Robert is the Managing Director and CEO of Steadfast, the largest distributor of general insurance in Australia and New Zealand, and joined the Abbott board in July 2016.
He has more than 45 years’ experience in the insurance industry and co-founded Steadfast in 1996. He led the company to a successful listing on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) and Steadfast is now an ASX 200 company with a market capitalisation of over $1.5 billion.
Robert was the ‘Insurance Industry Leader of the Year’ at the 2011 Annual Australian Insurance Industry Awards and was named the second ‘Most Influential Person in the Insurance Industry’ in 2014 by Insurance News magazine. He was one of the finalists in CEO Magazine’s 2015 ‘CEO of the Year Awards’, and a national finalist for the Eastern Region in the 2016 ‘EY Entrepreneur of the Year’ programme. In March 2014, Robert was awarded the prestigious Association for Cooperative Operations Research and Development (ACORD) ‘Rainmaker Award’.
Robert is a Director of various Steadfast subsidiaries, including the Steadfast Foundation, and is also a Director of the charity KidsXpress, and ACORD International representing the Asia Pacific region.