Blake brings a passion for driving innovation in the insurance industry. Blake is the Vice President of Life Insurance at dacadoo, a global health technology company delivering support for risk assessment and ongoing customer health engagement to insurers. Previously Blake was the Head of Manulife Vitality at Manulife, Canada's largest insurance company. In this role Blake developed, launched, and oversaw a comprehensive customer engagement platform that delivers wellness to its members, and developed many partnerships for the Canadian platform. Blake has also held senior roles as the head of new business product pricing for Manulife’s Canadian Division Retail Markets; in this role Blake lead a team to price and develop life, living benefits, and savings products sold through advisors to Canadian consumers. Blake also has prior experience in product and pricing of group savings and group benefits, and leading a new business team for Investment products. Blake is a Fellow of the Society of Actuaries, and Fellow of the Canadian Institute of Actuaries. Council member for the SOA E&I Committee, member of the SOA AIT committee and SOA InsureTech Committee. Blake also volunteers with the Canadian Institute of Actuaries

Principal Industry Lead - Azure for Insurance at Microsoft in Cloud + Ecosystems, Industry Experiences Division Recruiting partners, ISVs, start-ups and other influential organizations in the insurance industry to accelerate adoption of Azure cloud + AI platforms. One of my core missions is to amplify how our Microsoft cloud solutions meet the business enabling needs across the globe through speaking at conferences, authoring blogs, use cases, whitepapers and social media posts. Technology leader with over twenty years of experience bridging the gap between the business and IT while working in application development, operations, and infrastructure. He has worked with leading Life insurers, Manulife and AIG, as well as the Define Benefit area with the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation (BPGC). He has also developed applications for Actuarial Valuation and Projection including components of ArcVal and Prophet. Before joining Microsoft, Mr. Leimer was the Senior Director for Actuarial Compute at Manulife leading the migration of LAN based HPC Farms to the Azure environment for all of Asia. This included all desktop Moody’s / GGY Axis users and data feeds

Bryon Robidoux is a passionate, innovative, strategic and results-oriented actuary. He is currently employed by The Standard as Lead and Corporate actuary to devise and manage projects associated with their transformation and modernization efforts. Over the last nineteen years in the insurance industry, Bryon has become specialized in risk management and annuity modeling. His commitment to innovative strategy has driven him to incorporate the best practices of software engineering into modeling and actuarial science. He is a Fellow (FSA) and Certified Enterprise Risk Analyst (CERA) of the Society of Actuaries. He received a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics and a Minor in Computer Science from Missouri Western State University in 2001. Early in his career, Bryon spent seven years at Actuarial Resources Corporation (ARC) developing the Structured Settlements and SPIA module of the ARCVAL actuarial software. Throughout his career, he developed a strong level of competence in computer science which afforded him a greater strategic ability to solve problems. His passion is the creation of innovative strategies that make software more efficient and easier to maintain. In 2009, he was a Subject Matter Expert (SME) who helped design the Microsoft exam 70-69 and Windows Server 2008 High Performance Computing (HPC) (Development). Since 2017, Bryon has actively incorporated IT DevOps into modeling to help companies immensely improve productivity and work-product reliability. Bryon’s involvement in professional activities has Included: (1) Being on the Predictive Analytics Council (2014 – 2017); (2) Running the Hack-A-Thon at the Predictive Analytics Symposium (2019); (3) And writing several newsletter articles for the Modeling, Predictive Analytics and Technology Sections.

Paul currently leads the Industry Experiences team at Microsoft, focused on helping Microsoft partners with their move to the cloud. He is based in Seattle, where he lives with his wife and two boys. He is a proven leader in the technology field, having extensive industry experience acquired across a variety of roles, with a passion for technology. Paul started his career behind the code as a Software Engineer, through to most recently as General Manager at Microsoft. He has extensive experience of leading, building and growing global diverse and distributed teams. Paul has delivered mission-critical software products to market in multiple industries. He has been involved in helping some of the largest companies worldwide moving to the cloud. Paul is in popular demand for consult on digital transformation strategies and guidance on moving to the cloud. Recent key accomplishments: • Involved in building some of the largest scale cloud solutions existing in the market today. • Recognized by CIO Review magazine as key cloud Influencer. • Showcased in Profile Magazine covering career accomplishments. • Built world-class Product Engineering teams, and most recently delivered to market one of the world’s largest cloud, big data and business intelligence solutions: transformative state-of-the-art financial and risk management platform all running in the cloud.