Head of Pricing at Hollard Insurance

Job Advert Summary    

• Hello… an exciting new opportunity has just become available in our Risk and Underwriting Division | Hollard Insure Business Unit.  We are looking to recruit a Head of Pricing.

Role Objectives:

• Provide unified strategic and technical leadership for pricing across Personal Lines, Commercial and Specialty lines. Own the end-to-end pricing capability from data ingestion and model development to deployment, monitoring and portfolio action while modernising the stack and driving adoption of secondary-perils and climate-aware techniques. Ensure performance transparency and financial alignment of pricing data to Finance actuals across the organisation.

Strategic Outcomes (What success looks like)

• Modernised pricing data foundation: A single, governed ingestion layer (first-party, partner and external peril or climate feeds) with documented lineage, quality rules and privacy or compliance controls; reliable joins to policy, claims and finance datasets.
• Finance-reconciled reporting: A standard pricing management reporting framework where pricing measures such as Actual versus Expected, price strength, uplift, elasticity, retention and mix reconcile to finance (ledger and business intelligence) at agreed tolerances and timelines.
• Model excellence and adoption: Generalised linear model and machine learning rating frameworks deployed with disciplined model operations; measurable lift versus baselines; consistent calibration across lines; rapid rollout cadence.
• Secondary-perils leadership: Systematic use of hail, flood, wildfire and wind vulnerability views and peril scores in pricing and underwriting rules; scenario and return-period sensitivity built into portfolio steering and renewal actions.
• Commercial impact: Clear price-for-risk, improved return on capital and loss ratio targets met per portfolio; visible playbooks for broker negotiations and effective renewal pricing strategies.
• One-team operating model: A Pricing Centre of Excellence with segment focus, shared tooling, unified governance and reduced vendor or tool duplication.

Key Responsibilities:

Pricing Strategy and Governance

• Set enterprise pricing strategy in conjunction with the CUO across Personal Lines, Commercial and Specialty; harmonise philosophy, documentation and guardrails.
• Establish & Chair the Pricing Committee; align decision rights with Reinsurance, Corporate Actuarial, Finance, Distribution and Technical Underwriting.
• Own model risk governance, validation cadence and change control for rate deployment, including rollback criteria.

Data Ingestion, Quality and Financial Reconciliation

• Build the modern ingestion layer across policy and claims, quote and bind, broker, binder -holder, telematics or Internet of Things, geospatial, vendor data and climate or secondary-perils datasets; define metadata, lineage and quality thresholds.
• Lead pricing-to-Finance reconciliation: design bridging logic, tolerance bands and monthly sign-off workflow; publish a single source of truth management information pack.
• Establish data service-level agreements covering latency, completeness and accuracy, as well as data-issue escalation paths.

Modelling and Analytics

• Oversee generalised linear models, tree-based machine learning and other non-linear techniques; ensure stability, interpretability and fairness.
• Integrate peril scores and hazard intensity measures (hail, flood, wildfire, convective storm) into technical price, underwriting rules and segmentation.
• Partner with Reinsurance on capital, excess of loss and catastrophe considerations; quantify price–capital trade-offs in model choices.

Deployment, Monitoring and Portfolio Steering

• Industrialise deployment across rating engines with continuous integration and continuous delivery, champion testing frameworks and controlled pilots.
• Run portfolio dashboards for Actual versus Expected, impact analysis and price strength ratio; convert insight into pricing actions and broker playbooks.
• Lead renewal of pricing frameworks and elasticity-aware strategies to maximise retention at target margin.

Required Knowledge and Experience    
Skills and experience

• 8-12 or more years of property and\or casualty pricing across multiple lines; prior team leadership across Personal Lines and Commercial and Specialty.
• Demonstrated rollout of modern pricing platforms and cloud-based data pipelines; strong Python and SQL skills, with experience supervising generalised linear models and machine learning models in production.
• Hands-on integration of secondary-perils and convective-storm views into pricing and underwriting decision-making; familiarity with reinsurance capital interactions.

Technical Skills (must-have)

• Modelling: generalised linear models, regularisation, tree-based machine learning; calibration and stability; uplift and elasticity measurement; price strength analysis.
• Tooling: Python andSQL; rating platforms such as Radar or Earnix; version control; feature stores; application programming interface-based rating.
• Data and cloud: data modelling, ingestion frameworks, data quality rules and lineage; patterns on Microsoft Azure (preferably), Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud Platform for analytics.
• Perils and climate: use of vendor hazard layers and vulnerability functions; portfolio hot-spotting and mitigation levers; integration into rates and referral rules.

Educational Requirements    

• Fellow Actuary (Actuarial Society of South Africa, Institute and Faculty of Actuaries or equivalent), or near qualified with an exceptional pricing leadership record; an advanced degree in statistics or data science is beneficial.