From actuary to underwriter: Building an insurance company from scratch

You are now president and active underwriter at Neam Group.

Um, I ...

But I've known you for a long time, and one of the most fascinating things about your journey, Seema, is that you worked for successively larger insurance companies and then you decided to take the jump to be basically a founder of an insurance company.

So I'd love to hear a little bit about your motivation for doing that.

You know, I've done the big company to small company thing myself, but not at the scale you have.

I'd love to just hear about, you know, the career trajectory that you decided to embark upon and what made you wanna think about this kind of next step.

Yeah.

So, look, I've really enjoyed my journey, and every step I've taken has always been about what's gonna challenge me next, what's gonna expand what I'm doing, what can I learn in.

Um, and as I've grown to all these organizations, so you're right, right, you know, I started at various organizations, but if we start at Catlin, then XL Catlin, and then jumping to AIG, which was huge, and then PartnerRe, um, and then finally to Neam.

I've always, as I say, tried to think about what will expand my role and my skill set and, like, give me interest, but I can also add value to the company.

Um, when I met Bobby, uh, who's the original founder of Neam, our CEO, um, and he was talking about his vision in India, it really struck a chord with me.

Um, and then aside from really wanting to do something in India from a cultural perspective, given I'm Indian by background, uh, although born and brought up in the UK, um, and the excitement that I think the India market offers us as well just because it's the fastest growing economy.

Um, there's so much going on there.

It's a very vibrant area.

I really wanted the opportunity to sort of shape the business myself, uh, rather than being a sort of, I wouldn't say back office, but mid office [laughs] function in actuarial where you're doing the pricing and the reserving and driving sort of strategy but not actually doing the underwriting.

So the opportunity of doing the underwriting but also shaping the culture of a company, really making it exactly how you would want it versus ...

You know, it ...

I love all the big organizations I've worked at, but it's hard to shape the culture there as a one person in that big organization.

When you can start it off the way you want to, and who knows what's gonna happen, but let's hope [laughs].

Uh, it, it just gave me that extra buzz.