Admiral, the car insurer and owner of Confused.com, is to become the second FTSE 100 company with a female chief executive and a female chair.
Milena Mondini de Focatiis, currently the firm’s head of UK and European insurance, will take over from David Stevens in 12 months’ time. She has been made CEO-designate and will join the board as an executive director in due course. Stevens co-founded Admiral in 1991 and has been chief executive since May 2016.
Mondini de Focatiis will be one of a handful of female FTSE 100 chief executives. Admiral also has a female chair, Annette Court, a former Zurich executive who took on the post in 2017.
Court said: “Having been through a comprehensive and robust succession process, the board is confident that in Milena we have a natural successor and a leader for the next generation.”
The water company Severn Trent is the other FTSE 100 company with a female CEO, Liv Garfield, that will also get a female chair when Christine Hodgson replaces Andrew Druff in April.
There are six women at the helm of FTSE 100 companies but this number will drop when Alison Cooper is replaced by Stefan Bomhard at the tobacco firm Imperial Brands in July, unless there are other appointments elsewhere.
The other female chief executives are Alison Rose, who became the first woman to lead a major bank when she took over at Royal Bank of Scotland in November, Emma Walmsley at the drugmaker GSK, Dame Carolyn McCall at ITV, and Alison Brittain at Whitbread, the owner of Premier Inn.
The government-commissioned Hampton-Alexander review said last year that one in every two FTSE 100 executive appointments over the next year would have to go to a woman if the UK is to meet targets to tackle the gender imbalance across British business by the end of 2020. The review’s benchmark is that at least one third of all executive positions at FTSE 100 companies should be filled by women.
Mondini de Focatiis joined Admiral in 2007 and founded and ran its Italian insurance business in 2008. She previously worked as a consultant for Bain & Company and for Accenture. She holds an MBA from the French business school Insead.
Her appointment was announced alongside Admiral’s annual results, which showed a 10% rise in pre-tax profit to £522.6m.
