Niki Appleton

Niki is a qualified actuary with over 25 years of consulting and advisory experience.  She combines her strong technical analytic skills with stakeholder engagement expertise and commercial acumen to understand issues clients face and then work with them to develop value adding solutions.  Niki has worked on projects across a number of industry sectors including general insurance and injury schemes to community clubs and government social policy.

She brings commitment, integrity and a collaborative approach to the professional relationships she develops with her clients.

Niki’s recent experience includes:

• Medical Report Retrieval Solution – evaluating a third-party provider’s product to assess the service and financial outcomes to the workers’ compensation scheme and to claims managers. Recommendations were also sought on possible solutions to program barriers
• Built an interactive monitoring tool for a large state government department to enable them to understand in real time, emerging injury and risk experience for their workforce, drilling down to their constituent level, to enable the department to be more targeted in their strategies to improve their employees’ experience.
• Assisted various entities with exposure to child sex abuse to understand the bounds of their exposure, assess their liabilities for both known and unknown claims, and to develop monitoring tools to enable more effective oversight and strategy development.
• Pricing of new private health insurance products.
• Supporting a tennis club’s government funding submission by providing demographic profiling analysis, identifying opportunities for alignment with the municipality’s strategic goals.
• Helping a workers’ compensation insurer understand the key experience drivers to target to improve their incentive payment from the regulatory remuneration model.

As a senior actuary at Deloitte, Niki led teams to provide strategic and analytical actuarial services to various injury schemes, entities with exposure to child sex abuse, government departments, insurance mutuals, and provided SME advice within broader Deloitte risk and financial advisory teams.  She also led the internal Deloitte “Staff Development Program”, creating professional development opportunities tailored for the actuarial team.

During her 5 years at the Victorian WorkCover Authority, Niki provided high level support to the executive leadership team to enable financial and performance management of the Scheme and the Health Operation Division’s targets. She engaged with the various stakeholders ranging from agent case managers to senior management to drive projects aligned to achieving VWA strategic goals.

Niki worked at PwC for 13 years providing a range of general insurance actuarial services including reserving, premium setting, Financial Condition Reports and tailoring monitoring systems to provide useful management information. She was also a member of a cross divisional committee that redesigned PwC’s coaching and mentoring program.

Niki completed a Bachelor of Science degree at Monash University and is a Fellow of the Actuaries Institute of Australia. Niki has provided voluntary support to several Actuaries committees such as the Leadership and Careers Development Committee and the Anti-Discrimination working group.  She is currently a member of the Injury and Disability Working group and Redress and Reparation Schemes Working Group, both feeding into the General Insurance Practice Committee.