Joining a new insurer: Cedric’s bet
Cedric joined Alan at the end of March 2021 in the Insurance community and has set his focus on the Belgian market. Coming from a background in consulting and project based work at different financial players, the shift to a startup environment was a completely new adventure. This interview explores the opportunities and challenges that Cedric experienced during his first months at Alan.
Alan: After working for 3 years as an Actuarial consultant in the Insurance sector, you have decided to join us. Why did you explore new opportunities and what convinced you to join Alan?
Cedric: Honestly I stumbled upon Alan rather by accident. My attention was triggered with a simple post on LinkedIn mentioning this new health insurance player. This post formed the start of some web searches and the more I read about the history of Alan, the culture and the product mindset, the more I was eager to help this startup grow in Belgium.
I was especially interested in the clean slate in which Alan can operate; there aren’t legacy systems or product history that hold us back from delivering the best health insurance products needed by our members. This is something you don’t have at a regular insurance company so this was the “opportunity” for me. Adding on top of this, a fun and dynamic team, I was completely convinced to join Alan.
Alan: What have you learned since you arrived at Alan?
Cedric: I learned to move out of my comfort zone. Before, I was mainly focused on the technical product side such as pricing or reserving and financial analysis exercises to estimate impact of new regulations. Now I have to start the product development from another angle; start with the member and health care system to see where we can offer the best services. This approach enforces you to always look at the bigger picture. Also knowing that you are working on a product that directly impacts (in a positive way) our members, lets me finish my day with a big smile.
Alan: What makes you really happy in your role today?
Cedric: What makes me really happy is that, given our startup spirit, my responsibilities go way beyond the traditional barriers for a role such as mine and take up responsibilities that are only partly related to my role. For example, there are many tasks that would fall under someone else’s ownership in a large company, but given our small Belgian team we need to solve the problems with the people present. By taking on these new challenges, I can go beyond my current skills and learn by doing on a broad spectrum of topics. Experiencing this constant flow of learning opportunities creates a lot of personal growth and keeps everything interesting with the huge variety of challenges. On top of this you immediately notice your impact on the overall company in which you help writing the story of Alan.
Alan: What is the most interesting part in the development of a new country as an insurance product
Cedric: One of the fun things being at a new company is the ability to free float, do by learning and define a new process on the go. We have a strong culture in fast testing a new approach and quickly iterate on the outcomes. This way of working allows us to apply methods and models as we see fit at that moment and adjust if necessary. This also gives us flexibility and triggers creativity to come up with new ideas and approaches. And trust me, creativity is necessary for the challenges we face. For example we only have a scarce amount of data available given our limited history. Therefore we should find a good and accurate way to define our premium and setup of our reserves while at the same time not overthinking the problem.
Alan: What differentiates us from other players (like are you doing things you could not do in your previous job)?
Cedric: What differentiates Alan from other players in the insurance market, and even other companies in general is the thorough transparency. A well quoted example is that we all see each other’s salary but this is in my opinion just a political transparency topic. The real power in our transparency policy is that we all have access to everything in our organisation, from all conversations to all access rights to all our systems. This allows me for example to directly go in the backend to see the programmed logic and directly propose changes when necessary. Here there is a huge gain in efficiency as we saw last month during the contract update exercise. Since I could directly adjust the code to generate our contracts, I didn’t have to involve unnecessary stakeholders to request access rights, communicate changes, perform review of the implemented adjustments etc.
Another point that differentiates us and what I really appreciate is our customer centricity. And it is not a buzz word that is used by many. We actually implement it by, for example, a mandatory members day; everyone in Alan should spend one day per month helping our members with their questions.
Alan: What were your concerns before joining Alan?
Cedric: Before joining, I was worried about the lack of social contact due to the combination of the covid context and Alan’s written culture. It turned out to be a non-issue since our written culture doesn’t contradict our social interactions. To show you what I mean I need to explain our Work from Anywhere policy. At Alan we highly believe you are the best person to decide where you can work the best. This means that you can work from home when you need to really focus or just need to be at home in time to get your kids from school. On the other hand the policy also perfectly allows us to come to the office to meet colleagues or work from any exotic location to stimulate your open and creative mode. This way of working nicely facilite our written culture where all decisions are made via written discussions so you never miss out on what is going on in the company. So to come back to the question; aren’t you missing the social contact? No, since we discuss content in writing, we can completely focus on some “social chat” when we meet in the office or via the many virtual coffees.
Another concern before joining Alan was my relative limited experience. Being active for 4 years in the financial sector and 3 years in insurance, made me hold back for this huge role and “to launch a new insurer in Belgium”. This challenge was overcome by two factors, 1) the amazing support of my colleagues, both in Belgium as from the insurance community in France and 2) the drive within Alan to start topics and learn on the go.
Alan: What would you say to insurance specialists who might be interested in joining us?
Cedric: The best advice I can give is “dare to take the risk”. This is hard given the risk averse character of the average actuary but try to focus on the challenge and opportunity. The growth, both on a professional and personal level, will pay off! On top you will be welcomed in a really amazing team and can work in a company with a culture where both fun and changing the business are the main drivers.
