Hemalatha Dave’s math skills have led her to Swiss Re – Latest News

When Hemalatha Dave wanted to appear for a pre-medical test in class 12, her family didn’t agree. They had bought into the idea that an ‘overqualified’ girl might struggle to find a groom. Finances were a concern too.

Hema was good at mathematics. She had been drawn to the subject because of her mother, who, though not conventionally educated, was very sharp with calculations and took care of accounts in her father’s modest business. So Hema went to Mumbai University for a Bachelor’s in math. She then thought of doing a post-grad in applied mathematics from IIT Bombay. Her folks assumed she wouldn’t make the cut. But she did. And she went on to become the first person in her family to hold a postgraduate degree.

Hema was born in a village in Rajasthan. But she moved three states and four schools in the first 15 years of her life. Primary schooling was in Coimbatore, where she stayed with her uncle’s family. Then for two years she went to a boarding school in Ooty, and completed the rest of her education in Maharashtra. All along, her family’s focus was on getting her married once she turned 18.

“But the situations I was put into made me a very different person and I’m thankful for that,” says Hema, who is today vice president of data science and change lead at Zurich-based reinsurer Swiss Re.

Hema, 39, says the IIT experience changed her worldview. “IIT taught me that you don’t need to be a master of everything. It taught me that you should be able to navigate ambiguity,” she says.

Hema got married soon after her graduation, and then began her first job – in Bengaluru, with Marketics Technologies (now WNS Global Services). “Because Marketics was a startup, I learnt the entrepreneurial side of things. Later, with TCS, I learnt the importance of process,” she says.

When she joined Swiss Re in 2014, she was assigned the task of setting up the company’s sales analytics team for Bengaluru. Currently, she supports valuation teams, working on calculating optimal reserves for future claims.

Hema had an opportunity to help a cross-functional team at Swiss Re with their process improvement. The existing process used to take two days to complete. The tool she created using programming language R and automation helped reduce the time to three minutes. The tool, she says, is now being used by the global team as a part of the regular process.