Diary of an Insurer: Parametrix’s Yulia Brod

Sunday

I begin my week making sandwiches for my two kids, then taking them to school as my husband leaves for the office. 

Our work in digital supply chain monitoring is worldwide and 24/7, so my day starts a bit later in the morning, which allows me the time to indulge in my passion for staying fit. After I head to the gym, I make the refreshing 40-minute walk to the office.

We’re looking for a new person to join the team I manage, so I spend a couple of hours reviewing resumés. Beyond professional skills, I am looking for someone who will also be a good match personally. Someone who can work well with our team of engineers, make a good cultural fit, and stand up to the pressure.

Later I meet with our head of marketing to talk about our annual cloud outage report. My part is all about the numbers, which we collect and collate from our Cloud Monitoring System. 

I don’t get home until about 8pm, but my husband’s already there supervising the children’s homework. I do the morning shift, he does evenings.

Monday

The first thing I do when I get to the office is present to my team our new objectives for the week. I tend to give them a lot of tasks, but we work together as a team to get it done. In my previous role at Parametrix I worked in the actuarial department. I transitioned into my current role at the beginning of December, but I still oversee practical data management work.

Later I chat with the team about a couple of the resumés that I like, because I want to see what they think, too. Happily, we agree that we should invite one of the candidates to the office for a meeting. I give him a call.

After work, we head off to a nearby bar – our usual – for a few beverages, and to get some much-needed downtime. I think it’s important to catch up with the team and build our bonds in a relaxed setting.

Tuesday

Downtime of a different sort has caused a bit of a crisis in the office today. A potentially serious outage happened at one of the major cloud service providers. A European data centre has been offline for a few hours, so it’s a potential loss event for us.

It is likely to be just a minor irritation for most users of the affected infrastructure, but it could be a different story for others. Some may suffer a significant business interruption loss. I spend the day focusing on compiling and analysing the relevant cloud performance logs.

Everyone, including my whole team, spends time on the system interruption logs to interpret and understand the outage. We work intensively on it for three hours. I take in all their analytics, formulate correct assumptions about the incident, and then combine their findings to make a decision: is it an insured event for some of our customers?

Wednesday

After I drop my children at school, I look online at computer courses. Not for me, but for my 11-year-old. Despite his young age, he’s already completed two computer science courses. I consider giving him some logs to analyse.

At work, we follow through on yesterday’s activities. Because our policies are parametric, the decision is clear-cut once all the relevant data has been collected and assessed. I discuss the loss event with various colleagues and identify the policies that have been affected by the outage so we can prepare declarations of loss for those customers. 

When they send them back, confirming they suffered business interruption, we will issue the pre-agreed payment within days.

Then I spend some time explaining the event to the insurers who back us. I also speak to our account management team so that they can liaise with customers.

After that hectic couple of days, I need a distraction. My daughter plays violin, and happily she is performing in a school concert tonight, which the whole family attends. It is amazing.

Thursday

On Thursday, I interview the person we chose from the resumés. He has a lot of experience in analytics, and none in insurance (which is fine). More importantly, he has worked in a couple of small teams within tech start-ups, so he understands the environment (hectic!), and says he thrives in it.

I send him out for lunch with two colleagues, and they come back with good reports. I think I’ve found our new team member. It’s a good way to end a typical, frantic week.