Maverick Actuary is a transformational, multi platform content community founded by Dominic Lee in 2021 with the mission of maximizing the impact and value of quant professionals (numbers people) on a global scale. Live With The Maverick is a weekly interview series, hosted by Dominic on Instagram Live. The series features the movers and shakers in actuarial science, risk, and analytics. The overarching goal is to expose quant professionals to individuals who embody the values of Maverick Actuary’s brand and mission. The target audience is quant professionals who are seeking to develop and grow in their careers, and benefit from a broad variety of perspectives from industry leaders and experts with a proven track record of success.
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Maverick Actuary is a transformational, multi platform content community founded by Dominic Lee in 2021 with the mission of maximizing the impact and value of quant professionals (numbers people) on a global scale. Live With The Maverick is a weekly interview series, hosted by Dominic on Instagram Live. The series features the movers and shakers in actuarial science, risk, and analytics. The overarching goal is to expose quant professionals to individuals who embody the values of Maverick Actuary’s brand and mission. The target audience is quant professionals who are seeking to develop and grow in their careers, and benefit from a broad variety of perspectives from industry leaders and experts with a proven track record of success.
My guest for Episode 101 is Marcela Granados Lavoie, FCAS, CSPA, Principal - Global Head of Insurance at Databricks.
The theme for the episode is 𝗔𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗿𝗶𝗲𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝗦𝗼𝗳𝘁𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗲.
Marcela and I covered the following topics:
✅ Marcela’s motivation for pivoting to tech/software ✅ Why a software company would need an actuary ✅ The cloud and how it enables insurance modernization ✅ How generative AI can help yield value for insurance companies ✅ Using unstructured data for underwriting, claim, marketing, and distribution ✅ Marcela’s experience learning R and Python ✅ Programming and coding proficiency actuaries need today ✅ Tips for actuaries, data scientists, and data engineers to work collaboratively ✅ Origins and motivations for the Organization of Latino Actuaries
Time Markers
1:30: Transition from consulting to tech/software (impact of legacy systems on consumer sentiment, shifting policyholder expectations, and personalized experiences).
5:21: Where actuaries add value in tech/software (strategic conversations, becoming trusted advisors, speaking language of insurance, and understanding customer pain points).
7:10: Connecting horizontal product features to vertical insurance functions, understanding and quantification of customer use cases.
12:10: Databricks as a data and AI platform for ingestion, transformation, curation, servicing, and consumption into downstream applications.
14:40: Databricks’ compute capabilities (moving beyond batch to streaming), separating compute from storage, and evolving from ETL to business outcomes.
16:11: Global Head of Insurance role (qualifying opportunities, briefing executives, influencing product direction, building solution accelerators, and demonstrating platform capabilities).
24:01: Databricks’ customer profile, the rise of semi-structured data, and integration with other technologies.
30:25: The cloud, the rise of big data (volume, variety, and velocity), modernization, and cloud migration trends.
37:18: Generative AI explanation and homeowner’s premium modeling illustration (GLMs vs. neural networks).
44:10: Generative AI use cases (accident descriptions, product recommendations, coverage verification, underwriting appetite, claim reporting, measuring intent, and customer triaging).
49:36: The importance of programming and coding, open-source (R and Python), and combining programming languages with generative AI (ex. CoPilot).
54:56: Collaborative illustration with actuaries (business hypothesis and analysis), data scientists (model fine tuning and algo testing), and data engineers (building data pipelines).
1:01:18: The Organization of Latino actuaries, origins, and motivations.
If you are an actuary seeking to work in technology/software, you want to listen to this.
My Website: maverickactuary.com
Live With The Maverick
Maverick Actuary is a transformational, multi platform content community founded by Dominic Lee in 2021 with the mission of maximizing the impact and value of quant professionals (numbers people) on a global scale. Live With The Maverick is a weekly interview series, hosted by Dominic on Instagram Live. The series features the movers and shakers in actuarial science, risk, and analytics. The overarching goal is to expose quant professionals to individuals who embody the values of Maverick Actuary’s brand and mission. The target audience is quant professionals who are seeking to develop and grow in their careers, and benefit from a broad variety of perspectives from industry leaders and experts with a proven track record of success.
