Interview: Christine Theodore, Admiral, Women in Tech Excellence Awards winner

“I strongly believe women should have more space within the tech arena”

Christine Theodore is IT Director at Admiral Group and winner of the Women of the Year – Financial category of the Women In Tech Excellence Awards 2024.

Christine leads the technology teams partnering with across the insurance, data, customer and claims areas to help shape and deliver their strategic agenda. Christine has over 20 years’ global experience in IT leadership roles across a variety of sectors including media, healthcare and insurance. She has led a variety of teams to manage technology and business change, engineering, operational improvement, and simplification agendas. She enjoys building and working with diverse teams.

Christine shared with Computing what this year has brought for her and her organisation and where she thinks the opportunities for 2025 can be found.

Please provide some background on your company for our readers.

Founded in1993, Admiral Group Plc is an international financial services group with customers in France, Italy, Spain, the UK and the USA. Our headquarters are based in Wales in the UK, and we are proud to be Wales’ only FTSE 100 company. We have over 11,000 colleagues who all strive to serve our 10 million customers in line with our purpose of ‘Help more people to look after their future; always striving for better together.

Our culture is key to our continued success and what sets us apart from other companies. We’re a place Where You Can, where you can Be You, Grow & Progress, Make a Difference and Share In Our Future. This is embedded into everything we do, enabling us to create, and maintain an inclusive, supportive and engaging working environment for our colleagues.

What one company achievement in the last 12 months are you most proud of?

With so many highlights throughout 2024 it’s so hard to pick just one. I think a highlight for the business was our completion of the acquisition of RSA’s direct Home and Pet renewal rights. This was such a collaborative project across our business that enables us to accelerate our diversification strategy by growing our product offering and building multi-product customer relationships in core markets.

The technology support that went into supporting this was extensive and seeing our colleagues come together to make it a success, welcoming not only new customers but new colleagues to Admiral was a big 2024 stand out for me.

Why are events like the Women in Tech Excellence Awards important to the IT industry?

Even though over recent years the industry workforce has seen more diversity, the overall gender ratio is still unbalanced. I strongly believe women should have more space within the tech arena, and although we are seeing larger numbers of women entering careers in tech, there is still more that can be done to help. The Women in Tech Excellence Awards plays a vital role in creating community, advocacy and support for those of us in the industry, as well as inspiring others to join.

What have been the biggest challenges of 2024 so far, and how have you overcome them?

Being able to do everything we want can be a bit of a challenge. We’ve made great progress in 2024, being really clear on priorities and ensuring everyone understands how all of their hard work contributes to these. We’ve had quite a few key projects to get across the line this year and maintaining everyone’s focus on the reasons why these are so important has been key.

What do you see as the main opportunities for the IT industry in the coming year? How do you plan to capitalise on those opportunities?

I feel there’s no answer that doesn’t include GenAI! Admiral has always been a very data-driven organisation, and we’ve been using machine learning and AI for some time. I’m excited about all of the various areas of our business which GenAI can benefit, and it’s great that we have many people across teams, not just in IT, that are engaged in finding better ways of working and delivering value to our customers through this technology.