chief underwriting officer. Founder Mike Bernay was retiring, with a period as senior adviser during the transition.
The appointment connected her experience in property and engineered risks to a power insurance business. At the time, she also retained the JEM and TRU CEO roles. Miles Wuller, then leading Ryan Specialty Underwriting Managers, identified capital management, loss control and engineering among the resources she could bring to PERse. The move joined an early brokerage subject to a later leadership responsibility.
Who gets the next seat?
The committee milestone is one way to understand Davies’s career. Her work with other professional communities offers another. She was a founding member of WOW!, Ryan Specialty’s women-focused employee resource group, whose initials stand for Women. Opportunity. Winning! The punctuation is unusually enthusiastic for an industry so attentive to exclusions.
Her Georgetown connection continues through the university’s Allegiance Committee, which supports women’s athletics. In Miami, where her LinkedIn profile places her, she is a founding member of a Young Presidents Organization chapter. Her professional and university networks extend beyond a single underwriting team, connecting business leadership with opportunities for women.
Chicago supplied another set of connections. From January 2015 to December 2022, she served as vice president of the Boys and Girls Club of Chicago Guild Board. She also belonged to the Economic Club of Chicago from February 2018 to April 2023. Those commitments accompanied a career that moved between underwriting organizations. They add a civic dimension to the familiar list of employers, placing her in communities with purposes beyond the next insurance placement or executive appointment.
“working with this next generation in a professional arena”
Katie Davies, discussing new graduates entering insurance, 2020
In 2020, Davies spoke about her interest in college graduates entering the industry. She pointed to the social changes their generation had helped drive and anticipated working alongside them professionally. That is a different emphasis from simply recruiting replacements. It recognizes that people arriving at work bring experiences and expectations formed elsewhere.
In March 2025, she appeared in another room concerned with both leadership and insurance: the annual women’s leadership event hosted by APIW and NYCAIW. Her panel’s subject was the state of the insurance and reinsurance market. The photograph captures an ordinary professional arrangement: panelists, microphones, an audience. The topic is technical; the setting makes room for a wider conversation about who leads it.
Recognition has followed the career. Ryan Specialty Underwriting Managers named Davies its Executive of the Year for 2023. Insurance Business America included her among its Elite Women in 2020 and 2023, and on its Hot 100 list for 2024. Those distinctions mark different moments in work that began well before the awards.
The more durable outline runs from an intern in London to a broker, an underwriter and a chief executive building specialist teams. Along the way, Davies took a committee seat no woman had held before and helped establish a group focused on women’s opportunities. Insurance asks who will accept a risk. Her career also invites a quieter question: who will be invited to help decide?