Win-Li Toh, who picked up the gong for Insurance Leader of the Year at ANZIIF’s 19th Australian Insurance Industry Awards in August, has certainly come a long way from her early years as a child in Ipoh, then a small mining town in Malaysia.

She enjoyed mathematics, good debate and problem solving at school and was later accepted into Oxford University to study mathematics.  After graduating, she went to a careers fair and met two female actuaries from Clay and Partners who would influence the future direction of her life.

“They were really charismatic, eloquent and fun,” she says. They asked Toh to come in for an interview and offered her a job the very same day.

Real world consequences

Toh describes Clay and Partners as a small London-based actuarial consultancy that then employed about 40 people. She was allocated to a team that had just taken on the case of Robert Maxwell. His death triggered the collapse of his publishing empire after it emerged that he’d stolen from his companies’ pension funds.

To her surprise, Toh was allowed to answer the phone and help those who had lost their pensions. “I guess it brought home to me that I wasn’t just calculating numbers but dealing with real-world consequences,” she says.

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