Daniel Sharon, CEO of Milliman Israel
In an industry where regulation, risk management, and actuarial precision are foundational, Milliman has long been a defining professional force. In this interview, we speak with Daniel Sharon, CEO of Milliman Israel, about the work and impact of one of the world’s largest and most respected independent actuarial and consulting firms.
To start — for those meeting Milliman for the first time:
Could you briefly introduce Milliman, the areas you operate in across insurance and financial services, and what makes you a global leader in actuarial and consulting services?
Sharon: Milliman is one of the world’s largest and most respected independent actuarial and consulting firms, founded in 1947 and today operating through a global network of over 60 offices across North America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. We serve clients across life, health, property & casualty insurance, employee benefits, financial services, and healthcare. What distinguishes Milliman is our independence combined with unmatched technical depth and creativity. We don’t just advise, we build the models, tools, and frameworks that power the trickiest corners of the industry. From reserving and pricing to enterprise risk management and regulatory compliance, Milliman has shaped how the actuarial profession thinks and operates for over 75 years.
Validation for insurtech innovation:
Many insurtech startups struggle to build credibility with large insurance carriers. How does Milliman help startups professionally validate their models, technologies, and solutions — and how does this impact their ability to work with major insurers?
Sharon: Great question. Credibility is the single hardest currency for a startup to earn in insurance, and it’s often the bottleneck between a compelling product and an actual contract. Milliman helps startups by providing independent, rigorous validation of their models, methodologies, and underlying data — the kind of third-party sign-off that a Chief Actuary or CRO at a large carrier can trust and rely on. This includes reviewing machine learning and other mathematical models for actuarial soundness, stress-testing assumptions, and benchmarking outputs against industry standards. When an insurer sees a Milliman validation attached to a startup’s pitch, it reframes the conversation entirely, the discussion with the startup moves from begging for favors – to creating partnerships. So really the best value at every step of the way is to give comfort and confidence the startups’ insurance industry stakeholders, through validation, assistance with regulation and general advice and oversight assistance.
Bridging actuarial expertise with advanced technology:
How do you combine decades of actuarial depth with AI, data analytics, and automation, and what should insurtech founders keep in mind when developing solutions for the insurance market?
Sharon: Easy. It’s really as they say in Hebrew “like a glove to a hand”. As with most analytical fields, the demand for compute power and sophisticated tools is forever greater than the supply. Even in today’s world of AI and LLMs actuaries at Milliman are already thinking of the problems we’ll only be able to solve when quantum computing gets commercialized. At Milliman Israel, we’ve invested heavily in embedding data science and AI capabilities within our actuarial practice, which give our consultants the ability to turn around deliverables quickly, and to test simulations requiring massive compute power.
For insurtech founders, the critical thing to understand is that insurance is a highly regulated, long-cycle industry where the cost of a wrong model is solvency risk or regulatory sanction. That means explainability, auditability, and actuarial defensibility are absolute prerequisites, not just for success, but for starting out. Founders who treat those as afterthoughts will struggle to cross the threshold into production with serious carriers. You must build with the actuary in the room from day one and recognize that the entire framework must stand on rigorous analytical grounds. One piece out – the tower tumbles.
Milliman’s involvement in the Israeli insurtech ecosystem:
Milliman has been actively engaged in Israel’s innovation landscape. What stands out to you about Israeli insurtech, and which types of technologies or business models do you see as having strong global potential?
Sharon: What stands out most about Israeli insurtech is the density of true creativity being applied to insurance problems: companies reconsidering underwriting engines, fraud detection, real-time risk scoring and agentic claims processing, not to mention inventing new lines of insurance altogether. The areas we see with the strongest global export potential are computer vision and document intelligence applied to claims and underwriting, parametric insurance platforms possibly moving into climate and agriculture, and AI-native policy administration systems that can serve markets where legacy infrastructure is a major bottleneck. Israel also has a unique advantage in cybersecurity-linked insurance solutions, given the ecosystem around that domain. Business models that I’ve seen work better tend to be partnering with local Israeli insurance companies, gaining some experience and then, with Milliman’s assistance – going abroad, mainly to the US.
Looking ahead — advice to insurtech entrepreneurs:
Based on your experience working with insurers and startups worldwide, what are the most common mistakes founders make, and what are the top priorities for building a successful global insurtech company?
Sharon: Some of the most common mistakes is are underestimating the tricky US regulatory system and the tough distribution problem. Sometimes, founders build technically impressive solutions and assume the product will sell itself to an industry that is, in reality, deeply relationship-driven and change-averse. Another mistake is trying to boil the ocean targeting multiple lines of business, every geography, and every use case simultaneously. You need to dominate one specific, defensible niche first and expand from a position of proof. For priorities, is first get to the stage where you have a codeveloper – not a pilot program. Second, make sure you are fluent in the insurance language and regulation. Third – make sure your case is airtight. The last impacts the first two as well – and Milliman definitely has experience in partnering with startups to manage these priorities.
Milliman’s new AI initiative for businesses in Israel:
Recently, Milliman launched a dedicated AI initiative for businesses in Israel. What motivated this initiative, what problems does it aim to solve in insurance and financial services, and how can startups leverage it to accelerate market adoption?
Sharon: The initiative came from a very practical observation: our clients — insurers, financial institutions, SMEs and the startups serving them — were increasingly convinced that LLM-based capabilities could drive real efficiency gains, particularly in areas like document processing, OCR, claims triage, and agent-based workflow automation. But the path from conviction to deployment was being blocked not by technology, but by a tangle of regulatory, data governance, and infrastructure obstacles that most organizations simply didn’t have the internal capacity to navigate. Milliman’s position as a trusted, regulated, independent professional services firm means we can host these AI modules on behalf of clients, effectively absorbing that compliance and infrastructure burden. For startups and SMEs, this is significant — it means they can get their LLM-based products out much faster, without needing build the internal scaffolding to support them. We become the trusted bridge between cutting-edge AI capability and institutional adoption.
