Ankit Agrawal has been awarded young risk professional of the year at InsuranceERM's Americas Awards 2026, recognising his work to make catastrophe risk clearer, more comparable and more actionable across a nationwide property portfolio.

Agrawal is a risk management professional within the property product portfolio and reinsurance team at Progressive Insurance, the US personal lines property and casualty insurer.

He identified a problem familiar to many insurers: product managers had strong local expertise, but limited visibility of how individual underwriting and growth decisions affected countrywide catastrophe exposure.

His answer was a unified catastrophe risk relativity framework. Covering 48 states and major perils including wildfire, severe convective storm, winter storm and hurricane, the framework translates complex modelling outputs into a single standardised metric.

In simple terms, a relativity above one signals an increase in countrywide catastrophe risk, while a value below one indicates a reduction.

That clarity has proved more than a modelling exercise. Embedded into monthly reviews, planning and performance objectives, the framework gives product managers their own catastrophe risk position and target. It has enabled faster decision-making, more proactive portfolio steering and a sustained reduction in concentration within high-exposure regions.

Just as importantly, Agrawal helped turn risk insight into business capability. By working across product, catastrophe modelling and senior leadership teams, he secured alignment, executive sponsorship and adoption at scale.

Agrawal's work exemplifies outstanding leadership at an early career stage.

His commitment to this work is grounded in a belief that risk, made accessible and actionable, is what enables an insurer to keep its promises when it matters most.

Agrawal's work shows that the best risk management is not confined to specialist teams or technical reports. It is built into everyday decisions.