Shift Technology hosts reputation and networking focused coaching event for female network

Artificial intelligence (AI) driven insurance platform provider Shift Technology hosted a professional coaching afternoon for its revamped Women in Insurance Network on 24 September 2026, aiming to provide a “community space” for female insurance professions to learn “about other women’s experiences and [talk] openly”.

The afternoon session, held at WeWork’s Aviation House in Holborn, was attended by 28 women who work in insurance, including Shift Technology’s own employees, female staff from its customer cohort and other external professionals known by the business – such as Insurance Times’ content director Katie Scott.

This year, attendees represented 11 different insurance organisations, such as the Insurance Fraud Bureau, Covéa Insurance, ManyPets, NFU Mutual, Animal Friends, Markerstudy Group and Hastings Direct, to name a few. Around 43% of the delegates were repeat attendees from last year’s event, which took place on 11 September 2025.

For 2026, the coaching session was entitled Level up: Women driving insurance innovation.

The first half of the event was delivered by personal and business coach Gemma Brown, who guided attendees through thinking about their professional reputation, as well as discussing the power and intention of networks to support career development.

As part of this conversation, Brown highlighted tools such as the do/say matrix – she suggested that this can be used to help individuals take ownership of their reputation and what they want to be known for, offering a steer on where they might need to invest greater effort.

She also challenged delegates to think about who would sit in their imaginary, personal boardroom – a panel of people fulfilling different functions, such as ‘the inspirer’, ‘the challenger’ or ‘the connector’, who have supported career progression to date.

Following this, Brown chaired a panel discussion on these themes which included Laura Horrocks, customer success manager at Shift Technology, Tiffany Steele, head of application fraud at Markerstudy Group, and Adele Sumner, ex-head of counter fraud and financial crime at Intact Insurance UK.

The second half of the afternoon session was delivered by Joanna Butler, director of product marketing at Shift Technology. She talked through artificial intelligence (AI) use cases and how to build an AI agent in Claude Cowork.

Shift Technology hosted a dinner for the attending network members after the coaching session, held at Middle Eight in Covent Garden.

Feedback focused

This year’s coaching event is the third that Shift Technology has held for this demographic.

The Women in Insurance Network was launched in 2023 as the Women in Fraud Network, before being expanded this year to encompass a greater variety of female professionals – not just in terms of insurance industry subsector, but also varying seniorities.

The first coaching event in 2023 centred on tackling imposter syndrome, while 2025’s event was all about defining ambition and the art of resilience.

Speaking exclusively to Insurance Times at the event yesterday, Horrocks noted that the themes and content for each session are completely based on feedback from the Women in Insurance Network – whether this is gathered via the post-event survey that is emailed around, or through anecdotal feedback in day-to-day conversations.

“All of the agendas really come from feedback from the participants. The whole premise of the event is that we want to really build a community space for the participants – it’s their event,” she explained.

“While Shift Technology might be hosting it, we’re just giving that space to have those open conversations about things that are more specific to women in the industry. There wasn’t really a space for women to have these open conversations that we were aware of.”

For her, therefore, these sessions are not about driving numbers and growing the network by hard and fast metrics. It is “very much just to get a group of women together to talk about the challenges that we’re seeing day-to-day”.

Horrocks confirmed that the September coaching session was now set to be an annual occurrence on Shift Technology’s calendar in the UK. She flagged that the firm had also hosted a similar event over in Miami for the first time this year, at the International Association of Special Investigation Units’ conference held between 20 and 23 September 2026. She observed that this “was extremely well received”.

Safe communications

Horrocks believes there is still much the insurance industry can do to level the playing field when it comes to gender diversity.

She told Insurance Times: “It’s difficult for women to air [their] concerns in the right space. A lot of the time when you start to voice some of these concerns, it can be seen as you’re hormonal, you’re tired because you’ve got young children [and] it’s brushed off as being something that isn’t really that important.

“When you’re talking about your career, it’s vitally important. It’s the foundation that actually pulls your whole family together. It’s vitally important that you’ve got a working environment that you feel safe to communicate in.”

Horrocks noted that more gender diversity is occurring at “the bottom of the pyramid” rather than “higher up the management levels”, which she attributed to a potential lack of confidence in women applying and going for senior positions.

She therefore hopes that “if [network members] can take one piece of advice from one of our events and take it away and think ‘I am good enough to go for that promotion, I have got the ability, I’m just as qualified – if not more so – than some of the other candidates and I will put myself forward”, then that demonstrates that the event series is successful.