26/09/2025

From ideas to influence: the story of The Big Pitch

From ideas to influence: the story of The Big Pitch Mohamed Elsheemy, Chair of the IFoA Health and Care Lifelong Learning Committee, explains the background to The Big Pitch, the success of the first such event and why you should enter The Big Pitch 2025.

On a bright September afternoon last year, the Health and Care Lifelong Learning Committee planned to host something new: the health, care and protection big new ideas. A team of five committee members with the support from IFoA staff worked together to curate a new in-person event to enrich the engagement among the IFoA health and care practice community. The format was simple but bold. Three teams. Three ideas. 20 minutes each to make their case to an audience of peers, researchers, and practitioners.

The call for papers was like a live demonstration on how actuarial thinking could be applied to some of society’s questions.

 

Three ideas, three perspectives

Six months later, in March 2025, actuaries gathered at Staple Inn’s historic halls for The Big Pitch. The room was brought to life with discussions on the three ideas.

First to the stage were Shreya Bagrodia and Sushant Mallya, who took us thousands of miles away to India. Their proposal advocated a paradigm shift – prioritising primary care, using health indices, and developing a holistic ‘wellbeing rating’ for individuals and groups to proactively manage risk, empower healthier behaviour, and inform underwriting, workforce, and public health strategies.

Then came Les Mayhew, a familiar voice in health policy debates, who challenged us to look again at prevention in the NHS. His message was clear: prevention, he argued, deserves a stronger framework and clearer metrics. Actuaries can do more than measure the costs of illness: we can help make the case for avoiding it in the first place.

Last but not least, Vincent Bodnar took the stage with a radical idea: what if pension products could be adapted to fund social care? In a society grappling with how to pay for ageing and long-term support, their pitch was timely and provocative. Could insurers or employers one day sponsor products that blend retirement income with care provision?

The pitches sparked lively discussion. Delegates questioned feasibility, data availability, and policy fit. The audience voted the pension-product idea as the winner. It spoke directly to one of the biggest challenges facing society: how to pay for care as we live longer, and how financial services might innovate to help. The momentum didn’t stop there. The Social Care Working Party picked up the thread, engaging further to explore the idea’s potential. This has led to new strands of quantitative research and modelling to assess possible market impacts. Vincent, along with the working party, will be showcasing these developments at IFoA Life Conference 2025 in November, a testament to how far a single pitch can travel in just over a year.

 

From pitch to publication

The Health and Care Lifelong learning Committee agreed to take all three ideas forward, developing it them into full research papers. Within six months, that work is now published in the British Actuarial Journal. You can search and read the published papers here:

  • Bagrodia S, Mallya S. Inverting the healthcare pyramid: building synergies between outpatient care and inpatient hospitalisation. British Actuarial Journal. 2025;30:e17. Doi:10.1017/S1357321725000157
  • Vincent Bodnar and Gregory Moore, Designing a new social care product linked to pensions. IFoA Virtual Learning Environment, 2025
  • Mayhew L, Cairns A. The power of prevention – a lifeline for the NHS?: British Actuarial Journal. 2025;30:e26. Doi:10.1017/S1357321725000169

 

Why this year matters

Back by popular demand, The Big Pitch returns for a second year of bold ideas and engaging debate in health, care and protection. This year’s Big Pitch is your chance to add to that story. The Big Pitch is not just a showcase, it is a pipeline, taking raw ideas and nurturing them into outputs that influence thinking, research, and even policy.

This innovative research and networking in-person event will be held on Wednesday 18 March 2026 (15:00 to 18:00 UK time) at Staple Inn, London.

Hosted by the Health and Care Lifelong Learning Committee, we invite you to submit papers that explore bold, forward-thinking ideas poised to shape the future of the protection, health, and care markets.

We are seeking research that combines robust technical insight with visionary thinking. Selected papers will be presented live and considered for publication in the British Actuarial Journal (BAJ). They may also seed future IFoA research working parties.

 

Submission guidelines

  • Submit a 100-word abstract via the call for speakers webpage by Friday 31 October 2025
  • Selected speakers will be notified in mid-November 2025
  • Final short research papers (4,000 to 7,000 words or 8 to 12 pages) are due by Monday 2 February 2025.

Go to The Big Pitch call for papers 

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