Insurance pricing has a delivery problem. Actuaries can build technically robust models, but before those models generate any real business value, they must navigate data pipelines, product workflows, IT systems and governance processes. That journey, as Akur8 knows well, rarely belongs to actuaries alone.
In a discussion featuring Akur8 chief actuarial officer Thomas Holmes and Akur8 senior solution architect Marianne Farmiga, the InsurTech firm examined why cross-functional collaboration in pricing so often breaks down, and what organisations can do differently.
Modern insurance pricing is increasingly a team sport. Actuaries work alongside data scientists, underwriters, IT departments, product managers and external vendors. Each brings a different vocabulary and a different definition of success. The challenge is not to erase those differences, but to align them around a shared objective.
Akur8’s view is that the most common mistake in cross-functional projects is entering them with a predefined solution. Actuarial precision is a professional strength, but too much specificity too early can foreclose better approaches. Framing requests around desired outcomes rather than prescribed implementations allows IT teams to identify scalable paths, product teams to consider adoption, and data teams to assess feasibility, while actuaries retain control over pricing intent.
Terminology is another underestimated friction point. Rating factors and relativities mean nothing to an engineer thinking in APIs and data schemas. If those definitions are not aligned at the outset, teams can spend weeks believing they are solving the same problem while reaching entirely different conclusions. Akur8 argues that actuaries are well-placed to serve as translators between statistical, technical and commercial domains, a role that grows more critical as pricing systems become more automated.
Trust, the company notes, must be built before the critical moment, not during it. When teams only interact at formal handoffs, misalignment surfaces too late and rework becomes expensive. Shorter feedback loops throughout the process help surface constraints early. This matters most when pricing changes are approaching production, where delays embedded in legacy policy administration systems can neutralise the competitive value of a rate decision entirely.
Underpinning all of this, Akur8 points to technology as a structural enabler. When rating logic is decoupled from monolithic core systems and managed transparently, actuaries can retain ownership of pricing logic whilst IT maintains governance standards. The result is collaboration built into the workflow, rather than bolted on around it.
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