Life, Annuities & Retirement
- Life & annuities
- Retirement
- Institutional life
- Long-term care
- High-net-worth life (Bermuda operations)
- Alternative-investment arms of life carriers
Solutions Engineering & Pre-Sales Leadership · Financial Services
Thirteen years as implementer, carrier-side buyer, software vendor and services partner — shaping enterprise platforms for life, annuity, benefits, P&C and alternative-investment businesses across U.S. and U.K. markets. Now researching where enterprise-software value settles when AI agents do the work.
Institutions served Identities withheld
01 — Profile
Shiv Shankar Singh is a solutions engineering and pre-sales leader specializing in insurance and capital markets, with close expertise in banking and wealth & asset management. Over thirteen years he has held each seat at the enterprise-software table: implementation consultant at Deloitte Digital, lead solutions architect at New York Life, principal solutions engineer at Salesforce, and practice-building director at Mphasis Silverline.
The through-line is a consulting-led motion: enter a complex, regulated environment; run disciplined discovery; shape the commercial and technical case; then stay accountable through configuration, integration and adoption. That motion has influenced, supported and originated more than $30M in enterprise revenue across U.S. and U.K. markets — including $18.7M+ across 200+ opportunities in a representative fourteen-month window on the vendor side (£5.9M+ of it on a 2022–23 London rotation), and $6.3M in first-year practice revenue as a consulting director carrying a $3.4M quota.
His domain depth runs through the insurance core — policy administration, new business and underwriting, rating and quoting, servicing, billing and claims — across life & annuities, retirement, group benefits and P&C distribution, and into private-markets GP/LP operations, capital formation, and clearing & custody. He grounds applied AI at the orchestration layer: agentic design, data readiness, and the industry data standards — ACORD and FIBO — that let business meaning be defined once.
02 — Career arc
Few practitioners have built, bought, sold and delivered the same class of platform. Each seat exposes a different constraint: what implementers can deliver, what carriers will adopt, what vendors can prove, and what partners can sustain.
Implementer
Deloitte Digital 2013 – 2019
Built CRM and modernization programmes for insurers and banks, and the firm’s early insurance industry-platform capability.
Buyer
New York Life 2019 – 2021
Led the ground-up platform build from the carrier side: a 900-user service organization and an agency sales organization of 14,000+ daily users.
Vendor
Salesforce 2021 – 2024
Principal solutions engineer for insurance and financial services across U.S., U.K. and European accounts.
Services partner
Mphasis Silverline 2024 – 2025
Director who co-led the insurance practice, stood up capital markets, and sold then delivered the work.
Point of view
Control is not friction. In a regulated enterprise, control is the product.
AI makes capability cheap. What regulated firms still pay for is permission — identity, audit, revocation and a cost they can forecast. That is where the value settles.
The Constraint Premium03 — Domain coverage
Mapped to evidence: each line corresponds to a role, programme or pursuit on the record — from the insurance value chain to private-markets operations and the data standards that govern them.
04 — Selected engagements
Anonymized engagements from carrier, vendor and partner seats. Each pairs a structural decision with the outcome it produced.
Fortune-100 life & annuities carrier
Seven systems of record composed into the policy view opened on nearly every service call — and a profiling exercise showing only 10 of 81 overview fields needed real-time retrieval.
Capital marketsAlternative-investments arm of a U.S. life & retirement carrier
An end-to-end capital-lifecycle platform — marketing, fundraising and capital formation, execution — carried from pursuit through go-live with zero client escalations.
P&C distributionMulti-carrier quoting for brokers and agents
A software partnership taken from licensing and integration to a working multi-carrier quoting prototype, demonstrated across the vendor’s insurance customer base.
05 — Research & writing
Why the machines will do the work, and someone else will collect the rent.
Capability is getting cheap; permission is not. The thesis argues that as AI agents take on enterprise work, durable value accrues to the governed layer that decides what an agent may do, under whose authority, and with what evidence left behind — and it proposes two metrics for the context cost that agentic systems currently leave unattributed.
Writing in progress
All publicationsThe Constraint Premium
Business book proposal · International prize for emerging business authors
The semantic layer as control point
Feature article · Peer-reviewed software-engineering publication
Agents do the work; enterprise software keeps the rent
Viewpoint · Computing practitioners’ journal
What dominates the bill of an agentic system
Practice article · Practitioner journal
Engage
For insurers, capital-markets firms and the enterprise software companies that sell to them — on solutions strategy, go-to-market, and governing AI inside regulated operations.