A great leap forward

Natasha Scotland Courcy’s career has been characterised a combination of hard work and a willingness to take risks, which seems to be the perfect preparation for her role as the chair of BILTIR. 

From her earliest days growing up in Trinidad, Natasha Scotland Courcy says, her parents taught her the importance of preparation and hard work. 

Those habits led to a stellar academic career studying law and a willingness to take on big challenges, including working in three countries outside her homeland, including Bermuda. 

Now she is chief executive officer of life reinsurer Athene Life Re and the chair of Bermuda International Long Term Insurers and Reinsurers (BILTIR) at a time when the sector has been facing increased scrutiny. 

Given that the life and annuity sector is, above all, an industry where detail matters and it’s important to be on top of your brief, Scotland Courcy seems well suited to be its voice. 

This year she was named Woman of the Year 2024 by Women in Reinsurance (WiRe), the professional organisation for women working in Bermuda’s reinsurance sector. Winning the award reflected Scotland Courcy’s success with Athene, which has experienced extraordinary growth since it was founded in 2009, and the importance of the life re/insurance sector to the international business sector. 

Attempts to create a life re/insurance sector in Bermuda began to flourish with Athene’s success. Since then, the life insurance industry has grown rapidly, with $1.1 trillion in assets at year-end 2022, up from $496 billion in 2018. But the evolution of the sector has drawn detractors, and a large part of Scotland Courcy’s job at both Athene and BILTIR is to advocate on behalf of the industry.

 Taking the leap 

Taking on the role is not for the fainthearted, but Scotland Courcy has been overcoming challenges and making leaps of faith all of her life. 

She left high school with good grades, but they were not good enough to win the scholarships she needed to help pay for an overseas university. 

As a result, she worked for a year in a Trinidad bank to take the time to decide what to do. With advice from her parents, she opted to study law and went to the University of the West Indies, competing with applicants across the Caribbean for one of its coveted places. Like many students, she enjoyed the social life away from home, but by her third year, she was determined to focus on academics. 

“In my final year of university, my dad said: ‘Do you remember why we sent you there? Do you remember what you went to do? I’m not going to say anything else. I’m going to just let you do what you know you need to do.’ 

“I went into that final year of my LLB programme knowing I had a tall hill to climb. At that point, I was fighting to get even an upper second, but I studied so hard and I applied myself so much that I was able to obtain my first-class honours based on the grades I obtained in my final year,” she recalled. 

That dedication and drive followed Scotland Courcy into her postgraduate law studies where she excelled at the Hugh Wooding School of Law bank in Trinidad. 

“I kept working extremely hard in law school for the last two years of my studies, and I am proud to say I ended up getting most of the awards in the first year for most of the courses offered and ended up graduating with a Certificate of Merit, which is the highest accolade at law school,” she said. 

From law school, Scotland Courcy could have remained in Trinidad, but she knew a lawyer who had worked in corporate law in the British Virgin Islands (BVI) and that drew her interest. 

“I didn’t know anything about BVI, but I wanted to experience the world outside Trinidad, so I took the leap. BVI was a great entry point to international business relative to what I would have been doing at home, which would have been more local-facing. 

“The firm I was with had offices globally, including in London, and I saw that as a pathway to getting to where I wanted to be, which was doing international transactions with the big, ‘magic circle’ law firms in the UK and getting to experience the international clientele while being based in London,” she explained. 

Scotland Courcy gained this experience, but recalls how her parents came to visit her for Christmas at a time when her team was working to close a deal and she barely saw them. 

“This was not what I wanted to do all the time. The weather was getting to me and I wanted to be closer to my family, so I explored other opportunities. Bermuda was novel to me at the time, other than I knew it had such a good reputation as jurisdiction of choice for re/insurance business. 

“So I decided to take that leap of faith. I got an opportunity with a law firm, and I jumped on it,” she said. 

A legal background 

In Bermuda, Scotland Courcy joined a team of talented legal professionals on a series of corporate and insurance transactions before the opportunity arose to join a property and casualty reinsurance company which was a member of the Class of 2005 insurers which formed after Hurricane Katrina. 

There she worked as associate general counsel, and plunged into the varied work an in-house lawyer must undertake. 

“I saw a great opportunity to get a different type of experience versus being in private practice and I loved it,” she recalled. “I loved the company, and the diversity of matters that I needed to deal with. It could be something as simple as a lease, to general contract wording to the reinsurance and licensing regulatory requirements. The broad spectrum was so exciting to me. 

“I was able to get a lot of public company experience and helped to manage board meetings and shareholder meetings. We had a lot of interesting deal work and I was a part of all those transactions. I found my niche: cross-border reinsurance regulatory international transactions.” 

Scotland Courcy found the experience of working with a wide range of employees refreshing. “That’s where I found my joy. I wasn’t working with lawyers every day, I was working with the business units, trying to solve their business needs and getting more familiar with the business side of things, not just the legal aspects, and I felt drawn to it.” 

Having moved countries and gone from a law firm to being an inhouse counsel, Scotland Courcy then made the jump from property casualty re/insurance to life insurance. With her own insurer about to be bought, she had an opportunity in 2012 to join Athene, which was in its early stages of growth in the life and annuity re/insurance market. 

“This was not a business line I was overly familiar with. But again, it was in-house, they were looking for public company experience, and I had the key things they needed. I had the reinsurance concepts, I just needed to learn them for the life and annuity side. I jumped on that opportunity and made a leap of faith again,” she said. 

A new sector 

With Athene and the life re/insurance business just starting to grow, Scotland Courcy said she believed Athene was going to be a success. 

Founded by Jim Belardi, former CEO of US insurer Sun America Life, with backing from Apollo Global Management, Athene has since grown rapidly and now has $320 billion in assets, but these were still early days. 

“I couldn’t have predicted exactly where we are now, but there was no surprise for me in terms of what the company’s trajectory has been and continues to be,” she said. 

Scotland Courcy joined Athene as associate general counsel and chief compliance officer of Athene Life Re. Since then, she has risen steadily with the company and is now chief executive officer of Athene Life Re. Athene was established in Bermuda because of the territory’s sterling regulatory reputation, she says. 

“The company succeeded because it filled a vacuum in the market. The gap between what prospective pensioners should have for retirement and what they will have is estimated at $1 trillion a year and is growing each year,” she explained. 

“The protection gap remains the biggest issue for retirees and for companies and Bermuda has been very well-positioned for this,” she said, adding that the level of business expertise on the Island is tailormade to address the problem. 

“This is an issue that’s been growing. You’re seeing the development in our sector because there’s an opportunity where we can provide much needed support. There continues to be an opportunity to drive innovation, responsive and responsible innovation, to see a host of different annuity products that are coming into the markets, and you’re starting to see more companies looking for access to capital. 

“Bermuda is a great innovator and provides a robust framework for structures that can support the use of third-party capital that companies can then deploy to support the needs of cedant companies and ultimately policyholders. The retirement gap provides an opportunity for companies to enter the space and to support retirees and their plans.” 

Having seen the success of Athene and others, more companies have come into the space. BILTIR has a central role in this and enables competitors to work together towards common goals. 

“I’m happy to see that we have so many competitors in our space, that are eager to support their policyholders’ needs,” said Scotland Courcy. “But this is where we start to see the challenges, because we want to make sure that with growth and innovation and expansion, the need for capital and the scrutiny that comes with those things, the regulators are comfortable that companies are appropriately capitalised and their practices, from a fiscal, governance and risk management standpoint, are all sound and ultimately protective of policyholders and annuitants.” 

Scotland Courcy credits the Bermuda Monetary Authority (BMA) with overseeing the sector’s evolution and coming in with timely regulation which addresses these concerns. 

“Everything the BMA has done in the past couple of years, particularly with the new capital changes last year, is meant to shore up a lot of the questions that were being flagged,” she said. 

“Given where we are with our regulatory framework, I remain confident in the strength of the Bermudian regime. 

“There’s a lot of misinformation out there and that’s a natural part of success. The opportunity we have here is that we have a regulator which is laser-focused on ensuring regulations are keeping ahead of developments in the industry. The BMA has been very proactive on these issues.” 

Turning the diversity ship around 

As the CEO of a Bermuda-based re/insurer and the head of a major trade organisation, Scotland Courcy remains something of a rarity as a black woman in the industry. Winning the WiRe award was a recognition of her success, but also highlighted how much work needs to be done. Scotland Courcy says there has been progress in the industry but admits it can seem literally and figuratively glacial. 

She likens the progress to the view from a cruise ship in Alaska, which when it comes close to a glacier, executes a turn so that all the passengers can see it. The turn is so gradual that nothing seems to change, but by the end, the ship is heading in a different direction. 

“The diversity landscape is like a massive ship that has been going down a certain path,” she said. “It’s not something you can turn overnight, but every piece of progress matters.” 

To some degree, the life re/insurance sector is ahead of the curve. The BILTIR board has a majority of women on its board, and many of the Bermuda companies have female CEOs.

In general, she says, women have made significant steps in moving up the ranks in insurance, but there is more work to do when it comes to ethnicity. 

“When it comes to the race gap, that’s an area that requires even more work, more effort, and more thoughtful effort. You can have diversity and inclusion programmes all day, but that gap still exists. 

“You have to go back to things such as education and opportunities. There are still people who aren’t at the table that should be.” 

In a speech some years ago, Scotland Courcy said women make up more executive and C-suite roles than ever before, but black women make up a fraction of that number. “There’s a whole historical makeup here that needs to be recognised but again, I view it as a very slow moving vessel. 

“We need to be able to say, ‘this is the issue’ and we need to be comfortable having the uncomfortable conversations,” she said. 

She is proud that Athene is doing its part, especially in offering career-shifters opportunities they wouldn’t otherwise have. 

“They are people in the Bermuda market who would not ordinarily have had opportunities in international business—we want to open up the space for them. It could be something as simple as a workshop for a week,” she said. “To encourage others to follow in my footsteps and to increase diversity, I try to challenge the norms—whether it’s redefining the look for a CEO or encouraging authenticity in personality and appearance. 

“I embrace showing up as my true authentic self and think that it is crucial to call out those who pigeonhole women based on their looks. 

“We recognise that women can sometimes be their own harshest critics. In the context of challenging norms and embracing authenticity, we must support and uplift one another. It is important for us to come together and break down those barriers, not each other. 

“I try to always show encouragement to other women who look like me or come from similar backgrounds within and outside my organisation. 

“I will continue to use my platform to advocate for systemic changes that break down barriers to success for women—especially women of colour—and create opportunities for their advancement. 

“I strive to inspire and empower others to reach their full potential, regardless of their background or identity,” she concluded.

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