Strategy Consulting - Key skills gained

Strategy Consulting - Life Insurance, Asset & Wealth Management

Why the move away from Actuarial?

Working for a small syndicate with more traditional managment, I believed there was a wealth of analytics, whether out of the capital model, the actuarial team or from my own asset allocation tool creations that could have been being leveraged far more to enform commercial decision making but wasn't. I therefore started looking for areas in which the actuaries were encouraged to have much greater balance sheet impact.
Combining this with my growing interest in finance, pushed me to move into insurance/wealth management strategy consulting position where I could grow my commercial capabilities in a challenging environment and balance my analytical skills.

Key Commercial skills Gained?

• I got to contribute to many market sizing, market entry and distribution strategy projects: consistently considering factors such as: how large is the market under consideration, is it growing, is there differentiation in customer characteristics, can the market be segmented, how heavily is it contested, who are the biggest competitors and how integrated are their supply chains, what level of economics are they able to achieve, and much more.
• All key aspects and considerations for running a business or deploying new products that one would not get exposure to in an actuarial function. This experience I beleive has really balanced out my analytic capability to make me an all round commerical asset.
• I also got the oppurtunity to project management large insights research projects and interview a considerable amount of key decision makers, in the UK and abroad, across life insurers, wealth managers and intermediaries for both group B2B and B2C business across insurance/reinsurance and wealth managent topics. This has provided me with a great perspective in customer psychology and understanding of what drives customer behaviour in B2B and B2C business.