Meet The Seynators | Nabil Seddiki, Pricing & Acquisition Manager

Can you quickly introduce yourself and tell us about your role at Seyna and how long you've been working here?

I trained as an actuary and joined Seyna in September 2022 to develop the Health Insurance vertical.

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If you had to introduce yourself in 3 words?

Calm: I'm sometimes described as a quiet force. It's true that I don't lose my temper very often.

Conciliatory: I'm quick to compromise. It's sometimes complex in our businesses, but it's very often the only way to get all the teams on board and get things done.

Empathetic: I have a fairly natural grasp of what's at stake for everyone.

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Your fondest professional memory? Working for Seyna or not...

Without revealing any secrets, we probably won the backing of a client who had previously given us a No-Go. Deal that the team had worked hard on. I had to come up with 1,000 solutions and talk to half the company, but I loved it! It enabled us to unblock a structuring issue for Seyna and we were able to celebrate this small victory as a team too.

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What made you decide to join Seyna?

I'd been wanting to join an ‘entrepreneurial’ project for some time, where I could have a significant impact. When the opportunity arose to join Seyna to help them develop their healthcare business, the project appealed to me straight away: there was a lot to build and a highly motivated team.

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So at Seyna you're Pricing & Acquisition Manager - in concrete terms, what does that mean / what do you do?

I'm in charge of the pricing of new insurance products launched by our partner brokers in our various verticals. In practical terms, my job is to support/advise our partners in the creation of their offers and to propose pricing that will enable the product to develop profitably.

On a slightly more macro level, I'm responsible for refining our healthcare risk management models. How can we aggregate data to derive the main principles that will enable us to price our products faster and more accurately than others?

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What do you like most about being Pricing & Acquisition Manager at Seyna?

There are several things that make my job very interesting:

First of all, the diversity of the products I work on: I work as much on health as on breakdown cover, breakage, theft or even ticket/travel cancellation cover... With different issues each time, which is very stimulating intellectually on a daily basis.

Secondly, Seyna's positioning as a platform means that we work with a whole range of players: managers, service providers, carriers, reinsurers, etc. We have to get to grips with all of these issues. We inevitably go into the details of each business. You have to understand the specificities of each business and all the day-to-day issues involved.

Beyond the purely technical aspect, I develop a better knowledge of the field, which helps me to offer the best possible guarantees to our partners.

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What do you think is the greatest challenge/project waiting for you at Seyna?

To reach a level of maturity and efficiency that enables us to move very quickly, to combine speed of execution with actuarial finesse. We endeavour to always arrive with analysis axes. Seyna is recognised for its business expertise. This is something we want to continue to develop and in which we are investing heavily.

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What qualities do you look for in team-mates? And what value in Seyna are you most sensitive to?

I really like the ‘humble expert’ aspect of the Seynators, which is real. Everyone is a master of their subject but they never stop listening. As actuaries, we have to be very mathematical and rational about the decisions we make. This can sometimes generate feelings of certainty. But the reality in the field is that there is always an element of intuition and uncertainty. It's very rewarding to work in a team that recognises this and is always open to constructive debate.

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What's your superpower? What people tell you you can do better and faster than others.

My superpower is to remain calm in any situation, or at least to let it appear that way! Particularly useful for maintaining a constructive atmosphere in negotiations.

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What do you do outside work that helps you most professionally? (Routine, extra-curricular activity, charity work, etc.)

It's not the answer you'd expect, but I have a huge vegetable garden. (Laughs) The parallel with actuarial work isn't obvious, but I love building, planting and tinkering. It's a nice counterbalance to our more cerebral daily lives.

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Finally, what advice would you give to someone considering joining our team? What do you think makes our company a great place to work?

Put simply, Seyna is a company where you'll be asked to do a lot of things quickly. If you see a problem or a subject that interests you, you can make it your own and see it through to the end.

And to help you do that, you'll also be able to draw on the support of some very high-calibre colleagues. As well as getting on well together, everyone has an opinion, convictions and shares them. There's always a good idea to help you move forward.

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