Mike Mendel

Career

McGill and Partners

Partner, Data & Analytics

Previously Zurich North America, Enstar, Deloitte, and Nationwide.

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Currently

  • Watching too much football
  • Spending time and traveling with Jade
  • Building with Claude Code

Background

19 years in P&C insurance

Pricing, consulting, and analytics across carriers and brokers.

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Travel

Volunteering

Actuaires du Monde

Board member, Actuaires du Monde

  • Ohrid 2023
  • Sarajevo 2024
  • Kathmandu 2026

Projects

Fantasy Scoreboard

A live NFL fantasy scoring and analytics site, built with Claude Code.

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About

I am a property and casualty actuary with experience across carriers and consulting. I started my career in 2007 in homeowners pricing at Nationwide, then spent five years in Deloitte's actuarial consulting practice, followed by pricing roles at Enstar and Zurich North America. At Zurich, my work covered commercial property, auto, general liability, and excess, and increasingly involved building the analytical tools behind those decisions. In 2026 I joined McGill and Partners as Partner, Data & Analytics.

In early 2014, I spent five weeks working with Deloitte's actuarial team in India, which led to my interest in actuarial development in emerging insurance markets. Since then I have mentored through Actuaries Without Borders, and I now serve on the board of Actuaires du Monde, where I have led workshops in North Macedonia and Nepal.

I also build software. My work with R, Shiny, Python, and Databricks has more recently extended to AI-assisted development, which I use for both professional analytics and personal projects.

Career

  1. 2026 – present

    McGill and Partners

    Partner, Data & Analytics

    A specialist (re)insurance broker. mcgillpartners.com

  2. 2018 – 2026

    Zurich North America · Chicago

    AVP & Actuary, General Liability and Excess Pricing

    Built a Databricks method to link primary and excess liability claims across separate policies for the same insured, so we could see full occurrences across coverage layers for the first time. Previously led pricing for a $100M+ portfolio of middle market commercial property programs, and automated facultative reinsurance placement reporting in a way that saved underwriters more than 200 hours.

  3. 2016 – 2017

    Enstar Group · Starstone Insurance

    U.S. Senior Pricing Actuary

    Account-level pricing for medical malpractice and workers' compensation, and rate reviews for a condominium product with significant coastal exposure.

  4. 2010 – 2015

    Deloitte Consulting

    Senior Consultant

    Model validation, pricing audits, reserve reviews, and M&A advisory for national carriers. Two stints training staff in Gurgaon and Hyderabad.

  5. 2007 – 2010

    Nationwide Insurance

    Homeowners Pricing Senior Analyst

    State rate reviews, countrywide trend selection, and catastrophe exposure reduction for earthquake and hurricane risk.

Also: Casualty Actuarial Society Examination Committee since 2015, and a B.S. in Statistics and Electrical Engineering from Purdue (2006).

International volunteering

Many developing insurance markets have few credentialed actuaries. I volunteer with organizations that provide training, mentorship, and technical support to actuaries in those markets.

Actuaires du Monde

Actuaires du Monde

Board member since May 2024. A non-profit that sends volunteer actuaries to support the profession in lower- and middle-income countries.

actuairesdumonde.org

Apr 2026

Kathmandu, Nepal

Led a two-day actuarial workshop with Actuaires du Monde.

May 2024

Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Featured speaker at the Second Congress.

Sep 2023

Ohrid, North Macedonia

Led a two-day insurance ratemaking workshop.

2017 – 2020

Actuaries Without Borders

Mentor, then deputy project manager and project manager of the Global Mentorship Program.

Closer to home: mentor with the UNDP-Milliman GAIN program and The Actuarial Foundation's Modeling the Future Challenge, and a former math tutor with the Foundation.

Travel

Places I have lived, worked, taught, and traveled.

Projects

I build with Claude Code, usually in Python and FastAPI on Fly.io, plus whatever free tools fit the job. The goal is usually to answer a question I care about faster than I could by hand.

Live

Fantasy Scoreboard

A public NFL fantasy scoreboard: a live leaderboard by position, a fantasy box score for every game, and scoring for any Sleeper league you point it at. It also calculates the hindsight-optimal lineup for each team.

Python · FastAPI · Sleeper and ESPN data · Fly.io

Open the scoreboard

Free and open source

Nutrition Bot Lite

A Telegram bot that logs meals from a photo, a quick description, or a barcode. Gemini identifies each food and estimates the portion, the bot checks official restaurant numbers and the USDA database before falling back on the AI's guess, and every item lands in your own Google Sheet after a quick review. I built it to be the most frictionless meal tracker I could make; this is the free version of the one I use myself, with a step-by-step setup guide that needs no coding.

Gemini · Google Apps Script · Cloudflare Workers · Telegram

View on GitHub

At work, the same habit shows up as Python and Databricks tools for excess liability pricing and claim linkage.