Picture an actuary.
Now imagine a Chief Actuary at an international insurance company.
Chances are you’ve not conjured a very accurate portrait of Alice Boreman, Chief Actuary at RB Jones.
If, without any further prompting, you had brought to mind someone significantly older, possibly of a different gender, and with a lengthy, homogenous career history of increasingly senior actuarial roles, then you’re probably not alone in your stereotypical characterisation. “Typical” actuaries might tend to fit a certain mould.
But, as she frequently mentions – and in fact what a lot of people tell her – Alice Boreman is not a very traditional actuary. “Unique” or “not a normal actuary” are amongst the most common descriptions she receives.
With a background in consultancy, soon becoming a Partner at EY, then transitioning to H.W. Kaufman International’s first ever Chief Actuary last year, Alice doesn’t seem to have much time for convention or tradition.
Instead of conforming to expectations and doing things the way they’ve always been done, Boreman came to her current role precisely because she wanted to build an actuarial operation from scratch. And, in successfully doing so, it appears she’s striving to establish a brand-new approach to insurance actuarial, to the benefit of the whole operation of RB Jones Global.
Joining the dots and working from first principles
“I just can’t bear to not think about a problem myself,” she says, “and understand why we’re doing something the way we are.”
Far from accepting an actuary’s role as a back-office function merely quantifying risk in isolation or after the fact, Alice came to H.W. Kaufman Group principally because it was an opportunity to build something more dynamic and commercial from the ground up.
Her approach to coming up with solutions and establishing new ways of working is borne of an insistence on first principles, rather than accepting the way things have customarily been set up and run. This is something she’s passionate about instilling in her team too, a dedicated group of young and driven actuaries, some of whom have followed Boreman into H.W. Kaufman after working with her elsewhere.
“People say I’m good at connecting the dots”
As a former consultant used to managing stakeholder relationships to find the best solution, she likes to listen to advice from everybody, absorbing many opinions, but then make her decisions by seeing the opportunities that lie in the otherwise invisible connections between people and ideas.
Conducting an award-nominated collaboration to create a new way of underwriting
With support from HWKI leadership, Alice joined the group to embrace a rare chance to combine data and technology, designing and constructing a bespoke actuarial platform. Working alongside colleagues in the Transformation and IT teams, the aim was custom-build a system for underwriters and MGAs that achieves accuracy, efficiency and usability that is hard to find anywhere else.
“To run good models you need good data and technology. But I think without the people piece of that puzzle it’s all just a nice academic exercise. Those relationships internally, with capacity, and with brokers are really critical.”
As the entry for the Insurer Insider Honours award-shortlisted work states, the partnership of H. W. Kaufman, Moody’s, Azur and hyperexponential that delivered the project is a “genuine example of effective collaboration, delivered with a level of ambition and pace the market should want to celebrate and replicate.”
What Alice’s actuarial approach means for RB Jones Global
In her idea for success for RB Jones, Alice is committed to delivering on her promises made to capacity providers at the beginning of the process, and seeing the fruits of her labour grow. Work on fulfilling those promises is already underway, with a system up and running that delivers robust, transparent and market-aligned modeling to the RB Jones Global underwriting operation.
Alice Boreman at HX Live 2026
All risks are technically priced, with exposures and granular portfolio exposures and profitability visible to capacity providers, promoting technical rigour, transparency and collaboration. Alice’s actuarial team are in close partnership with both the RB Jones Global underwriters and capacity partners, ensuring pricing adequacy and underwriting quality is being monitored to achieve an optimal outcome for all parties.
The underwriters themselves are served through the collaborative process and easy-to-use models and reporting, allowing them to make streamlined, time-efficient decisions based on actuarially supported insights. In the new system, they have access to rapidly changing models and dynamic analytics, allowing them to focus on the broader commercial picture when writing a risk.
The end result is a faster turnaround for brokers and clients, based on granular risk assessment that produces differential pricing.
The longer-term aim is to employ an increasingly reliable data feedback loop to improve support for the new products as time goes on. On top of that, it’s about delivering a best-in-class premium for the market in the coming years, something that will be beneficial to everyone in the chain.
“On the one hand this project is slightly terrifying, but on the other it’s really exciting because I think we’ve built some really good foundations. Now we need to build the next five projects that we’re bringing on board and align everyone to our view.”
Telling stories and building relationships
Alice’s key strength might be an ability to convene people in unconventional combinations and leverage those partnerships to everyone’s benefit. The result is the creation of something better than the sum of its parts. These attributes have been already been noticed in industry awards submissions, with recent nominations for the Insurance Insider Honours and Women in Insurance Awards.
Aside from industry recognition, the ultimate achievement for Alice’s team will be to maintain the level of quality and rigour on their live portfolios as they grow, whilst onboarding more new and innovative products at the same time.
Meanwhile, regardless of whether anyone thinks of her as a “normal” Chief Actuary, Alice will continue to drive actuarial innovation within RB Jones Global, supporting a growing team of exceptional talent. And they’re only just getting started.
