Senior Portfolio Underwriting Analyst

Job Type:

Build a brilliant future with Hiscox

The team and role

The UK Portfolio Underwriting 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 Portfolio Underwriting 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.

In this role you’ll be someone who loves stakeholder management and knowing the who’s who as you’ll be networking and talking to the wider business, including Product Heads, Heads of Underwriting, and our Chief Underwriting Officer. You’ll be comfortable presenting on technical subjects and making real data driven decisions to shape the wider underwriting portfolio aligned with business objectives.

As a Senior Portfolio Underwriting Analyst, you’ll drive projects and analysis and influence the growing book of non-standard high net worth household, motor, SME commercial as well as specialty lines. The Senior Portfolio Underwriting Analyst plays a critical contributing role influencing the performance of our portfolio underwritten business and driving profitable growth for Hiscox UK.

What you’ll be doing

· Being the end-to-end architect of portfolio underwriting changes that support delivering budgeted volume and profitability targets over the underwriting cycle. This includes conceptually designing the changes and modelling their financial and customer impacts, making recommendations directly to Heads of Underwriting, writing of governance committee papers and ensuring changes follow the full governance and change cycle to implementation.

· Working closely with key stakeholders including heads of underwriting and heads of distribution on analysis and projects. Asking questions to understand their priorities and to scope individual projects. Presenting recommendations and findings to senior stakeholders with the support of lead analysts. You will need to be comfortable in juggling conflicting priorities between senior stakeholders, building a strong relationship with them.

· Design, development and production of regular portfolio management reporting for CUO and Heads of Underwriting to monitor performance of the UK portfolio.

· Independently producing analysis on a monthly basis to further understand changing trends and analyse quote conversion, policy retention, customer behaviour, claims experience with the aim of driving real change into the business aligned with the UK strategy.

· Maintenance and implementation of system underwriting rules for all UK products. Including delivery of simple underwriting changes from end to end, testing of prices before and after implementation and working with change colleagues and business analysts to deliver more complex underwriting changes.

· Applying knowledge of the underwriting cycle and the external insurance market to make portfolio decisions.

· Applying knowledge of the regulatory environment to all portfolio decisions and ensuring recommendations result in our customers being treated fairly and consistently in line with Hiscox values.

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

· Providing an independent review and recommendation for senior underwriting management on large individual case underwritten risks.

· Taking accountability of all your own underwriting recommendation and the performance of all models used for your products.

· Offering support and coaching for portfolio underwriting analysts, sharing your own experience and expertise to support their development

Person Specification:

We are looking for an individual who is highly analytical, driven and detail orientated with a passion for excellent execution. You will need to be articulate and exhibit a track record of good decision-making skills, working under pressure and to tight deadlines, with an ability to quickly understand problems and create and implement solutions. As a senior portfolio underwriting analyst experience is required but more important is an extremely good understanding of the nuances involved in performing detailed analytics combined with a strong commercial mindset.

Our must haves:

· Of graduate calibre with at least 3 years’ experience and proven success in a similar role

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

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

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

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

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

· 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 understanding of Commercial Lines and/or Personal Lines insurance through various distribution channels

Our nice to haves:

· 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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