The actuary weighing risks to drive board strategy – Meet Corinne Glasby
Corinne Glasby is the person who thinks about risk, and helps you to as well. Corinne is an actuary and Insurance Executive who’s held roles at Suncorp, CommInsure and IAG.
Moving through the noise
When Corinne was young, she didn’t know any actuaries. She was great at maths, but studying pure maths, engineering or computing didn’t appeal to her. When she discovered the actuary role, she thought she’d give it a go.
“Being an actuary is a fantastic career because it gives you so many options. Insurance to me is fascinating and I think we can really relate to how we’re helping people. Even though I don’t talk to customers and I wouldn’t be good at talking to customers…
“I know that everything I do is helping them. When the hailstorm or the earthquake hits, I can see how what I do is really benefiting the economy and individuals. I love that about general insurance.”
Another way Corinne helps her customers is to listen carefully and think strategically. “There’s a lot of noise in risk and you see a lot of things going wrong. You’ve got to figure out what are the ones that you really need to worry about. What are the ones that I should be articulating to the board and what are the ones that are just the general noise that we can manage effectively?”
“Listening to people, talking to people and being able to put that risk lens on the conversation that’s happening around you are the kinds of skills that are important.”
Making smarter decisions
After you’ve listened and digested the information, Corinne believes you make better decisions. Corinne wants actuaries, and other professions, to start making’ better decisions’ a key goal, and risk has a role to play in that. “The actuarial team are part of making those smarter decisions. The precision from a risk perspective that actuaries can bring to a problem is helping understand the implications of those decisions. We really think through what those risks and rewards are and make a proper decision.”
“Sometimes people will make decisions based on gut feel or what they’ve seen before but that’s not necessarily the best decision. The precision from my point of view is to think through those potential implications and then once you’ve decided, make sure you understand the risks that will come out of that. And then how can we mitigate those? How can we put controls in place to monitor that?”
A risk mindset
Corinne is always thinking of the potential risk. That’s her profession.
“We’re not just worried about whether or not the project is going to be successful, but what are the flow on implications.”
“And that’s helpful to make sure that once the project’s finished people are still aware of what decisions were made and what those implications were. To remember that delivered risk has been properly handed over to the BAU leader who’s going to be managing that going forward. And that’s really important to someone like me.”
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