Women in Data is a fantastic movement! At esure, we want to be a force for change, championing greater gender parity and diversity in data science, engineering, software development and analytics. We’re on a mission to become a leading digital insurer. We’re building an entire tech ecosystem to transform how we engage with our customers and operate our business. Underpinning this is a flexible and scalable digital platform, and industry-beating data capabilities that are enabling us to deliver exceptional customer experiences. We want to use our story to inspire and support more women into successful data careers.
Elspeth Hackett, Director of Home and
Underwriting at esure
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About Me
I studied Biomedical Engineering at Imperial College London, where I was first introduced to data through my final year project. I developed an algorithm to assess the severity of atopic dermatitis (eczema) using image processing and machine learning techniques. This practical experience sparked my interest in working end-to-end on data projects—from sourcing and engineering data to building useful, real-world tools.
I started my career as a Data Engineer Consultant at Kubrick, then joined Mars Petcare where I moved into a Tech Lead role. At Mars, I helped build the company’s first Data and Analytics platform, bringing together data from across the business. I led the development of a metadata-driven ingestion framework and expanded this to include tools for data transformation and compliance.
My Role
Since November 2023, I’ve been the Data Engineering Technical Lead at Esure. My work focuses on defining standards for data integration and building robust, scalable data products on our Data and Analytics Platform. I’ve led the development of several frameworks—including a Databricks Delta Live Table framework, and systems for Data Quality and Documentation—which have raised the bar for engineering best practices, governance, and consistency.
More recently, I’ve led efforts to build a self-serve data platform that enables teams across the business to independently develop data products, reporting, and tools—while ensuring auditability and standardisation. I’ve also overseen the transition to managing access control and infrastructure provisioning through Terraform, supporting a more secure and scalable engineering foundation.
A core part of my role is leading and supporting a team of data engineers who work across multiple domains. I’m passionate about creating an environment where they can grow, reach their career goals, and act as strong advocates for good data practices across the wider business.
Expertise: Data Analysis, Speech Analytics, Quality Assurance, Complaints
Education: BA Hons Hotel &Hospitality Management with Marketing, University of Strathclyde
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/margaret-maclean-9415a499
After graduating in 2000, I started a temporary data entry job at LloydsTSB which turned out to be the beginning of a varied career in Financial Services. My journey into analysis & data began when after a long spell as a complaints handler with Goldfish Credit Cards, I moved into a Root Cause Analyst role. This is where my inquisitive nature really started to kick in and I found gaining insight on one thing led to more questions and that never ending urge to find out more! After my first maternity leave, I moved into a Quality & Business Improvement role at Barclays. This again fuelled my passion for gaining insights and leaving things better than I found them. This role allowed me to develop into Speech Analytics and that’s where I really found my calling. Being able to delve into the nuances of customer interactions and extract crucial insights to enhance service delivery and customer experience was truly transformational and led to our team winning the CCA Back Office Team of the Year and Overall Team of the Year two years in a row, and also winning ECCCSA Quality Team of the Year.
I joined esure in April 2019 to lead in the newly created Speech Analytics function. This role has allowed me to grow both professionally and personally, and has lead to my current role, leading our Insights team where we are delivering actionable insights across our business to help improve our customer journeys, our digital adoption and all the while keeping our customers and our business safe. I’m lucky enough to work in a business where I know my voice is heard and I am empowered to make decisions and help drive our business forward.
I’m passionate about data and using data effectively to improve our business. I’m a huge advocate of taking away stereotypes, and I’m keen to ensure girls know they can follow a career in data and enjoy it!
When I’m not at work, I’m mum of 2, and my husband and I volunteer with my daughters football team. I look after much of the admin involved in running a club which just 2 years after forming has almost 200 girls. I’m on the sidelines every Saturday morning cheering on the girls and I love seeing the growth in girls & women’s football.
While studying for a PhD in biochemistry, I realised academic life was not for me, so I started looking for careers that would use the analytical and problem-solving skills that I had developed during my research. This led me to data science, so I started learning to code during the final year of my PhD, and after completing a tech graduate scheme I got a role as a data analyst before transitioning to data science.
I joined esure at the start of 2023 and since then have worked on a wide range of interesting projects including building models to help with pricing, forecasting call centre demand and predicting the value of claims.
Women are still underrepresented in the data field and I’ve really enjoyed getting involved with Girls in Data to speak in schools about the interesting and varied careers in the data sector and hopefully inspiring them to consider working in data from an earlier age.
My advice to anyone who wants to get into a career in data is to look up some of the great free resources available to learn the basics, then find a dataset on a topic you’re interested in and see what you can discover!
Expertise: Portfolio Management, Motor Retail Pricing, Risk Management
Education: BSc Actuarial Science, MSc Risk Management and Insurance
LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/liviavalle
Risk and Finance have always been my passion, at university I studied Actuarial Science back in Brazil, where I am a qualified Actuary, and moved to the UK in 2022 to do a Master`s in Risk Management and Insurance.
The path isn`t always clear and I sure took my time exploring the fields that the insurance industry has to offer, such as pricing, risk and actuarial, but one interesting thing that I found was that there was one constant factor for all of them: data analytics.
Learning how to code and more importantly how to apply that skill into creating insightful information out of big datasets is the key part of working with data for me, just like puzzle solving. There is a wide range of what data analytics enables, from dashboarding to risk modelling, or identifying data drift and many more possible applications, making it fundamental to always be upskilling and bringing new ideas into the business.
Within Pricing Portfolio Management it`s not just about writing and running codes, it`s about investigating its outputs, understanding what the process enables and delivering decision-making insights. It is challenging work which is why it matters to work for a company like Esure that supports your career and cares about diversity.
The Women in Data community not only helped me to land my current role at Esure, but also to feel empowered in this male-dominated field by listening to strong women`s voices, to stories I can relate and to see women leaders I aspire to be.
The insurance market will only be seen as a ‘force for good’ if it can anticipate and react to the everchanging lifestyles, expectations and needs of our customers – and that means more data being produced, captured and consumed, coupled with a need to use that information quickly to hone the customer experience and services required. This will become easier to facilitate as cloud platforms mature, data science tooling expands into the AutoML and ‘low-code’ realms, and self-serve models continue to become adopted. People have been driving less, the property market has shifted materially, the availability and cost of vehicle parts has transformed, hybrid working is on the rise, and so driving behaviour and patterns will adjust. We’ve also got the challenges of inflation, continuing pressures on supply chains, and significant regulatory changes on pricing. All of this creates new data trends, ways in which to use data, and opportunities for new propositions.
While challenging, this scale of change represents an opportunity to radically change brand, mission, the way the market works and the products on offer. Those putting data, digitisation, technology, and the right culture and talent together will reform the industry – and the people that work and buy within it. This represents a boom in talent creation, career opportunity, fresh thinking and innovation. We’ll begin to see new propositions with an increasing focus on the industry’s environmental impact and the ways in which customers engage with their suppliers.
We’re on a mission to fix insurance for good. We provide our esure and Sheilas’ Wheels customers with a world-class digital experience, together with human service when it’s needed most. Our expertise and use of industry–leading technology, data and insights deliver a more personal and intuitive experience to our car, home and travel insurance customers.
Our people mission is simple: we aim to make esure a great, progressive and innovative place to work for all our colleagues who are committed to delivering fantastic products, service, and experiences for our customers.
