28.Oct.2016

The story of how we started

• Newbie news: Cheviot Insured's Joel Marks
  Thu 27th Oct 10:33
  Beat the barriers: Joel Marks, director of Newcastle-based Cheviot Insured, on the road to authorisation

You started writing business in March 2016 – why did you start up on your own?

I used to work in the City as a fund manager for 20 years and then we moved to the North East for family reasons. Charlie Hoult, one of the dads in my son’s school, owns quite a big property company. We started chatting and Charlie, who is entrepreneurial, was interested in getting into financial services.

We decided that insurance is a sector we liked very much because it’s advice driven and the barriers to entry are very high with the FCA permissions. Because of Charlie’s property background we already had a reasonable amount of premium to start off with to channel through a new company. It took quite a long time to get to the finish line