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Yiannis Parizas on Outstanding Claims with the Price Writer Ep 15
38 Plays1 year ago
Join us for my conversation with Yiannis Parizas to hear about his remarkable journey from Cyprus to the forefront of GI pricing. From his early days at school in Cyprus to securing a place at the University of Southampton, Yiannis shares the pivotal moments that shaped his career.
📚 From Cyprus to the UK: Yanis's educational journey and his leap into pricing.
🌐 Global career footprint: Professional experiences in Dubai, the UK, Switzerland, and Italy.
✍️ Editorial leadership: Becoming the editor of the Actuary magazine and contributing to the profession.
🧮 R library creator: Introducing a tool for data analysis. Access it here https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/NetSimR/index.html
🔮 Future of insurance pricing: Yanis's vision on technology's role in enhancing pricing strategies.
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Transcript
Yanis' Early Life and Education
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, Yanis, and welcome to the show. Hello, Jeremy. Hello. It's great to have you on. Thank you so much for agreeing to come on this afternoon. So, the first thing I'd like to ask you is, how did you get where you are today? Okay. So, I'm originally from Cyprus. I studied in a private school. I was school in English, and I did the English curriculum.
00:00:23
Speaker
So I knew from high school that I was going to go to the UK to study. So after high school, I had to spend two years in the army. And then I wanted to study mathematics when I finished high school. But I finished high school just when the system changed. And then they created the stars and the double A level. So I couldn't do a math course. And I started doing some research in the army.
00:00:51
Speaker
to find some degree related to mathematics. It was then that I talked to Anakshari. He was alive, actually. And he explained to me what he was doing, the career progress that Anakshari could have. And actually, I was fascinated. He also showed me the actual magazine.
00:01:15
Speaker
which I'm currently an editor and I thought that's a great profession and maybe I should give it a try. So I started looking for degrees in the UK that involve mathematics, structural science, and I ended up going to the University of Southampton because they offered me a full scholarship for all the years.
00:01:35
Speaker
where I graduated with first-class honors. I was thinking what to do after my bachelor degree.
Career Journey Across Continents
00:01:46
Speaker
I had an offer from a company which I was doing an internship after my third year.
00:01:53
Speaker
to remain full-time. But finally, I decided to go back to education. So I did the master's in actuarial management. In the master's, I already did the general insurance courses. So it was quite short for me that I was going to follow in general insurance path after education. So after my master's, which I finish with the distinction again,
00:02:18
Speaker
I was looking for a job. At the moment I was doing an internship in London with a multinational insurer. And at the moment it was a very competitive landing job in the UK, even with a great record in education.
00:02:36
Speaker
So I ended up going to Dubai. I spent two and a half years with my first employer. I was already working in general insurance. Then I started contacting as well. I did a couple of contacts in the UAE and the UK.
00:02:56
Speaker
And then I returned back to my country Cyprus where I was working between Greece and Cyprus in a head of pricing position. After that, I returned back to contracting where I worked again in the UK and in Switzerland. And now I'm working for an Italian employer.
00:03:19
Speaker
Yeah, so pretty much this is how I ended up on an actuarial path and I was always focused on the enjoy side. That's brilliant.
Becoming Editor of Actuary Magazine
00:03:29
Speaker
So how did you become editor of the Actury magazine?
00:03:34
Speaker
Okay. I contributed articles, I think one or two years before I joined the editorial team as a features editor. And two of them were successful. And then the magazine opened a features editor position for general assurance and data science.
00:03:56
Speaker
where I applied, so I held the role of features editor for a couple of years. And then the editor role opened after my predecessor stepped down and she encouraged me actually to apply for the position. I did the interviews and I managed to get the role. That's brilliant.
Contributions to the Profession through Net CMR
00:04:20
Speaker
I think you've also authored an R library, is that right? Yes. So at my free time, not only I try to do continuous learning and studying, but I try to do R and D as well, because I believe this is another way of learning. And my findings and in terms of code, I try to publish them in a library where I also publish them as shiny apps, where it's easier for end users to use them.
00:04:51
Speaker
And the reason I do that, like the magazine is because I believe it's a way to contribute back to the profession and the society because I appreciate the Lord our qualification. I believe it secures for us jobs and prestige among the industry.
00:05:13
Speaker
And what's the name of your R libraries? It's Net CMR. It's case sensitive, but I mean, if one wants to find it, they can just Google search it. Yeah. We'll pop a link to it in the description as well. That's brilliant, Janice. So what would you say is your mission for general insurance pricing?
Advancements in Pricing Technologies
00:05:33
Speaker
Okay, as you just said, I'm an expert in pricing for general lines. I didn't work so much in reserving other than trying to do portfolio monitoring and the focus is trying to do that without triangles. The mission
00:05:55
Speaker
delivering state-of-the-art professional pricing to my employers or clients. Then I always try to utilize the latest technologies, the transition from GLM to boosting and potentially neural networks. I guess so I believe in the use of technology for improving
00:06:21
Speaker
pricing, making it in a more granular river and distinguishing profitable versus non-profitable segments for the employer, optimizing and delivering value to the shareholders. What do you think pricing teams and leaders need to be doing more of?
Challenges in Upskilling and Technology Investment
00:06:41
Speaker
Investing in technology and investing in their people because teams
00:06:52
Speaker
have skillful employees. They are very good in what they do, but they always need to be upskilled to the use of the latest technologies. So in terms of focusing maybe 190% to business as usual, they could invest more resources and time of the people to upskill them.
00:07:13
Speaker
And the benefits will come later when the newer technologies will be utilized. This is easier for employers where they have a team of 50, 60 people and they can't afford to have classes and training. But I mean, if the employer has a team of five, then it's a challenge to keep up with the business as usual, rather than spend time to upskill the people. It is, that's true.
00:07:43
Speaker
But the smaller teams are often the ones that are pushing most and trying to do the newer and more interesting things. So to some extent, they're the ones that need to be doing more, but certainly appreciate there is always the time pressure as well. And it seems like no matter how many more people we add, we always have more work to do than there are people.
Future of Data Utilization in Organizations
00:08:04
Speaker
Yeah. And Janice, what would you say is your vision for the future of general insurance pricing?
00:08:10
Speaker
Okay. Vision for the future. In the future, there will be more data. We have AI and sensors and information from satellites, from electric cars and everything. So this will be feeding back to our databases. And then it's a challenge to manage and utilize the larger amount of data.
00:08:37
Speaker
Maybe blind spot markets will become more competitive as well. What we just said, maybe it's more relevant for a developed industry like the UK one, but East Europe or the Middle East where the market sophistication lacks a bit behind.
00:08:58
Speaker
Maybe we'll first take the steps to go to the UK level and then utilize the additional information that can come from the sensors. The other thing is utilizing the newest methods.
00:09:16
Speaker
It's fascinating how many people talk about the new methods and actually how many companies really implement the new methods. So for the future I believe that more and more these methods will be used in practice in the industry. And then the other thing I see is
00:09:41
Speaker
stakeholders within the organization will appreciate more and more the value of the pricing and data science teams. And what they could potentially do to add more value to the organization is utilize the skills to other operations. For example,
00:10:01
Speaker
help the claims team, set reserves, the first estimates, identify fraud, prioritize the work of the fraud department, and prioritize the call center going back to increase conversions. So unblend more our skills and metrics to other business areas within our employers to add more value to the stakeholders.
00:10:30
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's quite a sensible model to start doing the data science in kind of the pricing area where there's already people with those skills and then maybe perhaps as it grows separating it out wider into the rest of the business. But there are lots of areas we could be doing more of. Yes.
Italian Insurance Market Dynamics
00:10:49
Speaker
You mentioned you're working in Italy. What are the particular challenges of that market?
00:10:56
Speaker
of that market. Every market is different because of regulation, because of the habits of people, the challenges in that market. So it's a market not so sophisticated like the UK, most
00:11:17
Speaker
Competitors are operating in the offline business with brokers. What is more to do with the relationship with your broker? While the UK is fully competitive and mostly on aggregators, I believe in terms of the market achieving a higher price sophistication in general, not within some specific insurer, we'll have to do until the people
00:11:45
Speaker
adapt to the online system, like what happened to the UK. And at that moment, all the insurance companies will have to improve on their pricing and increase the skill set of their pricing and on the writing team.
00:12:03
Speaker
Yeah, so this is how I see the market and pretty much outside markets like the US, the UK, maybe Germany and France, mostly this is the case for Middle East as well. Markets are more
00:12:24
Speaker
relying on the broker relationship and it's less about being pricing competitive. And this makes our job in those employers different because we need to optimize based on these way that the distribution channels are made and not how we want the data science and the fancy mathematics to work.
00:12:54
Speaker
Yeah, moving with what the business needs. I worked on Quixa, the Italian Axa brand in 2015 and it was interesting because the aggregator sold and it was fairly new in Italy at the time. So we had the most price sensitive customers with the ones actually going and looking on the aggregators anyway.
00:13:20
Speaker
almost an additional self-selection for really fighting for that cheapest price. And in fact, we had a very high number of people would negotiate at renewal and they had no, I mean, we think it's low loyalty in the UK, but there was pretty much zero loyalty to the insurer at all.
Comparative Insights on French and Italian Markets
00:13:39
Speaker
And it was interesting contrast because the intermediary business, the agent business in Italy was so much larger and that has a very high level of loyalty. So it was like we were only sucking away those customers that we'd just chop and change immediately. And in fact, France was similar, but I believe the direct, the aggregators in France have taken off faster. There's more direct business being sold there.
00:14:07
Speaker
But it's still predominantly an agent-led business, the opposite of the UK. Yeah. Myself, I always perceive the French industry more similar to the UK due to the kind of severity of the bodily injuries, because it's from the European markets, as far as I'm aware, it's France and the UK that could have claims up to, I don't know, 40 million, 50 million.
00:14:35
Speaker
While other industries, not industry markets, like East Europe are much more limited in terms of severity, even Germany as well. Yeah, that's right. Where they've got more of a set almost menu of payments rather than the UK, where it's extremely open. Brilliant Janice, is there anything else you'd like to add?
00:15:04
Speaker
Hello Jeremy. Thank you for inviting me. It was a pleasure as always to talk with you. Brilliant. Thanks ever so much for being on. You have a good rest of your day. Thank you. Bye. Thanks. Bye-bye.