Plenary speakers
Paul is a Director within Executive Education at Henley Business School. Paul is very much at the forefront of learning process innovation and has designed and delivered strategic leadership development programmes globally in a variety of learning environments. He brings first hand experience of leading successful teams within sport and organisations to his speaking engagements. Paul’s positive energy, experience, knowledge and sense of fun ensure that the messages he shares during his talks inspire others to action.
Tony is working in his second stint at Aviva, and is responsible for all Insurance risk, reporting to the Group CRO. Between times at Aviva, Tony spent five years at the FSA, initially as Chief Actuary, GI, and then for three years as Head of Wholesale Insurance Firms supervision. Tony began his actuarial career in the general insurance practice at Bacon & Woodrow – now Deloitte.
David is Actuarial Director at Direct Line Group who is a retail general insurer with leading market positions in the UK. Prior to joining Direct Line Group, David was Chief Actuary at HBOS General Insurance. In his earlier career he was a consultant at Towers Perrin after having worked as a research scientist in industry at companies ranging from BP in London to Michelin in France. David sits on GIPEC and the GIRO organising committee, and is, this year, as in previous years, chairing the Third Party Working Party.
Neil is a Principal working in Milliman’s London office. With over 20 years’ industry experience he has worked both in business and consulting. Prior to joining Milliman, Neil sat on the UK board of a large insurer, with executive responsibility for areas such as strategy, risk management and finance. At Milliman Neil leads the global development of CRisALIS™, Milliman’s cutting-edge approach to identifying, understanding, managing and modelling enterprise risk. Neil recently completed a research project on behalf of The Actuarial Profession looking at risk appetite and emerging risk. Neil also consults on strategy, product development and M&A.
Heidi Delobelle was elected as the first female President of l'Institut des Actuaires en Belgique in 2011 and is a member of the Council of the International Actuarial Association. After graduating from the Catholic University of Leuven and with a masters degree in Actuarial Sciences, Heidi has spent the majority of her career with AG Insurance where she is now a member of the executive committee & Chief Risk Officer.
Phil joined Lane Clark & Peacock in the summer of 2011, as one of seven Insurance Consulting partners, and is thoroughly enjoying it. He advises a range of clients including insurance companies, large and small mutuals, and Lloyd’s syndicates. He is also involved in various training initiatives internally and for clients. Previously Phil spent twelve years as group actuary in a large London-based insurance company, after spells with two different consultancies and several years training actuaries full time with Hazell Carr Training and then ActEd.
Graham is the Sales and Practice Leader for Towers Watson’s UK and Ireland P&C brokerage and consulting business. Before joining Towers Watson Graham spent 12 years as a Chief Actuary in the London and Lloyd’s market, lastly with ACE European Group. Graham specialises in reserving, M&A and pricing in the London and Bermuda markets.
Tim Harford is a world renowned behavioural economist and award-winning Financial Times columnist. Frequently described as ‘Britain’s Malcolm Gladwell,’ his first two books, The Logic of Life and The Undercover Economist, have been translated into 30 languages and sold well over a million copies. He is also presenter of Radio 4’s More or Less.
Tim’s most recent book is ADAPT: Why Success Always Starts With Failure shows how the challenges we face today can’t be solved with simple ready-made solutions; we must learn to improvise rather than plan. Drawing on psychology, evolutionary biology, physics, maths and economics, Tim shows how adaptive, trial-and-error processes can help tackle everything from innovation to financial crises.
But whilst he’s a ‘serious’ economist with a career spanning Oxford, Shell and the World Bank, Tim’s FT columns dwell on the economics of daily life and offer tongue-in-cheek solutions to readers’ problems.
Chris Hitchings is a senior analyst in KBW’s insurance research team. He has long experience across the European insurance universe but, currently, covers the Lloyd’s insurers. After working in investment management, he joined de Zoete & Bevan in 1974, moving to Hoare Govett (1980), UBS (1992), Commerzbank (1998) and KBW (2005). He is recognised as an authority on Lloyd’s and has written papers for the Association of Lloyd’s Members, including submissions to regulatory debates.
Sarah has worked as a consultant specialising in general insurance for Towers Watson since 1997. Prior to joining Towers Watson, Sarah was responsible for developing the actuarial processes for General Accident’s Hong Kong branch. She has a wide range of reserving, premium rating, and merger and acquisition experience both internationally and in the UK.Her reserving experience spans captives, Lloyd’s syndicates and P&I clubs as well as traditional insurers and reinsurers. Her main areas of interest are the assessment of reserve uncertainty, industrial disease and asbestos-related reserving, and Periodical Payment Orders (PPOs). Sarah has been a member of the PPO GIRO Working Party since its inception in 2009 and undertakes the UK survey of PPOs on behalf of the working party.
Trevor is Head of Exposure Management and Reinsurance at Lloyd’s of London, responsible for catastrophe modelling, reinsurance and emerging risks management. He has authored or edited many of Lloyd’s published reports on Climate Change and represents Lloyd’s on various climate change related initiatives including: ClimateWise and Geneva Association. Trevor is a director of OASIS, the open architecture system for catastrophe modelling. He is a Fellow of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries and has Bachelor and Master of Science degrees in pure mathematics from the University of Warwick.
Joe is the Global Chief Actuary of Bermuda based Alterra Capital. Prior to that he was a partner in the Insurance Consulting practice of LCP. As both firms are innovative in their approach and deal with several insurance and reinsurance entities, the move from consultant to in-house was remarkably smooth. The main difference being the newly acquired skill of functioning normally with jet lag and no longer being paid in Sterling but in Airmiles. Joe’s favourite film is “Up in the Air” and his favourite book is not "Air Crash Investigations". When not in the office Joe enjoys travelling anywhere by train as slowly as possible.
Since 1992 Robert has worked on the development of methodologies for catastrophe loss modelling of earthquake, tropical cyclone, windstorm and flood perils in Europe, Japan, North America, Caribbean and Australia. He has been head of research at RMS since 2003 with a mission to explore enhanced methodologies for natural catastrophe modelling and develop models for new areas of risk. He has been technical lead on a number of Catastrophe risk securitizations, was Lead Author on Insurance, Finance and Climate Change for the 2007 4th IPCC Assessment Report and for the 2012 IPCC ‘Special Report on Managing the Risk of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation’. He is Vice-Chair of the OECD High Level Advisory Board of the International Network on Financial Management of Large Catastrophes and has worked with the Geneva Association in the development of their policies and actions around climate change and insurance. He has published six books, written scientific papers on earthquake, flood and windstorm perils and published more than 200 articles. He has a degree in Natural Sciences and a PhD in Earth Sciences from the University of Cambridge.
James joined the capital markets and accounting advisory group in July 2011 to set up a new team advising insurers on developing their corporate strategy, investor communications and internal/external analysis and reporting.
Previously he was a Managing Director and Head of the Citigroup European Insurance Equity Research Team, and was one of the most highly regarded analysts in the sector. His direct coverage included a wide range of insurers, such as major European groups such as Allianz, Mapfre, RSA, Sampo and Zurich, as well as reinsurers, including Munich Re and Swiss Re.
Prior to moving into equity research James worked for PwC in London and New York, where he was mainly involved with auditing and financial advisory work with insurers. Overall he has more than 20 years experience in the insurance industry.
Dr Emily Shuckburgh is a climate scientist and leads the Open Oceans research group at the British Antarctic Survey, which is focused on understanding the role of the polar oceans in the global climate system. She is also a fellow of Darwin College, a member of the Faculty of Mathematics, an associate of the Cambridge Centre for Climate Change Mitigation Research and a member of Faculty for many programmes of the Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership, all at the University of Cambridge. In the past she has worked at Ecole Normal Superieure in Paris and at MIT. At present she is undertaking a part-time secondment to the UK Government's Department of Energy and Climate Change.
She is a fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society and Chair of their Scientific Publications Committee.
Buu is Managing Director of Insight Risk Consulting, a newly formed niche consultancy aiming to deliver tangible value from internal models and risk frameworks. After considerable efforts by the industry thus far in this area, Insight is working with clients to help them monetise Solvency II. Buu has worked directly with underwriting teams and executive management for a number of years and has endeavoured to bring actuarial concepts to the wider business. In this regard, he has significant experience in working within a business to get new ideas understood, frameworks embedded, and deliverables produced.
Prior to setting up Insight Risk Consulting, Buu held senior actuarial roles in the London Market, most recently as Group Chief Actuary of Omega Insurance Holdings. He has worked across reserving, pricing, capital modelling and more latterly risk, being responsible for all aspects of the Internal Model at Omega.