Data science - How actuaries can optimize usage of data science techniques within their sectors

Nigel Carpenter, Chief Data Scientist, RSA

Nigel Carpenter is a mathematician, actuary, data scientist and double Kaggle master, with a 30 year career in General Insurance. In that time he has held senior leadership positions in both Reserving and Pricing functions, but for the last 5 years has worked in the emerging field of Data Science where he holds the position of Chief Data Scientist at RSA Insurance. Nigel believes the Actuarial profession is well positioned to ensure that adoption of data science in Insurance is both robust and serves the public interest. 

Cherry Chan, Head of General Insurance, Barnett Waddingham

Cherry joined Barnett Waddingham in 2009 and was made a partner at Barnett Waddingham in 2013. She has experience in advising a range of general (re)insurance companies on actuarial issues including statutory reserve reviews, pricing and Solvency II implementations and is also working with technology providers and Insurtech firms to help insurers find ways to improve innovations, reduce operating expenses and efficiently implement IFRS17 standards.  Cherry is a Fellow and Faculty Institute of Actuaries and a liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Actuaries (WCA).   

Hugo Clugston, Senior Pricing Manager, Chubb

Hugo is Senior Pricing Manager at Chubb for Europe, Middle East & Africa. He joined Chubb in 2007 and has held various roles across Pricing, Loss Reserving and Capital Modelling. He has specific interests in portfolio management; and understanding how technology and Insurtech can play a role in driving better pricing decisions, managing claim costs and reducing operating expenses. Hugo is a Fellow of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries.

Eamon Comerford, Senior Consultant (Milliman)

Eamon is a Senior Consultant in the Dublin office of Milliman, having joined the company in 2010. Eamon has experience across a wide range of insurance issues and projects. His expertise includes valuation and financial reporting, Solvency II, IFRS 17 and other consulting work. Eamon has been heavily involved in Milliman’s data science work in the last few years. He has also presented at a number of events and authored publications on this subject.

Valerie du Preez, Managing Director Dupro Ltd

Valerie (FIA) has extensive actuarial experience focusing on developing sustainable finance and risk operating strategies and optimising key business drivers impacting organisational performance.
She advises insurers and technology providers on the use of innovative technologies including advanced data science techniques, that incorporates business domain experience.

She has recently played a key role within the IFoA’s virtual data science conference being on the opening panel with IFoA president John Taylor. She has worked with insurance and software clients within data science, providing advisory services and thought leadership and has been involved in data science and modelling analytics and insights through the IFoA Data Working Party. She was on the joint RSS/IFoA Task Force drafting the ethical guide for practitioners working in data science.

Dario Flood, Senior Consultant, Actuary, Risk, EY

Dario is a senior consultant within the UK actuarial team, where he’s worked on a number of strategic engagements involving analytics and visualisations. Dario is part of the UK actuarial innovation team where he is exploring IoT technology in insurance.

Asif John, CEO of AMJ Global Solutions Group

Asif has about 20 years of experience in the Insurance and Reinsurance sector. He has twenty years’ experience of performing c-level leadership roles in his domain.  A qualified actuary, he is the CEO of AMJ Global Solutions Group and is on a mission to disrupt the Insurance market using data science, machine learning and AI.

Asif is Chair of IFoA Data Science MIG which has in excess of 50 members across five work streams and participates in IFoA data science steering committee, a strategic committee to progress Data Science

Dawid Kopczyk

Dawid is a Fellow of Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, who worked on actuarial and data science projects with clients in the United Kingdom, Germany and Poland. He is specialized in Solvency II topics with a strong mathematical background of risk calibration models, stochastic processes and machine learning algorithms. Founder of Quantee, a company that provides actuarial data science solutions.

Xavier Maréchal, founder and CEO of Reacfin

Reacfin is a spin-off of the University of Louvain (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium) focusing on consulting in risk, finance, actuarial and data science. Xavier is one of the co-authors of “Actuarial Modeling of Claim Counts: Risk Classification, Credibility and Bonus-Malus Systems” (Wiley, 2007). Xavier has obtained different academic degrees as Master in Engineering (Applied Mathematics), MSc. Actuarial Sciences and MSc. Management.

Xavier is a qualified actuary of the Institute of Actuaries in Belgium (IA|BE). Xavier has extensive experience in the actuarial field obtained during his 16 years as a principal consultant for many national and multinational insurance companies. He has gained a complementary experience in various fields going from Non-Life ratemaking and provisioning to health modeling. Xavier is a regular speaker at actuarial training/conferences for actuarial associations, summer schools.

Sajjad Meghjee, Lloyds

Starting out as a Reserving Actuary within the Commercial SME Insurance space, Sajjad has moved towards, and is now firmly placed in, Lloyd’s focusing on Long Tail classes of business. Having a slightly geeky mindset, Sajjad enjoys the automation and programming side of things in order to make things more efficient. Outside of work you will find him clocking up miles on his road bike in the Chilterns.

Will Mirams, Life Actuarial Technology and Analytics team in the UK

Will leads EY’s Life Actuarial Technology and Analytics team in the UK. Will has recently worked with multiple insurers to deploy solutions across a wide spectrum of Actuarial and Finance functions. Most notably, Will has worked with the two ALM teams to build tools and capabilities to analyse and optimise the matching adjustment portfolio. Will has also led projects which have utilised machine learning techniques to identify drivers for particular policyholder behaviours, helping insurers better understand the risks that they are exposed to.

Rodwel Mupambirei, Actuary, Dupro Ltd

Rodwel is a Fellow of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, working in the life sector with a keen interest in applying machine learning techniques in a variety of real-world problems.
His involvement in data science began when he collaborated with sound engineers in the tech sector in applying deep learning techniques to refine voice recognition accuracy using Python.

More recently, he has been applying machine techniques in an insurance setting to help identify hidden patterns in data with the aim of providing new business insights. Rodwel is an active data science practitioner and is active in the data science community through Pydata data science meetings. He is currently using machine learning to provide business insights for data managers, pricing actuaries and senior executives.

John Ng, Chair of IFoA Data Science MIG Research

John is Senior Data Scientist at RGA, where he implements predictive modelling solutions for internal and external clients on mortality, morbidity, digital distribution and consumer response. Previously he worked in pricing and data science in General Insurance. His expertise includes machine learning, automation and optimisation. John is a Fellow of IFoA, an experienced pharmacist and member of Data Science MIG Managing Committee.

Colin Thores

Colin is an Education Actuary at the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, having previously worked in various product development, commercial and capital management roles in insurance companies in the UK and Europe. He is a member of the IFoA’s Data Science Certificate Committee and is heavily involved in the launch of the IFoA’s new Certificate of Data Science.

Melanie Zhang, Data science MIG Education Workstream Lead

Melanie is Head of Property Innovation at AXIS Capital, having previously worked in actuarial pricing, reserving and business planning roles in the London insurance market since 2011. Melanie has recently completed her Master’s degree at UCL in Computational Statistics and Machine Learning. She is a member of the IFoA Data Science Member Interest Group Managing Committee and the IFoA Data Science Certificate Committee.

About the Data Science MIG

The Data Science MIG (Members Interest Group) has been established since October 2018, which is a rebrand of MAID (Modelling, Analytics, and Insights from Data working party 'MAID')  and aims to show the opportunities for actuaries in traditional and new areas of work, and how to utilize data science.