From the classroom to consulting, Alan Xian is building bridges between insurance, research and the next generation; driven by a belief in the industry’s power to help people.

When Alan Xian was announced as the 2026 ANZIIF Young Insurance Professional of the Year, his first reaction was refreshingly unpolished.

“I’m still shocked,” he said shortly after leaving the stage. “Sweating a bit.”

It was a fitting response from someone whose achievements are substantial, but who is much more comfortable talking about the people he teaches, the colleagues he learns from and the problems he wants to help solve.

Xian works across two worlds. At Taylor Fry Consulting, he applies actuarial thinking to real industry challenges. As an Adjunct Lecturer at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), he conducts research and teaches the next generation of actuaries. Increasingly, he is using his position in both to bring academia and industry closer together.

Underpinning it all is a strong belief that insurance matters; not simply as a financial product, but because of what it can do for people when life goes wrong.

Opening students’ eyes to insurance

Asked on awards night about the achievements that make him most proud, Xian did not start by reaching for an accolade, qualification or research paper.

He talked about his students.

“Every time I get a student survey, I find out about the students who take my courses. I love that they end up thinking a lot more deeply about what they actually want to do,” he said.

“The classes open their eyes up to the value of the insurance industry and why it’s important for society. I think that’s extremely important.”

That response says much about Xian’s approach to his career.

His teaching emphasises practical experience and gives students opportunities to hear directly from insurance professionals. In 2025, he redesigned UNSW’s Actuarial Data Analytics course to strengthen its real-world focus, incorporating guest lectures and industry panel discussions into formal assessments.

The response from students has been telling. One described him as “down to earth and approachable”, while another singled out the real-world applications he brings to lectures, saying they make the material more interesting and easier to put into context.

For Xian, attracting talented young people is critically important for the long term sustainability of the industry and that starts with helping them understand what the industry is actually for.

“I think there’s a lot of misunderstanding about the ultimate purpose of the insurance industry,” he said.

“It is there to provide peace of mind. It’s there to help people through the roughest parts of their lives and to make it a bit more bearable.”

Bringing two worlds together

Xian’s own career has moved between academia and industry rather than following a conventional path through either.

After completing his actuarial studies and statistics degrees, and later a PhD in Actuarial Studies at UNSW, he took up an academic role at Macquarie University before joining Taylor Fry in 2022.

There, his work has taken him across general insurance, injury schemes and government, while he has maintained his university teaching and research.

Rather than seeing those roles as competing demands, Xian sees an opportunity in the overlap.

One of his longer-term goals is to strengthen collaboration between researchers and the insurance industry, particularly on issues where technical questions intersect with much bigger social ones, including climate change, affordability and fairness.

Research and addressing climate change

Xian has a keen interest in producing practical, impactful research. In 2025, he led a collaborative research project with industry practitioners examining approaches to insurance claims hindsight analysis.

Xian says his interest in climate risk has grown as the consequences for insurance become harder to ignore. He believes the profession has an important role in finding ways to share and price risk that remain both financially sustainable and socially acceptable.

To that end, his focus on bringing together different groups to work on big problems found expression by co-chairing a UNSW climate risk and insurance workshop designed to foster joint projects between researchers, insurers, government and scientific institutions. He also serves as Secretary for the Actuaries Institute’s Climate and Sustainability Practice Committee.

Despite such roles, Xian’s thoughts about his future direction are less about particular titles and more about continuing to connect ideas, people and practice.

“My goal has just been to contribute where I can be helpful,” he said.

“At the moment, I think that means continuing to understand and engage with many parts of this massive industry, including collaborating with both academics and practitioners to tackle some of the big challenges.

“I think there is also a part for me to play in bridging communication gaps with the younger generation and helping to explain why what insurers do is important. So I’d like to continue that.”

Leadership from both directions

Xian is also modest about his leadership achievements.

“I’m not entirely sure that I’m well equipped to answer that question,” he laughed.

“In the teams that I manage, I try my best to meet people where they are at and figure out what I can do to help them do what they do,” he said.

“I try to make the space one that everyone can contribute to as I think that there is a lot you can learn from people both above and below you.”

It is an approach grounded less in hierarchy than curiosity and support: qualities reflected across the different strands of his work.

At Taylor Fry, Xian works with senior leaders across insurance and government. In one particularly challenging assignment following Tropical Cyclone Alfred, Australian Reinsurance Pool Corporation Head of Actuarial Pulkit Jain praised his structured approach in a highly uncertain environment and his contribution to an outcome supporting insurance affordability and accessibility.

He has also broadened his contribution beyond technical actuarial work, including joining Taylor Fry’s Reconciliation Action Plan committee and leading the development of a firm-wide staff survey to inform its approach to supporting reconciliation.

A career that contributes to something

There is a thread running through Xian’s work that helps explain why teaching, research, climate risk and consulting can comfortably sit within the same career.

He wants the insurance system to work better.

As a young actuarial student, he was attracted to insurance by the idea of people collectively protecting one another against events beyond their control. Today, that idea remains central to how he thinks about the profession, even as climate change, inequality and affordability make delivering that protection increasingly difficult.

“I think there is huge value in making sure the system is sustainable, especially in the chaotic world that we unfortunately live in right now,” he said.

Xian adds part of the challenge is changing the way insurance itself is understood. Through teaching hundreds of students, he has an unusual opportunity to present insurance not simply as an expense, but as a mechanism for protection and to encourage thoughtful, socially conscious people to see a place for themselves within it.

Perhaps that is why, on a night celebrating his individual achievement, Xian was quick to shift the attention elsewhere.

“I’d just like to thank everyone who has supported me,” he said. “I wouldn’t be where I am today without the many people who have invested in my career.”

As 2026 Young Insurance Professional of the Year, Xian is paying forward that investment by passing on his experience to the students he teaches, the teams he supports and his determination to help build an insurance industry capable of meeting the challenges ahead.

Read more about the 2026 ANZIIF Australian Insurance Industry Awards winners.