Pricing Manager (Technical)

Job Type:

Build a brilliant future with Hiscox
 

The team and role

The UK Pricing team are a fundamental part of the Hiscox UK business driving analytics and business insight that drives the direction of portfolio underwriting decisions. The UK Pricing team sits within a wider Portfolio Underwriting and Pricing function whose primary objective is to provide pricing and underwriting services across our UK retail business wait the aim of providing market leading risk selection and driving profitable growth across our portfolio. The team reports directly to the UK Chief Underwriting Officer and collaborates closely with the rest of Underwriting, Distribution, Operations, Marketing, Reserving and Finance. The pricing team itself are split into “Technical” and “Product Facing” analysts, with product facing pricing analysts having more of a focus on the monitoring, implementation and maintenance of production prices and working with senior stakeholders prioritise pricing activity aligned with the UK strategy.

This role sits within the technical pricing area of the team, you’ll be someone who loves technical detail but is able to bring a commercial understanding to provide insights to directly influence business decisions. Day to day you will be focused on the creation, maintenance, monitoring and embedding of pricing models. You’ll have a passion for the science of data and seeing business outcomes influenced by your expertise.

As a Pricing Manager, you’ll be responsible for leading a team of analysts in planning and delivering pricing projects and analysis to influence the growing book of non-standard high net worth household, motor, SME commercial as well as specialty lines. The Pricing Manager plays a critical role in defining the strategic direction of the technical pricing team to deliver profitable growth for Hiscox UK as well as building pricing capability and core skills within the UK business.

Please note this role does not require you to pursue, or have previously pursued, actuarial qualifications.

What you’ll be doing

· Managing a team of three analysts. Providing development and coaching for all members of the team, sharing your own experience and expertise to support their development.

· Working closely with the Head of Portfolio Underwriting and Pricing to define and implement the strategy for the technical pricing team to support delivery of the wider UK strategy.

· Taking accountability for the pricing recommendations of the technical pricing team and the performance of all pricing models produced by the team.

· Being a key point of contact for underwriting managers and heads of underwriting actively engaging with them to understand underwriting strategy and identify how technical pricing can support these objectives. You will also need to be comfortable in juggling conflicting priorities between senior stakeholders, building a strong relationship with them to enable you to influence and manage their expectations.

· Design and manipulation of underlying data models to produce standardised data tables which form the basis of all underlying technical pricing models.

· Being the end-to-end architect of all technical pricing models. Creating models to predict claims frequency, claims severity, conversion, cancellation rates and other customer behaviours using GLMs and machine learning techniques.

· Owning a regular reporting cycle which allows us to monitor modelled predicted behaviours to actual observed and being the decision maker of when this cycle would trigger us to revise and update underlying models.

· Taking accountability for the infrastructure that enables the business to access technical pricing model insights and being the driver that ensures these insights are used to drive real change into the business aligned with the UK strategy.

· Defining and establishing regular feedback cycles with Heads of Underwriting to allow for continuous improvement and refinement of technical pricing models to enhance ability to select and accurately price business according to the risk presented.

· Design, development and production of regular reporting for CUO and Heads of Underwriting to monitor performance of the UK portfolio using outputs of technical pricing models.

· Work with and support the design and implementation of new technologies and data sources – including cloud-based data warehouses, data-visualisation products, and new pricing software for the business

· Take the pricing lead in the annual business planning cycle for the UK business unit

· Working closely with product facing pricing and portfolio underwriting teams to ensure the use of technical pricing outputs is embedded and driving day to day business decisions.

Person Specification:

Hiscox is a people orientated firm, no individual works in a silo and everyone is expected to work across the business and are empowered to make decisions. We are looking for an experienced technical pricing manager that is keen to engage across the business and understand different teams’ perspectives. With a firm focus of how to develop or utilise existing pricing models in order to drive better customer and financial outcomes. You will be naturally inquisitive and comfortable to challenge the status quote, always looking for opportunities to drive continuous improvement leveraging the technical pricing team and models. You will be able to understand complex problems through a variety of perspectives and identify potential solutions that is fit for purpose and not overtly complicated.

Our must haves:

· A broad knowledge of general insurance pricing across products and channels, with in depth knowledge of at least two products.

· Previous experience of managing (or supervising) a team of analysts

· Experience of the end-to-end process of building pricing technical models, and used to setting the core pricing assumptions

· Experience in balancing business needs against analytical quality (i.e. set appropriate assumptions and limitations).

· Practical application of in-depth statistical skills within a business environment

· Strong analytical pragmatic reasoning skills and an aptitude for innovative problem solving

· Highly confident in the use data analysis tools such as Excel and SQL

· Knowledge of programming and statistical tools such as Python, Emblem & SAS

· High level of numeric competence and excellent data gathering and manipulation skills

· Experience of working closely with stakeholders and an ability to build strong working relationships

· Comfortable with carrying research and development projects experimenting with new data sources and modelling techniques.

· Excellent communication skills with ability to articulate the complex to technical and non-technical audiences

· Deadline oriented, hardworking, curious, passionate, enthusiastic and a self-starter

· Good knowledge of the regulatory and competitive environment

Our nice to haves:

· Insurance pricing software Earnix / Radar or equivalent

· Seeking or attained relevant professional qualifications

Diversity and flexible working at Hiscox

At Hiscox we care about our people. We hire the best people for the job and we’re committed to diversity and creating a truly inclusive culture, which we believe drives success. We also understand that working life doesn’t always have to be ‘nine to five’ and we support flexible working wherever we can. No promises, but please chat to our resourcing team about the flexibility we could offer for this role.

We’ve introduced new hybrid ways of working to encourage a healthy work life balance.  We anticipate the successful candidate for this role will be in the office up to 2-3 days per week. Our London office will be your hub where team & collaboration time will take place.

We see it as the best of both worlds: structure and sociability on one hand, and independence and flexibility on the other.

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