Reserving Actuary in City of London

This is an opportunity to join Ascot Group - one of the world’s preeminent specialty risk underwriting organizations. The role will contribute to the ongoing build out of Ascot’s in‑house reserving capabilities, which is currently in a transition phase having previously been outsourced. During 2025 the Ascot team have taken responsibility for the setting and coordination of the quarterly reserves and are now defining and building the remaining components required for the end‑to‑end reserving process during 2025/2026. The person will require both technical skills and the ability to pick up new things quickly and work effectively with different parts of the business, offering immediate support to the development of the reserving process. The role includes both project development/process improvement as well as quarterly reserving analysis.

Responsibilities

• Enhance the capabilities of the reserving function.
• Contribute to the ongoing development of in‑house reserving processes in collaboration with both internal and external resources, including the wider Ascot Group reserving function.
• Provide insight into both process improvements and development of new analysis to improve the output and robustness of the reserving process.
• Enhance Syndicate and Group reporting, including Lloyd’s reporting, accident year view of syndicate reserves, PYD analysis, analysis of change, IBNR forecasting and liability durations.
• Enhance reserving diagnostics (including but not limited to the use of both Power BI and Excel) and the use of these to communicate reserves to other departments.
• Assist in development of other team members, including reserving analysts and peer review of reserving analysis.

Wider Support of the Reserving Function

• Work collaboratively across the reserving function, both on a local and group basis.
• Ability to offer suggestions of improvements to processes and analyses.
• Be confident in producing and communicating quarterly reserve estimates for the syndicate to a variety of audiences including peer review and feedback.
• Use appropriate actuarial techniques and analysis to calculate best estimate reserves and to identify and allow for trends and other changes over time.
• Set up and carry out deep dive reviews of individual classes of business and ad‑hoc reserving analyses including using Arius reserving software.
• Communicate the results of these analyses with other teams, including non‑actuarial audiences.
• Monitor and analyse data sources to extract value and inform reserving assumptions.
• Monitor reserving metrics and MI to identify trends and early indicators to extract business value from reserving insights.
• Prepare and communicate regular reports on reserves, claims experience and other reserving metrics for both reserving team and wider use.
• Prepare papers for meetings with underwriters, consultants and Reserve Committee.
• Contribute to the feedback loop between reserving, pricing, business planning and capital modelling.
• Respond to requests of other departments for information on reserves, assumptions and data.
• Liaise with other Ascot functions as necessary, such as Finance, Claims, Underwriting and Reinsurance in order to further the objectives of the team.

Contribution to Actuarial Function

• Proactive and positive contribution to the (Group) actuarial function with respect to culture and teamwork, contributing to the overarching objectives of the team.
• Contribute to the development of Ascot group reserving reporting to increase consistency and synergies between entities.
• Provide support to the capital modelling and/or pricing functions as required, and dependent on skills and preference of the successful candidate.
• Assist with the production of the Actuarial Function report.

Other

• Demonstrate commitment to personal and team development.
• Identifying opportunities to work more efficiently and rigorously, including development of other team members and team collaboration.
• Study towards actuarial qualification, if desired.
• Undertake relevant technical training to develop actuarial and business knowledge.

Qualifications

• Relevant London Market experience of reserving essential with Lloyd’s reporting experience desirable.
• IFoA qualified actuary preferred with relevant experience of actuarial reserving techniques.
• Proactive candidate that can prioritise and manage own workload as well as being collaborative within a team.
• Critical thinking skills – problem diagnosis and problem solving.
• Ability to think ‘outside of the box’ to find a solution.
• Excellent written and oral communication skills, including report writing and ability to summarise complex points in insightful management information.
• Good commercial awareness and ability to build and maintain positive relationships across functions.
• Ability to identify business challenges and propose and implement solutions to meet needs.
• Strong organisational, analytical and decision‑making skills and attention to detail.
• Enthusiastic, proactive and pragmatic.
• Microsoft Office skills, especially in Excel.
• Transferable experience in reserving software or programming languages (e.g. SQL, Python, R, Alteryx) is beneficial.
• Appetite to learn new software skills to advance capabilities and efficiencies of the team.