Peter Wood

Sir Peter John Wood (born November 1946, in Surrey) is an English entrepreneur, most notable as the founder of the Direct Line and esure insurance companies. Wood was knighted in the 2016 Birthday Honours for services to UK industry and philanthropy. In 2021 he was the 198th wealthiest person in Britain with an estimated personal fortune of £815 million, according to the Sunday Times Rich List 2021. Business Direct Line In 1985 Sir Peter launched Direct Line, the first telephone-only insurance company in the UK. The venture was underwritten by the Royal Bank of Scotland, and within nine years was the biggest insurer of private vehicles in the country, claiming three times as many customers as the Royal Bank itself. Wood did not have a capital stake in Direct Line, having sold it to the Royal Bank in 1988 in return for considerable performance-related remuneration. This led to his becoming Britain's highest paid company director, receiving £1.6 million in 1991, £6 million in 1992, and £18.2 million in 1993. The subsequent attention and notoriety his pay attracted—Labour Party MP and then-shadow Trade Secretary Robin Cook called his bonus "obscene"—was a source of embarrassment both to Wood himself and the Royal Bank, which attempted to buy its way out of its contractual obligations with a one-off £24 million payment in 1994, taking his total income that year to £42 million. Wood himself claims that he personally requested an end to the deal after receiving a letter bomb at the Direct Line offices which injured a member of staff. Nevertheless, Wood remained richly rewarded, receiving another £17 million in 1995 and remaining a byword for the perceived excesses of corporate boardrooms in the 1990s, according to critics. He left Direct Line in 1997, but continued to work with the Royal Bank in other areas, including Privilege, an insurance company specialising in lower-risk customers which had been founded in 1996. Whilst running Direct Line, Wood founded Línea Directa Aseguradora (LDA), a direct motor insurer in Spain, through a joint venture between RBS and Bankinter. LDA listed on the Madrid stock exchange in April 2020 with a market valuation of €1.434bn euros.