An actuary who has worked in first and second-line pricing roles, Tom Alden has had a diverse and interesting insurance career so far. Since October 2023, he’s been leading the Analytics Pricing Development team at NFU Mutual and he’s currently looking to recruit people into two key roles. We sat down with him to talk about how his career’s developed, how he’s reshaping his team and what these new opportunities have to offer.
Hi Tom – thanks for taking the time to talk to us. Can you start off by telling us about your background and how you came into pricing?
I qualified as an actuary in 2003 whilst working for an actuarial consultancy, giving advice to companies and trustees on their pension schemes. I found it really interesting and learned a lot of communication and consultancy-type skills. I then moved to Legal & General, where I did general insurance pricing for the first time. Whilst there I ran a team of actuaries and other professionals, setting the final price for customers for different products and sales channels.
What initially attracted me to that role was that it was a new team, with people from different backgrounds. I soon came to realise that in pricing, you have the opportunity to make a real difference to both the business and customers. But if you get it wrong, you’re not giving customers what they want – and you’ll also be losing the business money. My next move was to a life insurance company – so I’d gained pension, general insurance and life insurance experience, which is quite unusual for an actuary! Again, it was a pricing role, but I was also involved in actuarial project management.
In 2019 I joined NFU Mutual, where I was initially part of the actuarial function within Group Risk, that looked at all the actuarial work across the business, a role I found fascinating. In October 2023, I decided I wanted to be more hands-on and to do things more directly for customers again, so I moved into my current pricing development role.
So, I’ve done a variety of different things and worked with a lot of interesting teams. But what’s generally kept me in pricing is being closer to the customer, making sure we’re doing the right thing for each of them. Every day brings a new and exciting challenge!
It certainly sounds like you’ve been involved in a lot of different things! How do you think your background has helped you?
Being an actuary trains you to approach things in a methodical way, which helps in pricing – and obviously, there’s the number-crunching side of it, too. It’s also important to be able to analyse a range of outcomes and risks, and work those through.
My consultancy experience has also helped. As a consultant, you learn to see what’s really important. It’s easy to see pricing as just a mathematical or statistical exercise, but actually, you need to stand back and look at what it means to customers, decide what the most appropriate approach is and think about how you’re going to explain your decision so it can be easily understood.
So, in pricing, I think it really helps to have a combination of an actuarial and a consultancy mindset.
Tell us about your team – what kind of projects do they get involved in?
Overall, there are over 100 people in Pricing at NFU Mutual, who are split down into three broad areas. The first area is Analytics, and that’s where my team sits, and is where a lot of the number-crunching and modelling happens. Our work feeds in to Street Pricing, who use our work to develop the prices we charge customers. Then there’s Pricing Development (to be clear - a different team from mine with a similar name!), which manages all the data and models coming in to pricing, looks after pricing input to business projects, and is responsible for the final deployment of models out of pricing to the wider business.
Within my Analytics Pricing Development team, we focus on two main areas – Demand Modelling and Innovation. For Demand Modelling, we are looking to predict which customers are more or less likely to buy, renew or cancel our policies, to help with setting prices and predicting which policies we will write. Within this, we also do competitor price modelling, to predict how competitive our prices are.
The Innovation side of our work involves keeping an eye on things that are happening in the wider markets for best practice. If we think there’s something outside our business that we can usefully use, then my team will work with the relevant area elsewhere in pricing to design something. For example, we recently did a proof-of-concept for using machine learning models in new ways within claims modelling. Of course, we had to make sure we had the right controls in place, but it was exciting to look at it, test it and take it all the way to deployment.
How do these two new roles fit into Demand Modelling and Innovation?
These key roles are an opportunity to help me shape my team through providing knowledge and guidance to others.
In the past, we’ve run the Demand Modelling and Innovation parts of the team fairly separately; people focused on either Demand Modelling or Innovation. I’m changing that, because I think it’s good to give people a broader experience and let them get involved in everything.
At the moment there are six people in the team at Analyst, Lead Analyst and Principal Analyst levels. These two roles will be a part of managing this team of six and will report into me. They’ll be doing a bit of everything, managing the team, as well as getting involved in some demand modelling and innovation work.
So, what kind of skills are you looking for?
Between the two roles, we need both leadership and technical skills, but I’m quite flexible on how that balances out. So, if one person has more of a leadership background and the other’s more technical, that’s great. But it’s that combination I’m looking for – the technical knowledge to coach people in how to do things, and the managerial style to encourage the team and give them the autonomy to do their job but offering support when it’s needed.
The ideal candidate will have good technical knowledge, with specific pricing or demand modelling experience, and will also be an experienced people manager. However, I’d also like to see candidates that could grow into this role over time – perhaps they have more technical knowledge and want to develop as a manager, or vice versa. If someone can demonstrate that they’re ready for that step up, we can give all the training they need.
We sit in the middle of a lot of other moving parts, so on a day-to-day level, there’s a lot of liaising with people. That means they need to be able to manage different stakeholders, who might have competing priorities. They’ll also need the ability to boil down complex content and explain it clearly to quite senior people.
How would you describe the team culture?
We all work well together and focus on putting customers first. That comes from being a mutual – it’s front and centre of everything we do.
I think everyone at NFU Mutual lives by our three values – being a great place to work, a great company to do business with and delivering sustainable profitable growth. For me as a manager, and employee, NFU Mutual being a great place to work is important. One of the things that attracted me to NFU Mutual was the flexibility to balance work and family commitments. Obviously work needs to be done and deadlines met, but I have the flexibility to manage that around picking my kids up from school some days, which I really appreciate. It’s important to me that we help good people perform at their best whilst recognising family or caring commitments.
We also have a strong focus on training and development here. From the moment you start, there are plenty of resources that we tailor around your individual learning needs. For example, if you come into one of these two management roles, you’ll find there are specific courses available to develop your leadership skills, and we can get you signed up for those. On top of that, there’s a lot of mentoring, coaching and other training opportunities, too.
Thanks for talking to us today, Tom. To sum up, can you tell us why you believe NFU Mutual is a great place to work?
For me, it’s all about the people. It’s a place where everyone is committed to doing the right thing for the customer and each other, and you’ll always find the help and support you need. If you’ve got a problem, there’s always someone who’ll take the time to chat things through.
We’re also good at building a diverse workforce and bringing people from different experiences and backgrounds together. I think that helps build a better, more well-rounded team.
Sound good to you?
Just like Tom, you can build an interesting and rewarding career within Pricing at NFU Mutual. So take a look at our latest opportunities or sign up for job alerts by email.