Christopher Monsour has held significant leadership roles in the actuarial and analytics fields. He is a Fellow of the Casualty Actuarial Society, a Certified Specialist in Predictive Analytics, a member of the American Academy of Actuaries, and has a master’s degree in mathematics from the University of Chicago. With expertise in predictive analytics and data science, Monsour has contributed to advancing actuarial practices by integrating advanced analytics to improve risk assessment and reserving processes. His work emphasizes bridging technical actuarial skills with broader business insights and innovation.
Journey from Math to Business
I went into insurance when I decided not to pursue an academic career. My path has been driven by a combination of curiosity, technical depth, and a steady focus on achieving business results through predictive analytics. I started in the mid-nineties at Allstate, where I worked on personal lines. The environment at their research center exposed me to statisticians and machine learning experts who expanded my thinking far beyond the traditional actuarial playbook. Their influence helped me approach pricing and marketing problems with a broader analytical mindset, which I then applied throughout my career.
Later, I moved to commercial and specialty lines, leading predictive analytics for Middle Markets at Travelers and for the enterprise at CNA. I built strong teams, mentored and developed talented individuals, and learned to foster change at organizations with considerable inertia. A shift came six years ago when I entered the startup world. My first experience involved improving an automated machine learning product and making it easier for users to adopt. That exposure to iteration and product thinking prepared me well for my insurance return, still within startups, where I now serve as Chief Actuary at CompScience.
CompScience: Tech-Driven Risk Control
Technology is transforming the insurance space, making workers safer while driving enterprise growth.
Actuaries deliver the greatest value when they help steer an organization’s strategic vision and measure it on the path to that vision.
Computer vision allows us to analyze hundreds of hours of footage and identify high-risk moments that no human could monitor manually. It also captures safety hazards that are unlikely to occur during a risk-services visit. This capability transforms traditional risk control, prevents thousands of injuries, and provides safety managers with insights that they had not previously received.
At CompScience, my team works closely with computer vision experts who identify risky events in customer video. At a tactical level, once the most concerning types of events are identified. (e.g., forklifts being driven with the blades up or workers bending at the waist too frequently), CompScience provides concrete feedback to each customer as to how they can improve their safety, and the customer’s corrective actions then help drive renewal conversations.
We further support the underwriting team by providing pricing guidance that, while grounded in loss history and class rates, also considers the safety improvement we are likely to help a prospective customer achieve. We are constantly revising this guidance based on improvements to our computer vision analyses and empirical loss results. We have also made the pricing tools easier to use by automating the ingestion of loss runs and policy documents.
Leading with Strategic Insight
Even the most sophisticated operations require good old-fashioned feedback mechanisms. We produce reports that break down performance by vertical (industry) and by individual large accounts. These reports show the timing of safety recommendations, the degree to which customers implemented them, and the changes in claims behavior that followed. This allows us quickly to see what works and what does not.
At a strategic level, we identify the types of work environments where our solution excels, needs adjustment, or shows no impact. The startup environment demands fast feedback and fast corrections, with no time to wait months to assess progress. That expectation transforms actuarial work by embracing a fail-fast mentality, betting on innovations, and swiftly reallocating resources when data indicates a different direction. As I rely heavily on early insights, I developed techniques to project loss ratios from initial claims reports before meaningful case reserves are established. Capacity partners demand superior results, so the pressure is always there (as a startup) to grow quickly (as an MGA) to deliver underwriting profits. Making the right decisions quickly is essential for staying on that beam.
Guidance for Actuaries
With 30 years in the insurance industry, I have some advice about how to develop as an actuary.
First, embrace roles that allow you to touch many areas of insurance. Consulting offers broad exposure, and machine-learning or predictive analytics teams inside insurance companies connect to underwriting, pricing, claims, marketing, distribution, and regulatory relations. Working across these areas builds a fundamental understanding of insurance and its wide variety of products and customer needs.
Second, get involved in non-actuarial technical work, especially early on. Building predictive analytics models and doing considerable programming early in my career helped me stay at the cutting edge of actuarial science even after I was no longer doing those things daily.
Finally, product development is another powerful way to learn. Nothing reveals what people value better than seeing which features they respond to. For example, in the abstract, there may be an optimal pricing algorithm that accounts for many characteristics of each risk. Nonetheless, in the real world, innovative components of a pricing plan may not be valuable merely because they improve accuracy. It is also essential that the required information be readily obtainable and that underwriters be able to explain the resulting prices to agents and brokers. In some cases, the underwriters have no pricing power and, rather than using a pricing tool, may use it to determine the most desirable excess layer to write. Understand the use cases and design the tool to serve them.
Over time, the most meaningful contribution comes from participating in strategic decision-making. Actuaries deliver the greatest value when they help steer an organization’s strategic vision.
