We Are Actuaries

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Win-Li Toh is a principal at actuarial and analytics consultancy Taylor Fry, and Senior Vice President of the Actuaries Institute of Australia. From her childhood in a small mining town in Malaysia to an international career spanning more than 25 years, Win-Li’s diverse experiences have indelibly shaped her approach to life and work.

With a strong focus on collaboration, fresh perspectives in problem solving and advocacy for young people, Win-Li is a guiding force in the insurance industry. She brings deep understanding as a trusted advisor to self-insurers as well as publicly underwritten schemes, Appointed Actuary to several Australian and New Zealand insurers, and mentor to many.

Win-Li was named 2023 Insurance Leader of the Year, and is regularly approached for her commentary on critical issues affecting insurers and the community, including customer fairness, affordability and cyber vulnerabilities. She was lead author on the Actuaries Institute cyber green paper, exploring the challenges and opportunities for decision-makers in creating a vibrant, sustainable cyber insurance market.

She believes finding common purpose is key, and that actuaries are uniquely placed to bring multiple voices together to give clear insight into the shades of grey in situations towards finding pragmatic, workable solutions.
In this interview, Win-Li shares:

• Insights from living, studying and working across different cultures,
• How both culture and curriculum impact maths ability,
• What speaking several languages has taught her about communication, and
• Why enjoying the journey, in your actuarial career and in life, is so important.

Connect with Win-Li on LinkedIn.

We are featured in the Top 15 Actuary Podcasts here on Feedspot.
Thank you for listening to the We Are Actuaries podcast. Connect with Julia and Guardian Actuarial on LinkedIn. For more interviews and articles, visit our website.

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Daphna Horowitz is a qualified actuary currently based in Israel. But these days you won’t find Daphna calculating insurance premiums or reserves – she is a Master Certified Coach who helps high-performing CEOs to up their game in business and become confident, inspiring leaders. Daphna works with leaders and teams across the globe to transform leadership effectiveness and workplace culture by digging deep into leadership habits of self-awareness, leading people, purpose, strategy, leading change and enabling extraordinary leadership in themselves and their teams.

She’s worked across Africa, Europe, China and India, with large organisations such as Barclays Bank and Coca-Cola.

Before establishing her coaching career, Daphna worked in insurance and consulting, quickly rising to Director level. She held the position of Lecturer at the two largest universities in Johannesburg while managing her own actuarial consulting company and corporate event management company.

Daphna hosts the Leadership Live podcast and is a published author of Courage to Lead: Leadership Lessons from Kilimanjaro and Weekly Habits for Extraordinary Leaders.

In this interview, Daphna shares:

• How she helps actuaries make the transition to the C-suite,
• Common challenges she sees actuaries making as they transition to the C-suite,
• What a CEO coaching session looks like and how it typically works, and
• Her top tip for actuaries aspiring to C-suite roles.

Learn more about Daphna and her work here.

Connect with Daphna on LinkedIn.

Read Daphna’s books: “Weekly Habits for Extraordinary Leaders” “Courage to Lead: Leadership Lessons from Kilimanjaro”

Read “What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful” by Marshall Goldsmith.

We are featured in the Top 15 Actuary Podcasts here on Feedspot.
Thank you for listening to the We Are Actuaries podcast. Connect with Julia and Guardian Actuarial on LinkedIn. For more interviews and articles, visit our website.

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David is the Scheme Actuary for the NDIS. He has worked for nearly thirty years across social insurance, general insurance and government in both consulting and organisational roles. David was previously Chief Strategy Officer and Chief Risk Officer at the Transport Accident Commission, and held consulting roles for more than fifteen years, at PwC and most recently Quantium.

David has a Bachelor of Economics and an MBA from Melbourne Business School and is currently undertaking a Master of Public Health at Melbourne University.

In this interview, David shares his reflections about:

• What it’s like being the Scheme Actuary for the NDIS,
• The kind of work that the large team of actuaries and data scientists do for the NDIS,
• What he finds interesting and challenging about his role, and
• How actuaries from all professional backgrounds can carve themselves a career path in social services.

We are featured in the Top 15 Actuary Podcasts here on Feedspot.
Thank you for listening to the We Are Actuaries podcast. Connect with Julia and Guardian Actuarial on LinkedIn. For more interviews and articles, visit our website.

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Daniel Stone is a qualified actuary and data scientist with 20 years of experience in a wide range of fields including varied-sized life offices, reinsurance, consulting and expert-level model building experience. He has worked in Australia, South Africa, United Kingdom and ASEAN.

His recent experience is in applying big data and cloud technologies, data engineering automation and the application of statistical and data science techniques in life insurance and actuarial pricing.

In his spare time he enjoys spending time at the beach with his family and making a deep run in poker tournaments.

In this interview I asked Daniel:

1. How he became on of the first life insurance actuaries in Australia who adopted data science into their roles,
2. His advice to experienced actuaries that are wondering if it’s “too late” to learn data science and apply it to their roles,
3. How he defines good leadership,
4. How he balances the need to deliver without overloading team members,
5. What skills he looks for when hiring in his teams,
6. How he sees the competitive landscape between actuaries, data scientists and other data analytics professionals, and
7. His top tip for actuaries wanting to improve their skills in data science.

Connect with Daniel on LinkedIn.

In the episode, Daniel mentions: Darren Wickham, Francis Burgess and Andrew Yin.

Daniel referred to a range of learning options for actuaries wanting to build their data science skills, including:

• High level knowledge: Datacamp R, Python, SQL and Pluralsight
• Data Science specialisation: Udacity
• Most major universities: masters courses
• Cloud & Big Data: Microsoft Azure Fundamentals, Microsoft Azure AI Fundamentals and Databricks

We are featured in the Top 15 Actuary Podcasts here on Feedspot.
Thank you for listening to the We Are Actuaries podcast. Connect with Julia and Guardian Actuarial on LinkedIn. For more interviews and articles, visit our website.

Tell us what you thought of this episode!

Ryan is a career associate actuary with the Institute of Actuaries in Australia. Originally from South Africa with 8 years of consulting experience there including being a manager at Deloitte, he then became the Head of Corporate Actuarial for the APAC region at Allianz Partners based in Brisbane for the next 3.5 years. He is now the Head of Product & Underwriting for the Health Line of Business at the same company.
In addition to his actuarial career he is a former TEDx speaker, United Nations Ambassador, Regional Manager of CSR at Deloitte South Africa and has 17 years of presenting experience across multiple topics. Finally Ryan is happily married to his beautiful wife Teri, heavily involved at his Church and enjoys supporting Australian rugby and cricket whenever possible.

In this interview I ask Ryan about:

1. His career path to date and what you enjoy most about his current role,
2. What he thinks actuaries should consider when deciding which qualification pathway to take,
3. How he became an accomplished presenter, having even stood on the TEDx stage, and how this has helped his career,
4. His top tip for actuaries stepping into their first management roles.

We are featured in the Top 15 Actuary Podcasts here on Feedspot.
Thank you for listening to the We Are Actuaries podcast. Connect with Julia and Guardian Actuarial on LinkedIn. For more interviews and articles, visit our website.