Marsh has appointed James Addington-Smith, an insurance executive who came aboard in 2010, as the CEO of its UK business.

Insurers don’t sell commercial coverage directly to companies but rather go through a firm known as a broker. The broker maps out the risks against which a business wishes to purchase insurance and quantifies their potential financial impact. From there, it puts together a policy with a price that reflects the size of the risks.

Marsh is the world’s largest insurance broker. It’s a unit of Marsh McLennan, a large professional services firm that also operates in several other sectors. The company has a management consulting arm and provides investment portfolio management services to funds.

James Addington-Smith is taking up the top post at Marsh UK after two years at the helm of Marsh Asia. He earlier led Marsh Specialty Asia, a business unit that specializes in issuing complex, high-stake insurance policies. Data center builders, for example, can have the unit put together an insurance policy that protects against construction-related risks.

As the head of Marsh UK, Addington-Smith will oversee not only a sizable insurance brokering operation but also a unit called Advisory Consulting Solutions. The unit helps companies reduce their exposure to risks such as ransomware. It can help a firm implement new cybersecurity mechanisms, check that those mechanisms work as expected and develop a roadmap for future threat mitigation efforts. Lowering a company’s susceptibility to cyberattacks can convince insurers to reduce the fees they charge for cybersecurity insurance. The same is true for many other types of policies.

Addington-Smith will move into the CEO role early next year. He is succeeding Chris Lay, a long-time Marsh executive who also leads Marsh McLennan UK. Marsh McLennan plans to appoint a new executive to the helm of the latter business further down the road.