The Council of Australian Life Insurers (CALI) has named eight women for the first intake of its ReCALIbrate Women in Life Insurance program, which is a year-long leadership course run with Future Women.
The cohort is drawn largely from insurers. Seven of the eight work in claims, underwriting, product, legal or customer roles at life companies. One is a financial adviser.
Amity McCarthy, head of claims at NobleOak, and Touk Phanthana, head of retention and customer experience at Acenda Life, bring claims and policyholder retention experience.
Underwriting and product are represented by four recipients. Honor Grant-Hennessy is technical underwriting lead at Zurich and Cass Reifenstein is a senior product manager at ClearView. TAL has two places, taken by technical and capability manager Charlotte Gee and senior product manager Viraj Mody.
According to CALI, Mody’s application focused on keeping long-term policies relevant as customers’ lives, medical treatments and working patterns change. Grant-Hennessy stressed the need to balance innovation with human judgement in underwriting.
Madeleine Merriman, senior legal counsel at AIA, said she hoped to use the program to improve outcomes for vulnerable customers, including people affected by family and domestic violence.
Nga Vu, a financial adviser at Lautum Life, is the only recipient working in advice.
The recipients are based in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.
Each recipient receives Future Women’s Platinum+ Emerging Leaders program and a 12-month membership, which includes career planning, masterclasses and group mentoring. The package also includes a virtual ticket to Future Women’s leadership summit in March 2027 and a place at CALI’s next conference.
CALI chief executive Christine Cupitt said she expected the program’s benefits to extend beyond the participants themselves.
“When we back women to lead, we back the people they mentor, the teams they build, and the customers they serve,” said Cupitt.
Future Women founder and managing director Helen McCabe said the partnership aimed to help experienced women turn expertise into influence, and to create openings for others who follow.
ReCALIbrate began in 2023 as a grant scheme helping female risk advisers attend the Financial Advice Association Australia (FAAA) Congress. The 2025 round funded five advisers. This year CALI doubled the program to 10 places but cut the adviser grants to two. Those went to Aisha Elnour and Kristen Agius, who will attend this month’s Congress.
The shift comes as the advice workforce continues to shrink. FAAA figures put adviser numbers at 15,127 in March, almost 48% below the level at the start of 2019. The federal government is also proceeding with a new class of adviser that would let life insurers and super funds provide limited advice themselves.
For risk advisers, the change in emphasis is notable. A program that began by backing women in advice now invests mainly in the claims, underwriting and product staff whose decisions advisers and their clients deal with.
