25 min

Ep.44 - A non-traditional actuarial career and recognising the intricacies of diversity, Neha Agarwal, iPipeline The Risky Mix Podcast

    • Careers

The Key Learning Points:
1. That focusing more on your competence and less on the things that make you a minority can really help with self-belief and confidence when navigating non-inclusive environments
2. The importance of finding passion in your professional life to pull you through the inevitable ups and downs
3. How technology could have the power to transform life insurance sales - but it’s all about balance
Joining us on this week's remote Risky Mix podcast, is Neha Agarwal, head of actuarial at iPipeline - a business on a mission to grow the UK protection insurance market through innovative technology. Neha is here to share her career story, her experience as a young Indian woman in the sector and her thoughts on how technology has the power to transform life insurance sales.
Neha joined iPipeline six years ago as an analyst. She’s progressed in her career and is now head of actuarial, managing an actuarial services team and helping to drive actuarial innovation within insurance companies in the UK and US. iPipeline helped Neha to realise her passion for technology and actuarial work. She tells us a bit more about iPipeline, a business which she believes is “at the forefront of digital transformation”, processing 30% of the UK’s protection business, through the ‘SSG Digital Platform’, alone, which, to date, equates to 3.5m policies.
Neha’s belief is that “technology is reinventing the life insurance industry” and from her perspective, the current COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in two outcomes for insurers when it comes to digital transformation. There are those companies who have already invested in digital which have been able to react very quickly in terms of reprices and changes to the underwriting rules. Then there are other companies, for which the pandemic has been a “wakeup call”, and there is now much urgency to innovate. When it comes to the role of technology in the protection insurance space, for Neha “it comes back to the right balance.” Neha believes that everybody has different needs, so an automated process which delivers the same journey for every individual won’t work. We can add human interaction where it’s required “but we have to automate the processes which cause unnecessary delays.”
Being a young Indian woman in both the actuarial and tech space, we were keen to hear about Neha’s experience. She explains that she has never faced any challenges around her race, because her role involves working with colleagues from across the globe, including China, India, Sri Lanka and Romania. She admits, though, that she did face some difficulty as a woman:  “I was doing very well from the very start of my career, but that also meant that I had to be in meetings that had a predominantly male audience.” She explains that meetings which took place early on in her career were difficult: “I remember walking out of meetings without even saying a single word!” But Neha decided to run a “series of experiments”, where she would try being a little more assertive and confident: “I started considering myself as not a female among the males, but I started thinking of myself as a confident individual who knew what she was saying."
Neha quotes iPipeline’s gender mix statistics, a business with women in over a third of senior management roles, with different splits across the two offices:  “We are on a journey and I see iPipeline, as a business, achieving gender diversity.”
We end the episode by asking Neha for the key message she’d like Risky Mix listeners to take away: “Life will give you ups and downs. But something that can keep you going is your passion. So always search for your passion and your life journey becomes really easy.” For Neha, that passion is “helping insurers move up the ladder of technological innovation.”

The Key Learning Points:
1. That focusing more on your competence and less on the things that make you a minority can really help with self-belief and confidence when navigating non-inclusive environments
2. The importance of finding passion in your professional life to pull you through the inevitable ups and downs
3. How technology could have the power to transform life insurance sales - but it’s all about balance
Joining us on this week's remote Risky Mix podcast, is Neha Agarwal, head of actuarial at iPipeline - a business on a mission to grow the UK protection insurance market through innovative technology. Neha is here to share her career story, her experience as a young Indian woman in the sector and her thoughts on how technology has the power to transform life insurance sales.
Neha joined iPipeline six years ago as an analyst. She’s progressed in her career and is now head of actuarial, managing an actuarial services team and helping to drive actuarial innovation within insurance companies in the UK and US. iPipeline helped Neha to realise her passion for technology and actuarial work. She tells us a bit more about iPipeline, a business which she believes is “at the forefront of digital transformation”, processing 30% of the UK’s protection business, through the ‘SSG Digital Platform’, alone, which, to date, equates to 3.5m policies.
Neha’s belief is that “technology is reinventing the life insurance industry” and from her perspective, the current COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in two outcomes for insurers when it comes to digital transformation. There are those companies who have already invested in digital which have been able to react very quickly in terms of reprices and changes to the underwriting rules. Then there are other companies, for which the pandemic has been a “wakeup call”, and there is now much urgency to innovate. When it comes to the role of technology in the protection insurance space, for Neha “it comes back to the right balance.” Neha believes that everybody has different needs, so an automated process which delivers the same journey for every individual won’t work. We can add human interaction where it’s required “but we have to automate the processes which cause unnecessary delays.”
Being a young Indian woman in both the actuarial and tech space, we were keen to hear about Neha’s experience. She explains that she has never faced any challenges around her race, because her role involves working with colleagues from across the globe, including China, India, Sri Lanka and Romania. She admits, though, that she did face some difficulty as a woman:  “I was doing very well from the very start of my career, but that also meant that I had to be in meetings that had a predominantly male audience.” She explains that meetings which took place early on in her career were difficult: “I remember walking out of meetings without even saying a single word!” But Neha decided to run a “series of experiments”, where she would try being a little more assertive and confident: “I started considering myself as not a female among the males, but I started thinking of myself as a confident individual who knew what she was saying."
Neha quotes iPipeline’s gender mix statistics, a business with women in over a third of senior management roles, with different splits across the two offices:  “We are on a journey and I see iPipeline, as a business, achieving gender diversity.”
We end the episode by asking Neha for the key message she’d like Risky Mix listeners to take away: “Life will give you ups and downs. But something that can keep you going is your passion. So always search for your passion and your life journey becomes really easy.” For Neha, that passion is “helping insurers move up the ladder of technological innovation.”

25 min