Area(s) of expertise:

• Nine years as a student and actuary in UK life companies doing marketing, finance, and strategy.
• Strategy consulting with Oliver Wyman since 2000, across life and general insurance.

Current work:

• Strategic consultancy to major European insurance companies. I run the business for Europe, Middle East and Africa, across life and general insurance. My personal consulting focuses around group centre design, strategic planning, and organisational transformation.

Other comments:

• Moving to strategy consulting from a career in life companies posed a number of challenges for me:
  • living in a world where actuaries are not automatically seen as experts: here you have to prove it;
  • accepting that our methodologies and metrics are not the best or the only way, but only one of many alternatives.
• Having said that, the upside is the tremendous intellectual challenge of working with intelligent committed people, the freedom to explore new ideas within a flexible collegiate atmosphere, and the breadth of interesting things to do. I work with some of the most intelligent and creative people I have ever met. Some of them - a few - are actuaries: the baseline of knowledge helps, but at the end of the day it's skills and energy that matter.