When I left management consulting in 2005 to take a job at AXA, one of the world's leading insurers, my friends chided me for what they viewed as a questionable career move. "Why do you want to work in such a boring industry?" they asked. But having done research on credit risk for my PhD, I'm fascinated by the business of insurance. While some view it as a bureaucracy designed to simply track and pay claims, I see a much deeper purpose: to help people, companies, and societies thrive by distributing risk. Thus insurers (and their investment arms) are important vectors for positive change in the world.