A NAME like Aine Mizzoni has an exotic appeal among the usual dull plethora of Os and Macs and appears quintessentially Irish-Italian.

Ms Mizzoni's explanation is the Italian roots of her husband who has spent most of his life in the Republic and, she adds, supported the Irish team when the couple were in his home village in Italy during the 1994 World Cup.

Now chief operating officer with Sedgwick Dineen brokers, Ms Mizzoni is responsible for its strategic direction, charting a new course following its takeover last August by the world's largest brokers, Marsh McLennan.

She has worked for Sedgwick, whose parent group is Britain-based, since 1981, beginning as an assistant accountant and, six years later, being appointed associate director - "for me a first tentative step out of finance and into the business".

"One of the things I learnt and had to unlearn in subsequent years was that the business was not about keeping the books but about customers and insurance," she says.

She joined the board as a director and financial controller in 1989 and was appointed to her present position in 1991.

With a family of four daughters, a husband who runs his own business and a demanding work schedule, she has found the going hard.

In 1995 she was treated successfully for cancer but decided she had "to do things very differently". She was taking life too seriously and "being too intense about everything".

"When it came to work, I often would not delegate enough. That is a wrong strategy. It stops people learning and it is an ineffective use of work time."

She also feels she took on too much of the house management "even though over the years we had very good child-care arrangements."

"The learning for me through most of the 1990s is changing my style to one which is much more open to the principle of partnership and stewardship."

She first met her husband, Gerry, when she was 15, started going out with him when she was 16 and married him when she was 22.

He was her boyfriend when she did her leaving cert in 1978, and she remembers not being too interested in her subjects. She and her 14-year-old sister were living in a flat having promised faithfully to follow their parents to England after the summer exams. "I suppose we went a bit mad," Ms Mizzoni remembers. "There was an interesting thing there about learning independence early and learning to cope early, and making lots of mistakes because you did not have a clue."

After completing her exams she did a bookkeeping course with Manpower, now part of FAS, and found she was good at "toting figures". At a time when editions of the Evening Herald or Evening Press would advertise as few as five jobs, she describes the course as "a brilliant starting-off point because it threw people who had no work experience into the work scene".

Starting her career with Coughlan Moore in Fleet Street, in Dublin's city centre, she worked as an assistant accountant and enjoyed the intimacy of a small company.

The move to Sedgwick Dineen in 1981, however, was prompted by a the need to have more opportunities available. She remembers the steady advance of technology as computers came on stream. The day before she was married the PDP1124 arrived at the old offices in Harcourt Street. The staff peered out the windows at the strange machine being delivered.

"It was just a huge occasion. `The computer has arrived'. It had a profound influence on the way we had worked."

She studied for Certified Public Accountant (CPA) exams but the first time round failed them. "At that stage I had been married the previous year, we had opened a business and were working very hard, and I just did not care anymore."

She eventually decided to get out of the family restaurant business, Mamma Mizzoni's in Rathgar, when Giustina, the third of her four daughters was born in 1989.

"I had to draw a line in the sand and limit enormously my involvement with the business. I just had to say `no' and I did, and it was one of the best decisions I made for myself and for Gerry, because he had to start to learn the things he did not want to know about previously. He has been more successful in business since he had to take more full and complete responsibility."

Nevertheless, there was little let up in her hectic lifestyle. When her fourth child was born in 1991 she had four children under the age of six.

"I would say I was sleeping four or five hours for, I would say, eight or nine years, except for weekends when I would just sleep the whole weekend."

When she got around to taking the exams again, in 1997, she found it was a different world in accountancy "in terms of regulation" although the need to go back to face failure and gain a professional qualification was an important achievement.

A part of her work has been to develop a business strategy for the small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) market, one which has "untapped opportunities". "The challenge is high-volume/low-value, and how do you make money out of that," she says.

Sedgwick Dineen and its subsidiary, the group pensions company, Irish Pensions Trust (IPT), are currently going through a £1.25 billion sterling (€1.88 billion) merger deal. It will mean that Marsh & McLennan's pensions company, Mercer, will have the same owner as IPT, achieving a market dominance in the pensions market and, consequently, a move which the Competition Authority may object to.

"We are still at the very early stages of this in terms of planning, making sure we approach things in the right way," she says.

But she believes broker consolidation on a global basis will continue and drive the small players out of the market. The bigger brokers are taking a bigger share of new business. "I actually think the worse has yet to come for both brokers and insurers. I also think, in terms of modernising, the worst has yet to come.

"There is a lot of change there and there is a lot of pain in that change."

The upside will be "more comprehensive and sophisticated" products and services to customers, she says.

As a woman who entered a traditional industry, she feels she was not marked out by her gender but by her approach to the workplace. "As you would expect in a traditional industry mediocrity seeps in and it becomes a major obstacle to change."

She has found that she has worked harder because she had to, "because she was odd in this industry". "There is more balance to come in this industry and more balance will come," she says.