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Presentation and Talks
Jefferson edited this page May 15, 2026
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UA-RiskRunners-Presentation/
Presented to the Risk Runners Club at the University of Arizona on February 17, 2026. Available in Keynote, PowerPoint, PDF, and Marp Markdown formats.
Jefferson Richards, founder of the Risk Runners Club at U of A, shares his journey from founding the club through actuarial science, NLP, insurance internships, and into captive insurance consulting.
Origins: LinguaLint and NLP
- Built LinguaLint to scrape 1,500 news articles/day and extract event codes for stock market prediction
- Described as a "lightweight LLM middleware" — 10 fingers coding vs. the 100,000 that built ChatGPT
- Pivoted from UC Davis (Agriculture) → Poetry → U of A (Math/Finance)
Founding Risk Runners
- Chose U of A over ASU despite ASU having the established actuarial program
- Founded the club to bridge the gap — driving students to WSIA events, building community from scratch
The Actuarial Internship at Nautilus Insurance
- Applied NLP to scrape Yelp reviews for hotel/motels
- Discovered risk gaps: "Great mimosa!" + no alcohol indemnification = uncovered exposure
- Win-win-win: underwriter knows risk early, insurer gets proper premiums, client gets real coverage
Enterprise Architecture of Insurance
- Floor 1: Claims and Database Admins (foundation)
- Floor 2: Underwriters and Actuaries (risk assessment)
- Floor 3: Financial Analysts and CEO (investment/strategy)
- Key insight: insurance makes money by investing the float, not just on premiums
A Tale of Two Societies
| CAS (Casualty) | SOA (Society of Actuaries) |
|---|---|
| Property/Product focus | Health/Life focus |
| Before/After lifecycle risk | During lifecycle risk |
| "The Lawyer" | "The Doctor" |
| ASU (State School) | U of A (University) |
Career Trajectory
- CPG Analytics → Tableau mastery → teaching others to build portfolios with Kaggle + AI
- VA Contractor → Patient Generated Health Data (wearables predicting health risks)
- Current: Captive insurance for prefab manufacturers at captive.integralmass.com
- AI Trailblazers (Aaron Eden & Maria Eden)
- Casualty Actuaries of the Desert States
- Arizona Captive Insurance Association (AZCIA)
- Venture Café in Phoenix