In the first post of the year we are taking a quick look back to revisit some of our most-viewed articles and videos from the past 12 months, as well as some of the best content we contributed to for other publications.

Our CEO of North America Geoff Keast sat down with several brilliant figures from across the insurtech industry this year. In early February he chatted with Matt Wolf, who shared his experience of working as an actuary in large carriers before joining the innovative life insurer Haven Life, as actuarial lead. Matt shared his views on the personalization of life insurance in the future, and what this means for assessing risk. Watch the full video interview with Matt here.

In May, an article by Geoff was published by Insurance Thought Leadership, in which he shared his views on how personalization is necessary for insurers to achieve successful relationships with customers in the modern world. Read Geoff's article on Insurance Thought Leadership.

Geoff visited Madison, WI where he met with American Family chief actuary Prakash Shimpi. Prakash shares Montoux’s belief that pigeonholing the actuarial profession is a mistake, and they are more than capable of becoming business leaders. Prakash said, "If anything, actuarial training gives me the ability to do a lot more than most people expect." Watch the full interview with Prakash here.

Geoff had an extended conversation with Swiss Re’s Chris Behling, with this video on the life insurance industry catching up to P&C proving the most popular. Chris believes, "We need to build products that meet a real perceived need that we don't need to remind the client that they have." Watch the four part series with Chris here.

With Millennials overtaking Baby Boomers as the biggest segment of the US workforce, we took a look at why this large, valuable demographic isn’t rushing to buy life insurance - and considered how carriers might channel their focus in bridging this divide. Read our thoughts here.

In September, our lead actuary in New York Ben Tran co-presented a Society of Actuaries webinar, in which he shared his experience and observations of how culture differs between insurtech companies and Fortune 500 companies. We followed up his presentation by sharing this blog post, which highlights his main points. “In a large company, your decisions may have more economic or social impact, but in small companies you are able to impact a greater percentage of your customers or company. On a personal level, I’ve always felt the latter to be more rewarding.” Take a look at his further points from the webinar here.

The Montoux team grew substantially in 2018, with one third of Montouvians now bringing with them an actuarial background. One of our most popular posts presented the case of why we believe an actuary should be one of any insurtech’s firsts hires. Read our thoughts here - we’d love to hear your opinions on this!

We built such a great relationship with the wonderful Pat Renzi this year. Pat is the Principal of Life Technology Solutions at Milliman, and we were honoured to film her, sharing her thoughts on actuarial transformation with Geoff. Take a look at this six-part series here.

To wrap up the year, Geoff Keast was featured in a brilliant article by Rick Huckstep, which asked innovative leaders in actuarial fields to share their views on the role of the digital actuary in the 21st century. Geoff said, "In the future, models will have to be built on platforms that are natively cloud-based and use language and techniques that are able to ingest data from a variety of sources (i.e. API driven) and data agnostic (don’t care about where the data comes from). The use of AI and machine learning capabilities will need to be self-learning as the data and models change and evolve." Read the full article here.

Our final blog post of the year outlined the concept of a life insurance company’s ‘efficient frontier’, and how Montoux can help to determine where the company’s pricing sits in relation to that line. Our co-founder and global CEO Klaas Stijnen shared some of the observations he’s made from discussing this opportunity with life insurance executives and actuaries around the world. Read the blog post here.

Going forward into 2019, we have a great deal of content coming which will take a deeper dive into the efficient frontier, pricing transformation, the actuary of the future - and much more! If you haven’t subscribed to our Shifting Gears newsletter please do so - published every two weeks, it brings a selection of insurtech stories and Montoux news straight to your inbox.