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Matthew Adendorff
Matthew is a Partner within the Monitor Deloitte Strategy practice and leads the Australian Innovation and Ventures practice. With a strong focus on the insurance sector, Matthew brings expertise in Corporate Innovation, Growth Strategy, and New Venture creation. As a seasoned entrepreneur, he has successfully established and grown two companies, including Fusion Labs, which was later acquired by Deloitte. Matthew’s entrepreneurial background, coupled with extensive commercial experience, equips him with the unique ability to address intricate business challenges faced by his clients in the insurance industry. He excels in driving business transformations, devising innovative products and services, and crafting growth strategies. Matthew is frequently sought after by large corporations seeking assistance in (1) structuring and cultivating capabilities for strategic innovation, and (2) identifying and spearheading high-impact venture opportunities within the insurance realm.
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Amanda Aitken
Amanda is a member of the Institute’s Actuarial Education team. She brings her passion for teaching and years of actuarial experience to this role, which is focused on delivering high-quality Actuary and Fellowship Program subjects. Amanda is currently the Chief Examiner of the Data Science Applications subject. She is a member of the Data Science Practice Committee and the Data Science Education Faculty.
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Michele Armstrong
Michele Armstrong is an extroverted actuary at MNC Actuaries with a demonstrated ability to manage people, projects and resources gained from extensive experience over the past 30+ years with top tiered global financial services institutions.
Michele is passionate about the retirement income space, with several years’ experience of product development and pricing of retirement income solutions (retail & group) and longevity modelling.
During her role as Senior Product Actuary at TAL, she developed end to end retirement income product solutions for 5 of TAL's largest clients with an estimated premium of $500M.
Previously she spent many years in the UK pensions consulting market, and was responsible for analysing, structuring, and pricing complex longevity and investment risks, developing strategies for risk transfer and working on UK pension valuation, reporting and project management for a large number of FTSE100 companies.
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Anthony Asher
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Tim Barron
Tim is an actuarial consultant in the Investment and Superannuation Advisory team at Deloitte. He has been involved in a number of projects looking at the evolution and opportunities for equity release products in Australia to address the challenges facing current and future retirees.
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Hazel Bateman
Hazel Bateman is a Professor in the School of Risk & Actuarial Studies, UNSW Sydney, and Deputy Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Population Ageing Research (CEPAR). Hazel’s research focusses on consumer financial decision making especially as it relates to retirement accumulation and decumulation with an emphasis on interventions to facilitate better financial decisions. She also works on design of and demand for retirement products including annuities, aged care insurance and home equity release products.
Hazel has consulted on retirement income issues to international organisations including the OECD and the World Bank. She is the Chair of Netspar’s Scientific Council and President of the International Pension Research Association (IPRA) and serves on the UniSuper Consultative Committee and the Advisory Boards of the Mercer CFA Institute Global Pension Index, the Conexus Institute and the Centre for Behavioural Economics, Science and Technology (BEST).
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David Bell
David Bell is the executive director of The Conexus Institute and an active researcher (industry and academic) in the areas of retirement, superannuation, investment management and governance. David’s industry career experiences include the role of CIO at Mine Super, founder and director of his own consulting firm (St Davids Rd Advisory) and 12 years at CFS GAM (now First Sentier), mainly leading the fund-of-hedge funds investment team. David was a co-founder of financial newsletter Cuffelinks (now Firstlinks), and developed and taught the hedge funds elective at Macquarie University’s Applied Finance Centre. David completed his PhD at UNSW, with a focus on asset allocation problems related to lifecycle modelling.
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Iain Bulcraig
Iain Bulcraig is Chief Risk Officer at SCOR Australia having previously had a 2 year secondment in Paris within SCOR reinsurance, supporting its IFRS 17 implementation. In total, Iain has over 25 years of life insurance experience across consulting, insurance and reinsurance firms, both in Australia and his native Scotland. Until his European secondment, Iain was the CFO for SCOR Australia/NZ and been involved in Institute committees for many years.
Iain also focuses strongly on people-initiatives, especially mentoring of other actuaries and he is a qualified Ethics teacher, bringing this learning to primary school children each week.
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Adam Butler
Adam is an Actuarial Manager at HBF Health who brings passion, enthusiasm, curiosity and a jovial nature to his role in managing the Underwriting Forecast. <br bcx8"=""> <br bcx8"="">With prior experience in non-Actuarial Management Consulting, Adam regularly leverages his technical understanding and skillset of stakeholder management to consult many arms of the business and lead discussions to understand the many sources of uncertainty and work to solve problems for the business.
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Dr Simon Bradshaw
Dr Simon Bradshaw is Research Director at the Climate Council. Simon has spent two decades researching climate impacts and solutions in Australia, the Pacific, and South Asia, previously with Oxfam and the Australian Conservation Foundation. He is a prolific commentator on climate issues and has authored numerous influential research reports.
Simon is passionate about climate justice and the role of climate action in reducing poverty and inequality. His research with the Climate Council covers extreme weather, bushfires, health, security and many other areas of climate science and impacts.
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Tiberio Caetano
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Michael Callan
Mike is an Executive at the Actuaries Institute, leading the organisation’s Education function covering both pre-qualification subjects and CPD .
He holds 18 years’ industry experience working overseas in areas such as product development, statutory valuations, risk management, and embedded value. Mike was previously a Head of Actuarial with 30 reports, including two Appointed Actuaries. In 2014 he left an Australian Big4 consultancy to join Monash University where he set up their Part 2 Program.
Mike joined the Actuaries Institute in 2018 and has successfully launched the new Education Program. Mike's responsibility expanded in 2023 to include CPD.
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Luke Cassar
Luke Cassar is a Senior Consultant at Finity Consulting with over 13 years of experience in the General Insurance and Health Insurance industries. He is an Appointed Actuary for private health insurers with expertise in investments, capital modelling and consumer analytics. He has an interest in how survey data can be used to better understand consumer attitudes towards insurance, affordability issues and health.
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Roger Chan
Roger Chan is Willis Towers Watson’s Regional Technology Engagement Leader in APAC. Roger started with WTW’s software business in Sydney in 2002 and relocated to Hong Kong in 2011. Roger has extensive experience working with clients in Asia Pacific and Europe on financial modelling end-to-end business process automation and transformation.
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Kieran Chu
Kieran Chu is an Associate in Mercer’s Investments business, based in Sydney. Kieran provides investment and strategic advice to superannuation clients including advice on asset allocation, investment governance, superannuation product design and retirement strategy.
Prior to joining Mercer in January 2020, Kieran gained two years of experience in the investment management and superannuation area, including working at Pitt Capital Partners where he assisted with investment research and valuation of investment opportunities.
Kieran holds a Bachelor of Actuarial Studies and Bachelor of Commerce (Finance) from the University of New South Wales. He is a holder of the right to use the Chartered Financial Analyst designation, and is currently pursuing actuarial qualifications with the Institute of Actuaries of Australia.
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Antony Claughton
Antony is an actuary with over twenty years of experience currently working at Finity Consulting. One of Finity’s primary AASB 17 subject matter experts he has been providing GI and PHI clients advice on the standard since 2017.
He is the Appointed Actuary for HCi and works on the client teams for a number of other health funds. A member of the Actuaries Institute AASB17 taskforce since inception in 2016, Antony also sits on the AASB PHI Focus group for AASB17 and has presented to the AASB 17 Transition Resource Group.
Finity currently provides Appointed Actuarial services to 30 of Australia’s 35 private health insurers. As Finity’s PHI AASB 17 expert Antony has helped many of them with their AASB 17 implementation journey, from initial gap analyses to filling out APRA forms. Casual conversations helping explain processes to giving training to boards on the new standard. In this process Antony has worked closely with finance teams, actuarial teams and the industry’s various auditors.
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Antonie Jagga
Antonie is a Partner in PwC Australia and leads the Risk Data Analytics & Actuarial team. He is a Fellow of the Faculty of Actuaries (FFA, UK), and has significant experience in insurance, banking, financial risk modelling, and predictive modelling. Prior to moving to Australia, Antonie was based in Singapore and led PwC's actuarial practice across Southeast Asia.
In his role as a Partner, Antonie has led a number of engagements covering insurance and actuarial topics such as reserving and capital management, portfolio strategy and stress testing. He is also assisting a number of insurers in implementing IFRS 17, quantifying their Insurance Associate Emissions and formulating Net Zero transition approaches. Antonie also has extensive experience in Expected Credit Loss modelling (IFRS 9), Basel Capital Model Build and Validation, and US CCAR Model Validation.
He was previously an examiner for the Actuarial Society of South Africa (Banking Principles and Banking Application), has four children, and enjoys weekends outdoors with family and friends.
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Damien Clifford
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Jonathan Cohen
Jonathan is a Principal at Taylor Fry, where he leads advanced analytics engagements across insurance, corporate and government clients.
Jonathan’s work requires broad stakeholder engagement, from talking code with data scientists to strategy with senior executives. By translating between these diverse groups, he assists industry leaders to make informed decisions and drive operational improvements. Jonathan's engagements span strategic analytics advice through to the design and prototyping of custom machine learning and AI frameworks.
Jonathan supports his insurance clients across pricing, claims, fraud, marketing and customer use cases. His broader engagements include digital health, customer loyalty and marketing personalisation.
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Elaine Collins
Elaine is a Non-Executive Director, having been on the Zurich Insurance Board for ten years and is currently on the Boards of RACV, ANZLMI, ARPC and Ivory Insurance. She has chaired Board Committees since 2015, including Risk, Audit and Pricing. Concurrently, she has an academic role as a Professor of Practice in Risk & Actuarial with the UNSW Business School, enhancing linkages between the university and industry. Elaine has 25+ years’ insurance industry experience with expertise in capital efficiency, strategic risk and effective governance. Previously, Elaine spent over ten years in Appointed Actuary roles, firstly with KPMG, then as Partner of Deloitte. She served on several Institute Committees, including the GIPC and the Professional Practice Committee. Elaine is committed to contributing to the Institute's strategic priorities, particularly our members’ unique skills in deriving key insights for business and the community from data analytics.
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Briallen Cummings
Briallen is partner in KPMG’s Financial Risk & Analytics business practice and has over 20 years of experience in life insurance across corporate and consulting across Australia, New Zealand and the UK
She has spent much of her career understanding, analysing and benchmarking the fundamental drivers of the insurers’ value, such as claims, lapses, capital and distribution and she has a strong understanding of the direct and retail risk insurance market.
Briallen is a regular presenter at conferences and has written a number of papers on capital, experience investigations, underinsurance within the Australian market and most recently IFRS 17.
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Andrew Cunanan
APRA is Australia’s prudential supervisor, responsible for ensuring that our financial system is stable, competitive and efficient.
Andrew qualified as a Fellow in 2005. His roles at APRA have been to provide strategic insights and investment governance advice to a range of stakeholders. His career spans more than 20 years providing investment consulting and investment management of unlisted assets to superannuation funds.
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Jenny Davis
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Chris Dolman
Chris Dolman is working to ensure that AI and other data-driven decisions operate responsibly, thoughtfully and ethically. In recent years he has focussed on building these capabilities at IAG, after a varied career across industry and consulting, in Australia and the UK. He publishes and speaks regularly, both individually and in collaboration with some of the leading thinkers in Australia. He is an active member of the Actuaries Institute’s General Insurance and Data Science Practice Committees, is a Gradient Institute Fellow, and was the 2022 Actuary of the Year.
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Richard Dunn
Richard Dunn is a Principal in Mercer’s Investments business, based in Sydney. Richard works with clients across the superannuation industry and the endowments and foundations client base to provide insights on policy developments and deliver consulting advice across investment and actuarial matters. Richard brings a strong skill set in developing investment and business strategies which are tailored to the individual needs of clients. Prior to joining Mercer in September 2022, Richard worked for Deloitte following its acquisition of Rice Warner where he had worked for seven years leading strategy and research projects across the Australian financial services landscape. For this work Richard was awarded several prizes including the Melville Prize and the Andrew Prescott Prize. Beyond his role with Mercer, Richard leads the Investment Management and Finance and Education Faculty at the Actuaries Institute which is responsible for educating the next generation of investment actuaries. Richard holds a combined Bachelor of Commerce and Bachelor of Science (Advanced Mathematics) (Honours) from the University of New South Wales. He is a Fellow of the Actuaries Institute of Australia.
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.tmb-thumbnail.jpg?sfvrsn=3ca1bdf4_1 "Lenita Elvina") |
Lenita Elvina
Lenita Elvina works as a pricing analyst in the Technical division at Allianz Australia. She is currently still progressing towards her actuarial qualifications after having graduated her Bachelor of Actuarial Science from Monash University with the Dean's Honour Roll.
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John Evans
John Evans is the founder of JE Advisory Pty Ltd, an independent risk management consultancy, which provides risk advisory services and training to the financial and broader corporate sectors. His key areas of expertise include enterprise risk management frameworks, strategic risk and balance sheet management, which he now applies in advising organisations on how to address the risks posed by climate and sustainability related change.
Prior to this John was Head of Enterprise Risk and Capital Advisory at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia for more than ten years, having transitioned into banking from the UK Life Insurance industry. John has served on the Actuaries Institute’s Climate Risk Working Group, Education Committee and Risk Management Practice Committee.
John is a Fellow of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (UK), a Chartered Enterprise Risk Actuary and is holds a Sustainability and Climate Risk certification from the Global Association of Risk Professionals (GARP).
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Kirsten Flynn
Kirsten is a Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries Australia and has more than 10 years’ experience in Australia and the USA, both in corporate and consulting environments, and across life insurance, general insurance, health insurance, superannuation, and banking. As Senior Pricing Actuary, Kirsten is responsible for leading pricing efforts for both individual and group life reinsurance business of a dedicated set of RGA Australia clients. In addition, she is involved in product design and terms, client and internal communications, and market research and development.
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.tmb-thumbnail.jpg?sfvrsn=da6bbcf4_1 "Alan Greenfield") |
Alan Greenfield
Alan is a Principal and co-founder of Taylor Fry, helping to establish the actuarial business, its expansion into analytics, and initiating the company’s position on sustainability. Over the past 15 years, he has worked mainly with government clients in the social and environment sectors. In 2015, Alan was awarded Actuary of the Year by the Actuaries Institute for his contribution in developing the investment approach to public policy making. He now leads Taylor Fry’s climate and sustainability practice, and is a member of the Actuaries Institute Climate and Sustainability Working Group.
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Jules Gribble
Jules has established interests in pension and retirement income products and capacity building for both actuaries and supervisors. He has over 30 years of consulting experience. Since 2019 Jules has been a Principal with PFS Consulting, and is also a Director of Lifetime Income. Previously he was a Senior Policy Advisor with the IAIS and established several successful actuarial consulting companies before that.
Jules has expertise with governance, operational risk, unit pricing primarily in pensions, and retirement products and approaches.
For over 20 years, he has also been involved with capacity building for the actuarial profession, through teaching, course development, and championing CPD. He has also led many training programs for supervisors to support them with utilising actuarial inputs.
Jules is a fully qualified actuary (FIAA Australia for over 25 years), a CERA, a Graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors (GAICD), and received his PhD from St Andrews University in 1980.
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Jess Hamby
Jess is an actuarial manager at Deloitte and a counsellor-in-training. She is passionate about improving the insurance industry and compensation landscape for those suffering from illness and injury, particularly related to their mental health. She specialises in workers’ compensation liabilities and deep claims experience and process analysis.
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Welly Han
Welly is a general insurance actuary who specialises in pricing, valuations and capital management. He is part of Deloitte's Actuarial & Insurance Solutions unit helping general insurers navigate through ASIC pricing practices reviews in Australia.
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Dr Katja Hanewald
Dr Katja Hanewald is an Associate Professor in the School of Risk and Actuarial Studies, an Associate Investigator at the ARC Centre of Excellence in Population Ageing Research (CEPAR) and the Director of Research at CEPAR’s Ageing Asia Research Hub. She is also a member of the Executive Committee of the Asia-Pacific Risk and Insurance Association (APRIA). Her research models longevity and healthy ageing trends and develops risk management and insurance responses to population ageing. She has published 30 peer-reviewed articles in major insurance, actuarial, economics, and medical journals and is a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Pension Economics and Finance, the Risk Management and Insurance Review, and the Journal of Retirement.
Katja's current research interests include insurance economics, actuarial studies, longevity trends, healthy ageing and long-term care trends, the design of public and private insurance programs to manage retirement risks, housing wealth as a source of retirement funding, and behavioural aspects of financial planning.
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Rhoda Harrington
Rhoda is a consulting actuary at MNC Actuaries with 25 years of experience which spans life insurance, superannuation and general insurance, with the last 18 years working in life insurance pricing and product roles. Rhoda has worked in many teams and built strong and lasting relationships with both actuarial and non- actuarial stakeholders. She brings actuarial and product experience from several Australian market sectors including Group Risk, Retail Advice & Direct.
During her actuarial career in the UK, she spent 10 years in motor insurance reserving, pensions transfer review, bank assurance pricing and annuities valuation.
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Cary Helenius
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James Hickey
James is the practice leader of Deloitte's Australian actuarial practice. He advises clients across the financial services sector, including insurers, banks, non-banks, wealth managers and public sector agencies.
He has been actively involved in the equity release sector as an area of specialist interest for over 20 years, assisting many of the non-bank lenders in entering the market in the early 2000s. He has stayed involved with providers ever since, including in more recent times advising governments and regulators on the potential for the product and overseas potential market entrants and investors.
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Giles Hooker
Giles Hooker is Professor of Statistics and Data Science at the University of Pennsylvania. His work has focussed on statistical methods using dynamical systems models, inference with machine learning models, functional data analysis and robust statistics. He is the author of "Dynamic Data Analysis: Modeling Data with Differential Equations" and "Functional Data Analysis in R and Matlab". Much of his work has been inspired by collaborations particularly in ecology, human movement, and citizen science data.
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Didier How Yin Fat
Didier is a Senior Pricing Manager at Zurich with a decade of experience in Group Insurance. He spearheads a dynamic team of pricing professionals and takes the lead on delivering innovative and contemporary client solutions to Zurich's insurance partners. His responsibilities extend to overseeing the pricing for group insurance new business tenders and leading the insurance reviews and profitability update projects of existing mandates.
Prior to his tenure at Zurich, Didier held the role of Pricing Actuary at TAL where he honed his specialization in Group Insurance and prior to that, a Senior Associate at Mercer, providing consulting services to superannuation funds, successfully advocating on their behalf to obtain outcomes that are in the best interests of members.
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Dr. Fei Huang
Dr. Fei Huang is a Senior Lecturer in Risk and Actuarial Studies, Lead-Data and AI Tech of UNSW Business AI Lab, and an investigator of the IRIS Knowlege Hub. Fei's research focuses on the explanation and fairness of insurance pricing using statistical machine learning methods. Fei's research focuses on Ethical AI (and non-AI) and Data Science for Insurance. In particular, she studies insurance discrimination, pricing fairness, and interpretation tools for machine learning. She also develops statistical and machine learning methods for various actuarial applications. She received the Carol Dolan Actuaries Summit Prize and ASTIN Colloquium Best Paper Award for her research on anti-discrimination insurance pricing in 2022 (with Xi Xin). She was a recipient of the Actuaries Institute's 2023 Volunteer of the Year Award. She also received the UNSW Business School SDG Research Impact Award in 2023.
Fei teaches actuarial data science and statistical machine learning at UNSW. By collaborating with industry partners, she incorporates contemporary industry challenges into the course syllabus to offer a unique industry-engaging experience for students via Sandbox Projects. Her educational excellence has been recognized by winning the UNSW John Prescott Award for Outstanding Teaching Innovation (2022), ANU Vice Chancellor’s Award for Teaching Excellence in the Early Career Category (2018), and ANU College of Business and Economics Award for Teaching Excellence in the Early Career Category (2017). Fei is a Senior Fellow of Advance HE (SFHEA).
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Trevor Jack
Trevor is a part time self employed actuary who spends more time sailing and developing sailing technology than being an actuary. He retains an interest in technical actuarial work. Much of his work for some decades has involved long tail reserving.
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Bo Jiang
Bo joined Swiss Re in 2023 as Head of Public Sector Solutions for the ANZ market. He has over 15 years of experience working in the reinsurance industry across underwriting, broking, and analytics, servicing clients from Australia, New Zealand, South East Asia and Greater China.
Bo is a Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries of Australia and a Fellow of ANZIIF. He has a Master of Commerce degree in Actuarial Studies from Macquarie University and an MBA (Executive) from the Australian Graduate School of Management, UNSW.
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Sathish Kanniappan
Sathish is a general insurance actuary who specialises in pricing, data analytics and risk management. He is part of Deloitte's Actuarial & Insurance Solutions unit helping general insurers navigate through ASIC pricing practices reviews in Australia.
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Nicole Kriek
Nicole Kriek is a qualified actuary and has 12 years of experience working both in industry and in consulting. Nicole has experience across a range of areas including valuations, product development, pricing, risk management and financial modelling within various practice areas including Life-, Health- and General insurance.
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Nina Larkin
Nina is a PwC Actuarial Partner with over 20 years of experience in the financial services industry across Australia, NZ, UK and Europe.
She is currently the lead PwC Actuarial Partner for external audits of credit risk provisions across the sector.
In addition, Nina supports her clients across a range of financial (credit, liquidity, stress testing) and non-financial (product, system) risks.
She is passionate about deploying Actuarial capability in new and emerging areas (e.g. climate risk, generative AI, financial crime).
Nina graduated from the University of New South Wales and is a Fellow of the Actuaries Institute. Proud mum to three young children.
Nina has a passion for people and leadership development - she believes working with a growth mindset helps build resilience which has both personal and professional benefits.
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Seth Lazar
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Maggie Lee
Maggie Lee is an Actuary and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Actuarial Studies and Business Analytics at Macquarie University. She has over 10 years of experience in both traditional and non-traditional areas of actuarial practice through industry and academic roles. Her research interests are in health and health policy. As part of her research, she has been recently working with the Australian Department of Health and Aged Care to investigate the health and social outcomes of individuals living with co-morbid mental and physical health conditions.
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Julia Lessing
Julia is a qualified actuary, certified coach and the Director of Guardian Actuarial. She is leading a mission to foster forward-thinking leaders in the actuarial industry and runs the Guardian Actuarial Leadership Program to help actuaries build their communication, management and leadership skills.
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Dr Han Li
Dr Han Li is an Associate Professor at the Department of Economics, the University of Melbourne. She is an Associate of the Institute of Actuaries of Australia, and has a broad range of research interests around longevity and mortality risks, ageing and retirement, and the impact of climate change on insurance industry. She has been an active member of the COVID-19 Mortality Working Group and the Long COVID Working Group.
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Estelle Liu
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Bob Rick Looi
Bob Rick Looi is a Data Scientist at MNC Actuaries. He has developed extensive data science experience over the last 5 years helping life insurance actuaries to build and maintain complex pipelines for data validation, financial modelling, and insights analysis.
He is experienced at the implementation of R models in building pricing pipelines for insurance in superannuation.He has an entrepreneurial nature and a unique background from previously being a trader for a proprietary cryptocurrency trading firm and working for a government market research firm.
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Brad Louis
Brad Louis is the Chief Commercial Officer at MRA, a position that he has held since January 2017. Brad joined Munich Re in 2014 as the Head of Pricing.
Prior to this, Brad’s Actuarial qualifications have seen him engaged in a range of industry roles across wealth management, encompassing pricing, valuation, strategy and planning, management reporting and financial control.
Brad has been a member of the Actuaries Institute Taskforce since inception and is currently leading its TPD and Trauma Working Group.
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Lawrence Lu
Lawrence is a Senior Pricing Manager at Zurich and is responsible for providing pricing insights, product design and market research for group clients. In addition, he has experience in a wide range of projects expanding across capital optimisation, P&L and risk management. Lawrence is a Fellow of the Actuaries Institute and has nearly a decade of experience both in corporate and consulting environments, across life insurance and defined benefit schemes. Prior to joining Zurich, Lawrence was a New Business Development Manager at TAL.
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James Ma
James qualified as a Fellow in 2021. His role at APRA has been to provide strategic insights to a range of stakeholders. His career spans more than 7 years providing actuarial and investment consulting advice to a range of institutional investors.
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Niro Maheswaran
Niro is a consultant at Finity with over 10 years of actuarial experience in various regulatory, prudential, and data analytical roles. Her passion lies in enhancing the sustainability, efficiency and effectiveness of Australia's health landscape, particularly within the domains of private health insurance, aged care, and public policy.
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Stephan Marais
Stephan is experienced in designing and implementing technology solutions for actuarial teams to achieve end-to-end automation. He is a Senior Manager at Dynamo Analytics South Africa and leads the actuarial software team working on the Actuarial and Financial modelling platform, Psicle, used by insurers in various markets around the world.
His current focus is to automate and improve reserving processes, but he is also working on applying general learnings from process automation to the life insurance valuation, health insurance and banking sectors.
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Mark McClenehan
Mark is Swiss Re's Head of Life & Health for New Zealand and Head of Product & Pricing across Australia and New Zealand. In this role he is responsible for the end-to-end performance of the New Zealand business, including strategy, client relationships, operations, regulation, and compliance. His Product and Pricing team partner with clients on the design, pricing and profitability of the retail and group insurance product lines across Australia and New Zealand. Prior to Swiss Re, he worked across primary life insurers and in consulting.
Mark is passionate about the life industry and the critical role we play in facilitating protection across the community for life's biggest challenges.
In his spare time he enjoys time at the beach and keeping up with his family.
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Marc Mer
Marc is a Director in Deloitte’s Actuarial & Insurance Solutions practice, with nearly 15 years of experience in financial services with a focus on life insurance. In addition to his core actuarial
expertise, his experience includes buy and sell-side due diligence for life insurance transactions, strategic and actuarial advice for overseas organisations considering entering/exiting the Australian life insurance industry, Independent Expert (Part 9) work for the regulator and courts with regards to life insurance sales, managing and running the actuarial side of an annual business planning, budgeting and forecasting process for an Australian life insurer, a range of reinsurance experience, and strategy development for an insurance and automobile association group buying a mutual bank.
With a keen interest in the future of life insurance and the actuarial profession, he is a co-author of a Green Paper on “The Impact of Big Data on the Future on Insurance”, commissioned in 2016 by The Actuaries Institute.
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Alan Merten
Alan is the Lead Partner of Deloitte’s Actuarial & Insurance Solutions practice, with over 35 years’ experience in financial services corporate executive and consulting roles in Australia, Asia, and Europe. His main corporate roles have been in insurance general management, and he has covered the full value chain from customer and distribution, through to product and operations, as well as the Appointed Actuary, assurance, and other financial aspects of running businesses. Some of his experience includes Country Head and CEO position of a major Canadian multinational’s large and complex insurance business in Indonesia providing life insurance, health insurance, and wealth management products, and advising life and health insurance and reinsurance companies on market, product, and distribution strategy and business planning, M&A, product development, and pricing.
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Hugh Miller
Hugh Miller is a principal at Taylor Fry. For the past 10 years he has been applying actuarial techniques to social sector problems spanning welfare, employment, housing, disability and health. He has a strong interest in analytical techniques and has a PhD in high-deminstional statistics. Hugh is the data analytics editor for the Actuaries Digital magazine and was also 2021 Actuary of the Year.
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Kushal Mithal
Kush is a Manager at Taylor Fry, providing actuarial advice and working on analytics and predictive modelling projects for government agencies, injury and disability schemes and general insurers. His engagements include CTP pricing, workers compensation, digital health, lifetime pathway modelling, and actuarial advice to general insurers and self-insurers.
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Tom Moulder
Tom is a director in Taylor Fry’s advanced analytics team. He specialises in data analytics, predictive modelling, and optimising and evaluating interventions. He works across a range of applications, including insurance pricing, injury schemes, marketing and customer measurement, and government programs.
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Martin Mulcare
Martin loves sharing ideas in the course of his is current portfolio of activities. He plays the role of facilitator of programs for diverse clients, both regular and one-off. He acts as a business adviser to business owners who appreciate the need for external accountability. He is also a company director, including his current position of Chair of the Board of The Growth Project, with a mission to promote collaboration between business leaders and charity leaders.
In Martin’s prior corporate career path, he had more than 25 years’ experience in the financial services industry as a Fellow of the Actuaries Institute. The ten years from 1995 were focused on actuarial, financial and general management roles with Mercantile Mutual/ING and BT/Westpac. As a line manager responsible for around 150 people, Martin gained a range of valuable experiences leading the life insurance business at both of those organisations.
In the last decade he has broadened his interests and activities. He is a member of The Ethics Centre as well as the Australian Institute of Company Directors. He feels a strong sense of purpose to support those people who are effectively improving society.
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Sen Nagarajan
Sen is a Senior Consultant in Finity’s banking practice. He has worked with a range of banks and non-bank lenders supporting with credit risk modelling, capital management, model development and validation engagements.
His areas of expertise include credit risk modelling including models for advanced (IRB) capital, IFRS 9 provisioning, credit risk stress testing. He has worked extensively with Finance and Treasury in the areas of capital management plans and ICAAP, review of Treasury funding, liquidity, and interest rate risk models, and bank business planning and forecasting models. He has also carried out work in broader bank operational areas such as customer retention modelling and process improvement for credit decisioning.
Sen has worked with a number of banks including Commonwealth Bank and Teachers Mutual Bank to evaluate the impact of climate risk and understand the implications for risk at the bank.
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Dr Michael Neary
Dr Michael Neary is the Managing Director of Insurance for APJ-MEA of DXC Technology, a leading IT and services company with a large insurance specialisation. With more than 20 years’ experience in financial services, including numerous executive and board roles, he is responsible for software, claims processing and technology for the firm’s insurance clients. Michael is co-author of the Actuaries Institute Green Paper on Cyber Risk & the Role of Insurance that was published in Sept 2022.
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Eilidh Nicholson
Eilidh is the Head of Actuarial Services at HBF Health and through her slightly non-traditional career has had detours into politics and data analytics before helping to the build HBF’s first internal Actuarial team. She has recently returned from a sabbatical in London seeking exposure to new markets and lines of business.
During 10 years in private health insurance, Eilidh has been involved in pricing, reserving and strategic analysis but has spent most of her time forecasting, bringing stakeholders together from all areas and levels of the business to understand and solve problems.
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Matt Noyce
Matt is the founder and owner of MNC Actuaries, a firm of 20 Actuaries and Data Scientists and a trusted partner for insurers, reinsurers and superannuation funds.
Matt has 30 years’ experience in life insurance, reinsurance, superannuation and consulting, across Australia, New Zealand, Asia and the UK. His previous leadership roles include Chief Pricing Actuary for Swiss Re and a member of the Australian Leadership Team. Prior to that, he was the Chief Pricing Officer for CommInsure and responsible for the pricing of its Life and General Insurance products.
MNC’s client engagements include strategy, operations and data analytics in addition to more traditional actuarial projects.
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Dr Martin O'Neill
Dr Michael O'Neill is a portfolio manager of IML's All Industrials Share Fund and Equity Income Fund. Michael also oversees the Financials Sector and co-manages the large-cap research team. Michael became an equities analyst in 2008. His sector responsibilities have included banks, insurance, diversified financials, media, discretionary retail, food and beverage and information technology. Prior to his role as an equities analyst, Michael was as an Actuary with the Commonwealth Treasury. Michael holds a PhD in Finance from UQ, along with a Bachelor of Laws and Bachelor of Actuarial Studies with First Class Honours and a University Medal from ANU. Michael has been a Fellow of the Actuaries Institute since 2007 and was a Director on the Institute’s Board from 2008-2018. Michael also holds the position of Adjunct Associate Professor of Actuarial Sciences at Bond University and has published several papers in international journals.
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Christelle Oosthuizen
Christelle Oosthuizen is a consulting actuary at Insight Life Solutions. She has 5 years of experience working both in industry and in consulting. She has worked across a range of areas including valuations, risk management and modelling, and has been exposed to a wide variety of projects. She has a passion for innovation within the life insurance industry and is interested in how non-traditional rating factors can be used to make a positive impact to both insurers and the lives they protect.
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Sharanjit Paddam
Sharanjit is an Actuary with 30 years’ experience in actuarial consulting in the UK and Australia. He is a leading expert on climate change, and awarded Insurance Leader of the Year 2022 by ANZIIF for his work on championing action on climate change, Actuary of the Year 2023 by the Actuaries Institute, and Risk Manager of the Year by the Climate Alliance in 2020.
He co-leads Finity’s perils & climate practice and advises insurers, banks, investors and governments on perils and climate risk assessment, management, strategy and reporting.
In 2023 he authored a research report for the Actuaries Institute on Home Insurance Affordability, and in 2022 he gave a TEDxSydney talk on climate change and banks and insurers.
Prior to working at Finity he was Group Head of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) risk at QBE Insurance Group, where he developed QBE’s global ESG policies, risk management framework, and reporting on climate change.
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Claudia Pastellides
Claudia Pastellides is a healthcare actuary leading the population health management analytics team at Discovery Health.
After completing a Bachelor of Business Science degree in Actuarial Science at the University of Cape Town in 2017, she completed her actuarial exams and qualified as an healthcare actuary in 2021.
Claudia’s focus lies in healthcare analytics, particularly within the disease management space, where she has presented at the International Diabetes Federation on diabetes outcome-based initiatives.
Claudia is dedicated to leveraging data insights to improve healthcare outcomes and actively contributes to advancing knowledge in her areas of expertise.
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Dr Matthew Paul
Dr Matthew Paul is a specialist occupational physician, clinical epidemiologist and insurance medicine expert with over 25 years of clinical experience. He is the chief medical officer at Munich Re Australia and has broad life and non life insurance experience.
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Sath Peiris
Sath qualified as a Fellow in 2022 and is part of APRA's Super Strategic Insights team. His quantitative analysis of superannuation funds and insights inform supervisory decision making to drive improved member outcomes. His career spans 5 years providing modelling and data-driven insights in superannuation and banking.
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Minh Phan
With over 12 years of expertise in pricing and analytics, Minh is a Data Science Actuary passionately invested in learning, teaching, coding and deploying Generative AI applications on private cloud infrastructure. He currently leads the Generative AI innovation hub at Finity Consulting.
As a musician, performer and content creator (search "Actuary Savage Rap" or "Minh Phan on Catboost" on YouTube!), Minh infuses his presentation with unique flair, delivering rich technical content in an entertaining and engaging manner.
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Tatiana Potemina
Tatiana is a Senior Pricing Advisor within Suncorp's Natural Perils team. Her professional interests encompass climate change and its impact on natural disasters, extreme weather, public health, and various domains of climate science. She also maintains a keen interest in data science, using machine learning techniques to improve the application of climate data.
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Alexander Pui
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James Purvis
James Purvis is an Actuarial Educator and Chief Examiner for the Fellowship Investment Subject. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries of Australia. James has a BA in Actuarial Studies and Demography (Macquarie University), a Diploma of Finance and Accounting (Chisholm) and a Master of International Public Health (University of Sydney).
He has over 40 years’ experience in investment management, research and advice. This includes managing investment portfolios, asset allocation as well as assessing and rating fund managers. James has held senior actuarial, investment and management roles in Sydney, Melbourne, London, Brussels and New York since 1976. He has served as Chief Executive of four investment management firms and also of two life insurance companies. James has also served as the Chief Investment Officer of a firm specialising in investment and financial advice for high-net-worth clients.
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Alfie Qiang
Alfie is a senior consultant with Willis Towers Watson’s Insurance Consulting and Technology practice, based in Australia. She has over 8 years of experience in the life insurance business across strategic consulting and actuarial pricing and valuation in Australia and overseas.
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Chao Qiao
Chao has 15 years’ experience as an actuary in the insurance industry. Chao has worked in both core actuarial functions such as reserving, pricing and capital management, IFRS 17, and broader insurance functions such as customer, technology-led modernisation, operations, and strategy. Chao is also an auditor's expert on a number of external audits for insurance companies. Chao has also maintained a keen interest in socially relevant research, professional matters and discussions especially on longevity insurance.
Chao graduated from the University of New South Wales with first class honours in Actuarial Studies, with a thesis on group self-annuitisation. Chao is a Fellow of the Actuaries Institute and a Chartered Enterprise Risk Actuary. Chao mainly practices in general insurance, but has also worked in life insurance and banking. Chao has also actively volunteered extensively with the Actuaries Institute, including on Council and as an examiner in general insurance education.
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Maathu Ranjan
Maathu Ranjan is a Councillor of the Actuaries Institute Australia and a Senior Actuary at the National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA). Over the last nine years, Maathu has assisted the NDIA with evaluating and delivering key Scheme initiatives and priorities including the early childhood strategy, framework for consistent decision making, review of pricing arrangements, intergovernmental service agreements as well as workforce modelling. She has also undertaken actuarial work in accident compensation, health and aged care. Maathu is currently pursuing her PhD as a Sir Roland Wilson PhD scholar at the ANU, investigating the impact of government supports on the prevalence of Autism Spectrum Disorder and younger onset disability.
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Jacqueline Reid
Jacqueline is the Chief Examiner for the General Insurance Applications subject and a Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries of Australia. She has actuarial consulting experience advising companies, insurers, reinsurers and captives in the UK, Ireland, Sweden, Finland, Bermuda and Switzerland. Her Australian experience includes leading a small actuarial team based in Sydney and Melbourne advising corporates, scheme Actuary for NT WorkSafe and developing an operational risk measurement model for a major Australian bank.
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Dr Nina Ridder
Dr Nina Ridder is the Senior Climate Advisor at Suncorp Australia. Originally from Berlin, Germany, she holds a master in Physics from the Technische Universität Berlin and a PhD in Climate Science from the University of New South Wales. After completing her PhD in 2014, Nina moved on to hold postdoctoral positions at the European Space Agency and the Koninklijk Nederlands Meteorologisch Instituut (KNMI) where she started her work on compound events by analysing the co-occurrence of high storm surge and heavy precipitation affecting the Dutch coast. In 2019 Nina returned to the University of New South Wales to continue her work on multivariate and compounding events on the global scale as part of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes. She has published several highly cited papers in leading scientific journals and is widely recognised as one of the leading experts in the field of compound event research. In December 2022, Nina started her position at Suncorp where she is implementing state-of-the-art science into the insurance sector and facilitates lasting collaborations between research and the insurance industry to make Australia more resilient toward natural disasters.
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Catherine Robertson-Hodder
Catherine is a director in KPMG’s Financial Risk & Analytics business practice with over 20 years of experience in financial services, specialising in life insurance. Catherine loves working with her clients to identify and solve challenges across their business. She has a broad range of experience which includes pricing, financial reporting, M&A and being an Appointed Actuary and is an active member of the Life Insurance Practice Committee.
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Jon Shen
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Ruby Smith
Ruby is a qualified actuary working in Finity's Climate Analytics practice, focusing on physical risk, transition risk and modelling of long term climate-related issues. Passionate about the environment, Ruby is a member of the Institute’s Climate and Sustainability Working Group, with particular interests in decarbonisation, risk quantification and the social impacts of climate change.
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Jared Spowart
Jared is deeply intrigued by artificial intelligence and its potential to transform industries. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries of Australia with a career spanning nearly two decades within the Life Insurance industry. Currently serving as the Head of Actuarial Systems, Data, and Process Optimisation at AIA, Jared is keenly exploring how AI can elevate company-wide productivity. Eager to share his AI insights, he aspires to assist others in harnessing the transformative benefits of this technology in their professional lives. With a blend of technical skills and an innovative mindset, Jared is committed to shaping the ongoing conversation about the role of AI for actuaries and its wider impact in the insurance industry.
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Olivia Stephenson
Olivia has 10 years-experience across management consulting, general insurance and health insurance in Australia. After a non-actuarial start to her career, Olivia qualified as a Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries Australia in 2022 and is currently working at HBF Health as the Senior Manager for Product Strategy & Performance.
Throughout her career, Olivia has been involved in various aspects of actuarial and non-actuarial work, including product design & pricing, reserving, reporting, performance improvement and strategy development. She is most in her element when presented with a complex problem to solve and is passionate about understanding business challenges, collaborating with key stakeholders, and delivering effective solutions. Olivia is a member of the Institute’s Health Practice Committee, Gold Product Working Group and is the co-author of the newly established Health Practice Committee newsletter.
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Michael Storozhev
Michael is the Chief Underwriting Officer at PassportCard Travel Insurance, where he is responsible for the actuarial, product and analytics, helping drive a customer-centric mindset in technical domains.
With almost a decade in travel insurance Michael has driven important changes, like removing mental health exclusions and introducing new travel coverages, while streamlining underwriting and harnessed AI for improved insurance products.
Actively volunteering with the Actuaries Institute Australia, Michael has contributed to data science strategies and research on fair insurance pricing with the Data Science Practice Committee, and previously the founding convener of the Young Data Analytics Practice Committee.
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Adam Stolz
Adam is a senior actuary with broad experience in health insurance, life insurance and retirement savings, in Australia as well as internationally. Adam is currently Chief Actuary at Medibank, and has previously worked with AIA, as well as AXA for 11 years in France and the US. Adam has a passion for customer-orientated innovation in the health and insurance sectors.
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Dr Felix Sun
Dr Felix Sun is a Principal in Mercer’s Investments business, and is based in Sydney. He is a Senior Investment Consultant and an Actuary specialising in insurance and superannuation investment, financial and statistical modelling to identify insights from data analysis. These insights enable projections or simulations of how a client’s assets and liabilities may develop over time to assist in formulating the most optimal investment solutions. Felix is the lead or supporting investment consultant for several Mercer’s large insurance clients. Felix also works closely with other consultants on projects which involve advanced data and investment analytics, including share-based payment valuation services to listed and unlisted companies around the world, mortality rate analysis, employee behaviour analysis, dynamic investment strategy and retirement income product design. Felix was an Associate Lecturer at the Australian National University (ANU) before he joined Mercer in 2006. Felix holds a Doctor of Philosophy (Statistics), a Bachelor of Commerce (Information System), and a Bachelor of Actuarial Studies (Honours) from the ANU. He is also a Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries of Australia.
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Chenthuran Suthersan
Chenthuran Suthersan is a Data Science Actuary at MNC Actuaries. Chenny has more than 10 years post-qualification experience in the Australian and UK life insurance markets. Before joining MNC 3 years ago, he spent 4 years working in InsurTech/Robo Advice as Head of Protection Advice at Anorak Technologies in London. Chenny also worked for TAL for 4 years as Data Analytics Actuary and Group Pricing Actuary, including pricing large, successful insurance tenders for superannuation funds. Chenny is a daily and expert user of R, and Python but is also a user of SQL, BigQuery and SAS. and has developed many of MNC's insurance and superannuation dashboards.
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Greg Taylor
Greg Taylor is Adjunct Professor in the School of Risk and Actuarial Studies at the University of New South Wales. He was formerly a consulting actuary.
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Damian Thornley
Damian is a Partner and Co-Founder of Azuria Partners, a team of actuarial consultants specialising in all areas of life insurance. A qualified Actuary with 20+ years experience working as an Actuary, Damian has practiced as a consulting actuary for past five years and prior to that was the Head of Pricing (Group Insurance) for several life insurers and has a deep experience of life insurance product and pricing within the group insurance segment.
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Win-Li Toh
Win-Li is a principal at actuarial and analytics consultancy Taylor Fry, with a special focus on cyber security. She leads the company’s general insurance practice, backed by more than 25 years advising insurers, self-insurers and government across the globe. Win-Li holds several Appointed Actuary roles and is 2023 Vice President of the Actuaries Institute of Australia. As lead author on the Actuaries Institute green paper Cyber Risk and the Role of Insurance, she provided crucial evidence for the industry to enhance its cyber resilience efforts. She also contributed meaningful discussion to mainstream media, broadening understanding of how insurance fits in tackling cyber risk. Today, she continues to bring solutions-focused insight and facilitate open dialogue between government, business and insurers amid an ever-evolving threat landscape. She was recently awarded 2023 Insurance Leader of the Year by the Australian and New Zealand Institute of Insurance and Finance.
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Lesley Traverso
Lesley has been recruiting in the Actuarial market for over 25 years across, Australia, the UK, Asia, Middle East, and Europe. She has also been keenly involved with the Australian Institute, having been the Convenor of the Diversity and Inclusion Working Group, an editor of Actuaries Digital, a member of served on the Curriculum Review Working Group, and recently the CPD Review Committee.
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Katherine Tregoning
Katherine is an Actuarial Analyst in the Risk Intelligence team at Discovery Health.
She joined Discovery Health in January 2022, after graduating from the University of Witwatersrand with a BSc (Hons) in Actuarial Science (with distinction).
Katherine has passed all her actuarial exams through the Actuarial Society of South Africa, including the South Africa’s Healthcare Fellowship Examination.
Katherine has been involved in various healthcare analytical projects within the team, with a focus on mental health conditions, where she has developed a keen interest.
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Poonam Vala
Poonam is a Consulting Actuary at Insight Actuaries & Consultants, where she brings more than a decade of experience within the healthcare sector. Her career has been defined by a diverse array of projects for various stakeholders in the industry.
In her role, Poonam provides consultative support to a variety of healthcare insurers and provider groups, with the aim of delivering data-driven solutions to address the complex challenges within the healthcare industry. Her expertise ranges from traditional actuarial work to the use of machine learning models in alternative reimbursement contracts.
Poonam's dedication and expertise in her field have made her a respected figure among her peers. She remains committed to using her knowledge to make valuable contributions to the healthcare industry and to continue her professional growth.
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Emma Vitz
Emma is an associate actuary (AIAA) with 5 years of consulting experience, focusing primarily on natural perils, climate risk and personal lines pricing.
A recent transplant from New Zealand, Emma studied Statistics and Psychology before realising she was destined for a more quantitative pathway and had chosen the wrong degree. This propelled her to develop public speaking, writing and data visualisation skills in an attempt to make up for this perceived weakness in her CV.
However, what started as a career risk management strategy turned into a real passion. Along the way, Emma realised that she loves communicating about complex topics in an interesting and accessible way for a broad range of audiences.
After the Auckland floods and Cyclone Gabrielle, Emma appeared live on Q+A New Zealand and Radio New Zealand to discuss the impact that the largest non-earthquake natural disaster the country had seen would have on insurance affordability and availability.
She writes regular data journalism pieces for The Spinoff, covering a wide range of topics from housing to healthcare and transportation. Her data visualisations have been presented to the New Zealand Housing Minister on live television and viewed hundreds of thousands of times online.
Emma also compiles the Australian Actuaries Climate Index and communicates the results to the actuarial profession as well as the wider public. She has spoken on natural perils, climate risk, data science and data visualisation at a number of conferences across New Zealand, Australia and in international forums, as well as being interviewed for print media and podcasts.
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Philip Walter Clark
Husband and dad to an Aussie family. A qualified life actuary with the French and British institutes. Philip has worked in product & pricing, risk & capital, and has a particular interest in longevity with reference to public health and epidemiology. Philip moved from the UK to Australia in 2023 and recently joined the Retirement Income Working Group of the Actuaries Institute.
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Sylvia Wang
Sylvia is an active member of Actuaries Institute's Climate Sustainability working Group. She works in Natural Perils and Analytics space, has a strong interest in natural catastrophe risks and data science.
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Zhan Wang
Zhan is submitting the abstract on behalf of the Long COVID Working Group. Established in 2023, the Working Group's primary objective is to provide relevant insights to actuaries working in various areas of specialisations re the potential impact of Long COVID, including an understanding of the definition, any changes in the underlying insurance risks associated with persistent symptoms and/or changes originating from the new “norm” way of working and living. The Working Group also look into broader societal impacts, such as impacts on the Public Health system, other government agencies, and organisations outside of the financial services industry.
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Hayden Ware
Hayden is a qualified actuary with the Institute of Actuaries Australia. He has experience in pricing, capital, and reserving, and in particular reserving process automation. Over the last few years he has been focusing on applications of machine learning to reserving, and how these techniques can generate higher level actuarial insight by supporting a diagnostic led approach to reserving.
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Dr Geoff Warren
Dr Geoff Warren is Research Director at the Consensus Institute and an Associate Professor with the Australian National University. He is a member of various advisory boards including the ASIC Consultative Panel, Atlas Infrastructure Investment Governance and Macro Advisory Boards, Brandes Center Asia-Pacific Advisory Board, Conexus Institute Advisory Board, Salvation Army Investment Advisory Group and Super Consumers Australia Research Committee. Geoff’s research has an applied emphasis with particular focus on superannuation, retirement and fund management. Prior to pursuing an academic career, he spent over 20 years in investment markets, including as the Director of Capital Markets Research at Russell Investments; as an analyst, Chief Strategist and Head of Research with investment bank Ord Minnett / JP Morgan Australia; and as an equity portfolio manager at AMP Capital. Geoff has a PhD from the AGSM, and a BComm (Hons) with the University Medal from UNSW.
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Lara Wayburne
Lara Wayburne is a senior actuary in the Risk Intelligence team of Discovery Health leading actuarial analytics and insights for claims reporting, healthcare service provider contracting, value based care and population health management. Lara has fulfilled actuarial leadership roles previously including Head of NMG’s Actuarial & Specialised Consulting business and a consulting actuary at Deloitte where she was appointed as an Associate Director before the age of 30.
Lara has provided actuarial and strategic consulting services to a large and diverse range of stakeholders in the Southern African healthcare industries over 20 years including medical schemes, insurers, healthcare service providers, healthcare administrators and managed care organisations, government departments, international donor funders and industry associations.
Lara has a Master of Science degree in Actuarial Science and passed the first round of examinations to qualify as a South African Healthcare Actuary. She is currently the Principal Examiner for the Actuarial Society of South Africa’s Healthcare Fellowship Examination and supports the Healthcare Honours course at Wits University.
Lara is a mom of 4 children and is passionate about applying actuarial thinking to influence the development of sustainable healthcare systems for the current and next generations.
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Kimberlee Weatherall
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Matthew Webster
Matthew is a Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries of Australia and an Associate Director with Dynamo Analytics. He has broad actuarial consulting experience across the Australian, UK and Nordic markets, advising insurers and government clients on reserving and capital, with a focus on leveraging technology to improve actuarial processes.
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Dr Rhys Whitley
Dr Rhys Whitley is the science lead for the Pricing and Analytics team at Suncorp and is responsible for directing the company’s research into climate and weather extremes. A physicist by training, he has spent over a decade working in the field of terrestrial ecology and land-surface science looking at how climate and wildfire regimes have shaped Australian ecosystems, particularly Northern Australia. Since joining Suncorp, he has used his knowledge and expertise to facilitate the use of climate analytics in driving the business’s financial decisions and strategy around extreme weather.
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Michael Wong
Michael leads Willis Towers Watson's Regional Business Excellence proposition in APAC, mainly supporting APAC insurers in Financial Reporting Transformation. He has been involved in leading several actuarial software and process automation implementations for life insurers in Japan.
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Sarah Wood
Sarah is Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) risk advisor at Taylor Fry, with a background in economics and public policy in Australia and New Zealand. She has worked in government at the NZ Treasury and Justice departments, and in the private sector. Sarah specialises in two of the most significant ESG risks for all organisations: climate and sustainability, and cyber risk. She works closely with actuaries to ensure their business and risk modelling of these key ESG risks is relevant and meaningful. She is also a member of the Actuaries Institute Climate and Sustainability Working Group.
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Shang Wu
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Victoria Xie
Victoria heads up Willis Towers Watson’s Australian and New Zealand Insurance Consulting and Technology business. She has over 15 years of experience in the life insurance industry in Australia and overseas. Victoria’s areas of expertise include life Insurance valuations and financial reporting.
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Xi Xin
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Dr Xiao Xu
Dr Xiao Xu is a Senior Lecturer at the University of New South Wales in Australia and International Research Manager at the Society of Actuaries Research Institute. Her research interests centre around variable annuities, retirement planning and artificial intelligence (AI) deep learning. Xiao is passionate about actuarial education and industry research.
Xiao had years of industry work experience in life insurance, consulting business and VC entrepreneurship. She completed her PhD at UNSW, MSE at the Johns Hopkins University and BBA at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Xiao holds several professional qualifications: Chartered Financial Analyst (2019), Chartered Accountant - Australia (2019), Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries of Australia (2018), Certified Public Accountant - USA (2018), Financial Risk Manager (2016), Fellow of Society of Actuaries (2015) and Chartered Enterprise Risk Analyst (2015).
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Jamie Yan
Jiamin (Jamie) Yan is a first year PhD student at the School of Risk and Actuarial Studies at UNSW Sydney and the ARC Centre of Excellence in Population Ageing Research (CEPAR). She holds a dual bachelor’s degree in science and economics, and a master's degree in insurance, all from Central University of Finance and Economics in China. Her current research interests are in lifecycle financial decision-making, retirement products, and behavioural finance.
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Lisa Ye
Lisa is a qualified actuary with over 13 years of experience in the general insurance industry across Australia and the UK. She currently leads the Natural Perils Pricing team at Suncorp, where she works with climate scientists, data scientists and other actuaries to understand the impacts of climate on communities. Most of Lisa’s time outside of work is spent attempting to keep up with her toddler. She also tries to fit in a bit of crocheting and swimming when she can.
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Timothy Yip
Tim is a Director at Taylor Fry, and provides actuarial advice to schemes, self-insurers and APRA-regulated insurers. He is currently the Actuary for several workers' compensation self-insurers, and is the Appointed Actuary for a reinsurer. He has a particular passion around the setting of economic assumptions, and has been involved with various working groups that assisted the Actuaries Institute in determining the profession's stance on these. He is currently responsible for further development of Taylor Fry's economic assumption framework. Tim is also passionate about encouraging increased engagement by younger actuaries with the Institute, and currently sits on the Young Actuaries Advisory Board.
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Evelyn Yong
Evelyn is a consultant at Finity’s perils & climate practice and works on translating climate change projections into financial impacts for companies, including asset owners, banks and insurers. She is experienced in supporting clients with the delivery of risk assessments, adaptation strategy, and reporting.
Evelyn is a member of the Climate Sustainability Working Group at the Institute of Actuaries of Australia and is an active contributor to the International Actuarial Association (IAA). In 2021, she co-authored the third paper in a series on climate risk titled Climate-Related Scenarios Applied to Insurers and Other Financial Institutions, developed by the IAA Executive Committee Task Force on Climate Risk.
Evelyn previously worked for AIA Australia where she optimised capital processes, completed research and scenario analysis for the pandemic taskforce and pioneered the development of new business concepts.
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Jason Yu
Jason is currently a Senior Risk Manager at Swiss Re, guiding and supporting the effective operation of business strategy, local risk management framework, capital, sustainability and risk mindsets of the A&NZ business.
Jason is a business leader and a qualified actuary with more than 10 years of experience and knowledge in Pricing, Data Analytics and Risk Management. A professional and pragmatic individual with a proven track record to problem solving and simplifying the complex. With a focus to empower decision making through data driven insights. A well-regarded leader, mentor and strategic thinker.
Jason is currently the chair of the Risk Management Education Faculty and a member of the Risk Management Practice Committee.
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