From travelling the world to a career in Underwriting
After I left university, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I had some vague ideas had no clear path, no grad scheme and no money! I worked a variety of service jobs for a year, saved up some money and went travelling. I ended up in Australia where I stayed for 7 years. When I returned to the UK, I got a job in insurance and have been working in the industry ever since. Starting in call centres, I moved into product management and then into underwriting and studied for my ACII qualification. I have experience working in product management, roadmap design, product development & delivery, technical underwriting and change delivery. I have worked across Motor and Home Insurance and I joined First Central in 2022 as the Head of Home Underwriting.
I lead and manage our underwriting function for Home insurance.
I manage a team who look at our approach to underwriting a Home insurance product. This involves us using data and our experience to create our risk appetite, policy terms and our exposure and accumulation management. In a nutshell, we decide who we want to offer a policy too and under what terms.
I work with a brilliant team who are all experts at what they do
Working on Home insurance is new to First Central and we are a small team within the company who are very focused and enthusiastic around what we want to achieve. I feel very lucky to work within a team of great people who love what they do and are focused on getting the best outcomes for both our customers and First Central.
Grab opportunities, every piece of work is a chance to gain experience
Be open to change and grab opportunities that come your way to help you grow and develop yourself. Always have a growth mindset and don’t close down opportunities because you’re afraid that you can’t meet the challenge. Pushing yourself outside your usual skill set will help increase your confidence and show you what you’re capable of.
Leading Underwriting on a large-scale transformation programme
The opportunity arose and I put myself forward – it felt like a bit of a leap, and I was nervous and second guessing myself, but I wanted to push myself into something new and ambitious. I had a small team, and we were really thrown in at the deep end, suddenly working in a large change project, which was also trying to implement agile methodology. It was a really challenging time as we had a number of deadlines to meet and there were a lot of stakeholders involved. I quickly saw that the key to success was to ensure that we really focused on our deliverables by creating ambitious but realistic plans that we stuck to. The team was small but had a variety of experience which we used well to plan and prioritise our output. We built our underwriting rules in record time and showed how quickly we could produce output within the organisation by embracing the agile methodology and focusing on one common goal.
