Stephen Harford first joined EY as a summer intern and is now an Assurance Manager in our Insurance team. Read his story and watch his short video at the end of this post.
As a business student, I started in EY Financial Services in 2014 on the Summer Internship programme. I wanted to join an organisation that would invest in my career as much as I invested in the firm. I figured there were three key components to this: high-quality technical training, supportive mentors and the right career opportunities to grow my career. I found EY provided all three and so I accepted a graduate contract offer at the end of the internship.
After graduating from college, I re-joined EY Financial Services Insurance Audit in 2015. Reflecting on my time so far in EY, I have been fortunate to work with some amazing teams consisting of some of the best and brightest in the industry. Having strong mentors supporting your career goals is a key ingredient to a successful career. Upon joining EY everyone is assigned a counsellor who discusses your long-term goals and sets plans for how you will both work together to achieve these. I’ve been lucky to have fantastic leaders in the business who support me with my personal goals and together we work on developing opportunities within the firm to help me grow professionally.
With the ever-changing business and regulation landscape impacting the insurance industry, our clients face new challenges and in turn, we are presented with new learning opportunities for our teams. Through collaboration with our EY subject matter experts across our global Financial Services network, our teams are equipped with the knowledge to be responsive to our clients. There are fantastic opportunities to accelerate the careers of our team members.
Looking back to when I started my career only a short few years ago, the day-to-day tasks of an auditor have changed drastically. I recall drawing the short straw and having to carry the bankers’ box filled with workpapers, files and folders onto our client sites! This has fortunately changed. At EY, we have effectively digitalised the end-to-end audit process, removing paper from our process and enhancing our risk assessments, reducing the burden on clients, and delivering operational benefits to produce higher-quality audits. This benefits our teams by removing the manual paper-based repetitive tasks to allow us to focus on the important and interesting areas of the audit. Our teams are also enhancing their knowledge through training on the latest automation and analytics tools and techniques.
I’m excited about the outlook for the insurance sector in EY and the opportunities this will bring to our team. With our new pipeline of large global client wins complementing our already strong portfolio, IFRS 17 implementation gaining momentum in the industry, there’s never been a better time to join the insurance group in EY Financial Services.
If you’re like me and you’re asking the same questions I was, and looking for a firm with supportive mentors, high-quality industry training and a strong pipeline of opportunities to grow your career, I’m confident the EY insurance audit team is the right place for you!
We are currently recruiting for a number of positions within our Insurance audit team – explore our current vacancies.
