Wayne Phillips

Optimization is the thread. A post-acquisition integration, a risk-control matrix, a reinsurance treaty timed to the right month, a recursive Excel function — they are the same instinct applied to different material: find the better way to do the thing, then make it repeatable.

For over a decade I was a Corporate Controller, most of it at Pacific Compensation Insurance Company, where I helped stand up the finance function from inception. PacificComp reached $155 million in premium at an 82.5% combined ratio before being sold to Alleghany Corporation in 2007, and I worked the offering memorandum with our private equity owners and Wachovia Securities. Ten years later I prepared the memorandum and due diligence materials with Alleghany's management and Goldman Sachs for the sale to CopperPoint in December 2017.

Along the way: business process redesign, post-acquisition integration, and ICFR risk-control matrices built alongside Internal Audit. One I still point to is timing the commutation of a structured reinsurance contract, which settled at $400,000 — sixty percent above our internal view of its economic value.

I stayed with the business through the CopperPoint acquisition until my role was eliminated in mid-2023. I spent the months that followed going deeper rather than sideways, completing Wharton's Business Analytics program and earning CFI's Financial Modeling & Valuation Analyst certification. I joined Insight Global in April 2024 as a Senior Data Analyst, working analytics across large data sets.

Early career was about stacking technical skills. Mid-career became people leadership, culture, and the efficiency of processes. My current role is a deliberate step back into the detail, and it reignited something I had let go dormant: I stopped waiting for better tools and started building them. An Excel add-in. Recursive LAMBDAs that size a bond issue against a coverage test, where par comes out as an output rather than going in as a guess. Open-source Claude Code skills that put an AI assistant to work on genuine finance problems. The BIDA and AI for Finance certifications followed in 2026, earned while working.

That is where I am pointed now — analytics and AI work where the finance context makes the analysis better, and where I still get to build the tooling.