Big Interview: Peter Beaumont, CEO of Cornish Mutual

Founded in 1903 by farmers, Cornish Mutual has been providing cover for rural businesses across Cornwall, Devon, Somerset and Dorset for almost 125-years.

Chartered accountant Peter Beaumont first joined the provider in 2009 as finance and operations director after he became fed up with his commute to the Tolworth Tower in Surbiton, where he was employed as a financial controller at Close Asset Finance.

“I had a bad travel day,” he says. “I came home and said to my wife: ‘Why are we still living here? We’ve just washed up here.’

“I did a quick search online to find out where are people happiest [living] in the UK? It said generally the west. After a few more minutes searching for finance director roles in the west, this job popped up for an insurance company in Cornwall.

“I said to the wife: ‘Do you fancy moving to Cornwall?’ Fifteen minutes later I had updated my CV and sent it over. It was catharsis from the frustrations of the day. I subsequently got contacted [by Cornish Mutual] and it snowballed from there.”

The couple packed their bags to relocate to Truro with their two young children, who were then aged three and six-years-old.

Initially hired by Cornish Mutual to focus on the provider’s finances, he quickly used his wealth of experience in IT and financial services to get to grips with the insurer’s operations.

“My profile is around change. I preferred getting involved in the real nuts and bolts of the business and the strategic side,” he says. “I find that exciting and interesting. I love those sorts of opportunities.”

Modernising the mutual

Before his first paid day at Cornish Mutual, he helped the provider with selecting IT systems.

He highlighted another operational challenge in the first few seconds of walking through Cornish Mutual’s Truro head office doors on his first day.

He recalls that back then there were around 70 members of staff and for many years the business had mainly been a distributor for Co-op Insurance products.

“We really were a servicing company,” he recalls. “We had an underwriting part delivering the pricing that was inherited from the Co-op originally.

“We had a claims department, we had an accounting department, but we didn’t have product development. We didn’t have all the sort of departments you’d expect.

“We also needed new finance systems, new everything really. I don’t think they had ever had an employed accountant in the business. They had used the auditors to pull the accounts together.”

Beaumont quickly spotted ways to improve the way Cornish Mutual operated.

“On my first day I was greeted as Mr Beaumont and I was like ‘That’s great, but that’s my Dad. I’m Peter,’” he says. “It was polite, but it felt a little bit old-fashioned. That was a good representation of it.

“Those people on the front desk were the main ones answering the telephone. I thought ‘Oh, that’s interesting. How are we operating as an insurance company with only maybe three people for the phone?’

“As it transpired, we weren’t necessarily picking the phone up as often or as quickly as we should, but it wasn’t being monitored.

“It didn’t seem to be causing us any reputational problems interestingly, because we had -  and still have - field-based people that go to see our members. They were bearing the brunt probably of the inbound phone traffic, rather than the office.”

These days, Beaumont says the workflow of Cornish Mutual is far smoother with pinch points that could have potentially caused problems further down the track, as the insurer looked to grow, having been addressed.

Today, with Beaumont as CEO since 2019, Cornish Mutual has around 125 members of staff and it is now a provider that picks up the phone to members within seconds.

The insurer has £35m gross written premium, with around 40,000 policies in-force with around 20,000 individuals.

Reflecting on the pace of developments since he joined and then took the reins of the business, he says: “It’s been a really significant change to be a full function, modern insurance company.”

Growth plans

When he took on the top job Beaumont says there was a debate about the scope of the organisation moving forward.

“There were changes in insurance,” he says. “There was a lot of talk about going beyond indemnification. What was that going to mean for Cornish Mutual? We explored that and where we could take the organisation.”

Whether growth should come from diversifying into new lines of business and targeting new customers beyond farming was considered.

As a mutual with a long history, Beaumont says Cornish Mutual’s workforce has a real sense of responsibility in how capital is used for the benefit of farming communities.

He adds: “There was a risk we would spend it on a vanity project [of a new line] to make the company bigger and that didn’t feel like the right thing to do.

“We looked at all the wider sort of commercial risk. Farmers diversify a lot. They’re very entrepreneurial. So, we do campsites or cover for buildings converted for commercial purposes.

“We’ve got a reasonably broad spread of risks, but our focus starts at the farm. It works really well as a model, because we don’t spend very much on acquisition expenses, which helps us keep costs down.

“We’ve got quite a low expense ratio because we grow by reputation.”

Talk turned to the challenges Cornish Mutual’s membership face and whether individuals working in agriculture needed more support to consistently post a profit and cope with climate change.

Beaumont says one of the first pieces of work the insurer did with him at the helm was look at transition risks faced by farmers.

He continues: “When we looked at the main transition risks for us it was around what happens if UK farming is not supported by the UK government, the legislative environment?

“There’s nothing saying we can’t import all our food. We talked about the extent to which we could help support our sector and mutualise some of that information sharing.

“Farming is quite an isolated activity. Productivity gains have meant that a lot of farms, especially down in our area, are really a single person. There might be family involvement, but often decision making is around one person.

“They haven’t got a team to help facilitate answering questions. That’s part of what we’re interested in doing but you have to get the brand stretch to get the credibility to be able to talk about things beyond insurance.”

To switch from being a provider of cover to a partner in managing risks, Beaumont says Cornish Mutual has moved from sharing amusing claim stories of cows falling through shed roofs to educating members about the challenges farming is facing plus sharing good practice.

In 2023 Cornish Mutual launched a podcast, called Farming Focus, which recognises the way individuals engaged in agriculture wish to digest the latest thinking about how best to ensure a consistent food supply for the country.

“That’s [the podcast] trying to find subject matter experts and examples of good practise in the industry where people have planned ahead and dealt with those things,” Beaumont says. “There are real issues around succession, for example.

“That has come much more to the fore again with the very recent changes to inheritance tax.

“There’s the rise of regenerative farming, which certainly back in 2019, felt like a bit of a mythical beast and it’s been building the emerging story around that.”

Other issues the podcast has addressed include the level of accidents and deaths in the industry, with health and safety steps that can be taken to reduce the risk of high value injury and fire offered.

Mutual status

Beaumont feels Cornish Mutual’s status is because it has focused on helping members with their challenges rather than relentlessly pursuing profit for shareholders.

As well as angering farmers by imposing a 20% inheritance tax on agricultural and business assets worth more than £1m from April 2026 onwards, the Labour government has pledged to boost the number of mutuals in the UK.

Beaumont is a passionate believer in mutual status ensuring insurers do the best thing for policyholders: “A shareholder looks for a dividend, but a member looks for a high quality of service,” he says.

“I think mutuality is a really good structure. It feels like it sits somewhere between private ownership and public ownership. It’s good to align the interests [of management with], obviously, of the people who are members of the organisation. For financial services, I think it makes an awful lot of sense.”

Asked for his thoughts on whether Labour is likely to achieve its mutual goal, Beaumont reckons addressing where capital comes from will be key.

“From an insurance perspective, that’s quite capital intensive,” he continues. “I wonder whether there will be opportunities to find organisations, that could be independent or maybe converted away and had a change of heart.”

“They’re working on it and there are some interesting opportunities. We need to create a market where capital can move between mutuals in some way, because shareholders can withdraw funds and then reinvest.

“It’s not so obvious how things would work in a mutual world.”

Turning back to that thorny inheritance tax issue, and how Labour isn’t pleasing the nation’s farmers, will part of Cornish Mutual’s shift from providing cover to improving the resilience of the nation’s farmers include Beaumont banging on the door of 10 Downing Street?

“We will engage through our trade bodies on issues facing [farming] insurance specifically,” he says. “We don’t lobby on agricultural issues. There are other lobbying bodies [for that].

“We have good relations with people in the NFU, not the mutual, but the union and tenant farmers and things like that. They do a good job at that [lobbying].”

However, he says he has commented on the short-term nature of the inheritance tax change within two years when succession planning to ensure a farm can be passed on to the next generation takes seven years.

“We’ve commented on how fast things move,” he says.

Future ambitions

Looking to the future of Cornish Mutual, Beaumont wants to grow the business at a sustainable rate by helping the provider’s farming membership boost their profits and improve their resilience from whatever the weather or politicians throw at them.

“We want to grow at the same rate at which we think it is fair to grow our capital base. We are trying to match those two things so that we maintain our capital strength,” he says.

“We’ve been growing at about 4% to 5% in real terms underlying. It varies depending on what the market conditions are. We technically price. We don’t follow the market price up and down.

“If motor prices drop away or home prices drop away, we will see our retention rate and our position rates change on those personal lines, in particular. The commercial stuff tends to be more stable.

“We have over 5000 core farm businesses. A lot of the other policies around that are fleet and motor policies, home policies, let property and some of the other commercial activities, but it’s that number of farms we want to steadily grow.”

On farmers: They care. They’re a great sector. They are a very committed sector. They are committed to feeding. They really care about food. That is their job, and they take it very seriously and they remember having to feed the country during the war.

Asked to name Cornish Mutual’s rivals, he says: “There’s us and then NFU Mutual. It’s an oligopoly really. In the region, we have different penetration depending on the county.

“We’ve got higher penetration in Cornwall, good but less in Devon and then lower in Somerset and Dorset.”

On how he will entice business away from NFU Mutual, Beaumont says his team bide their time and wait for people to be ready to move over to Cornish Mutual.

“We’re very consistent,” he says. “We’re very reliable. Everyone knows we’ve got a good reputation for service. When people are ready to move, we make sure we’re there.”

On what he thinks differentiates Cornish Mutual from its main rival, he has one word: distribution.

“Our distribution is our employees,” he says. “NFU Mutual’s distribution is independent agencies.

“We have a local presence that answers the phone. Those individual offices can’t match that same approach because, in a way, they are sort of in an internal competition within the region, because they’ve got multiple agencies.”

Future of farming

Turning to what the future holds for farming, it would be remiss not to ask Beaumont if he is concerned families passionate about the land are being usurped by large companies industrially harvesting crops and livestock.

“We’re worried about that,” he admits. “We think that there is real value in diverse family farming.

“There’s a real problem now in rural New Zealand with large conglomerates coming in and doing that. Instead of using a local workforce, they’ve got mobile workforces that sort of move through the island. You haven’t necessarily got the stewardship of the countryside.

“I think the sustainable farming initiative is the right sort of approach. I think it would be hard for the conglomerates to focus on that.

“There’s a real desire to be part of that community and a real connection to the land. Farmers see themselves as stewards, not owners, and they don’t want to sell off their family estate.

“The economics will be very hard, because in a lot of ways it’s not a rational activity. The whole thing is about being asset rich and cash poor. Why not just be rich?

“They care. They’re a great sector. They are a very committed sector. They are committed to feeding. They really care about food. That is their job, and they take it very seriously and they remember having to feed the country during the war.

“The numbers for the farm value added, looks small. Food is massive. Food is paying a lot of rent in London and where is it coming from?”

Beaumont clearly cares passionately about his member’s futures and is keen to help them not just with extreme weather and a Labour Party that has caused them upset, but cyber risks too.

With many farmers reliant on their smart phones rather than a computer with enhanced security, Cornish Mutual now has a cyber helpdesk, but Beaumont admits it is difficult to get farmers to see why they would need this kind of cover even after recent high-profile attacks on the likes of Marks & Spencer.

But he says support with cyber is vital as these days many insurers have automated machinery that could get hacked: “There are risks. I think it’s quite difficult to understand what the risk environment is like in advance. It’s very hard to provide wide cover for anything that happens,” he adds.

“We are heading to a world where everything’s going to be connected and so cyber is going to be a real piece, isn’t it?

Road ahead

Almost 15 years on from relocating from outer London to Cornwall, Beaumont is pulled back to the capital again as his 22-year-old son recently moved to Clapham.

When asked if he too could return to the City, Beaumont shares he is still in love with Cornwall, where he can indulge in his passion for sailing and continues to relish leading Cornish Mutual.

“I love it,” he says. “I don’t want to outstay my welcome. There will be a time when it is right for a change and a refresh. My big challenge will be spotting that moment.

“We’ve grown a really good, multi-disciplinary team, with broader decision making and responsibility and lots of different capabilities compared to where we used to be.

“There are lots of good opportunities for people in the company as well.”

With less than 10% staff churn and employees who have worked there for decades, the road ahead for Beaumont and many of his team doesn’t appear to be one that is inside the M25, or as Chris Rea called it the “Road to Hell,” any time soon.

He is clearly committed to continuing to thrive in Cornwall and ensuring the region's farmers can too.