An actuary’s role in life insurance

Clayton Balkind, chief actuary at MSV Life writes, "Looking after your financial health is no different to looking after your physical health. If you want the best care, you turn to an expert. If you need life-saving surgery, you’re safer in the hands of a specialist surgeon. It’s no different with your lifetime finances." continues Times of Malta.

Actuaries’ focus on risk means they are crucial in generating the security a financial company can offer its clients.  
Photo: Times of Malta  

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To take care of your financial health, it pays – literally – to talk to experts who understand financial risk and know how to manage it properly. When you buy life insurance, for instance, you need to think in the long term. That means planning for personal and financial risks. 

Much of the information you need to plan your financial life is available at the touch of a button. However, you need to know where to find it in the first place and, in a fast-changing world, the amount of information is overwhelming and often confusing.

Specialist advisers can help you make sense of what you need to know to understand and plan for your personal and financial needs. The best advisers and financial services organisations rely on the expertise of actuaries for help with this – actuaries are professionals who specialise in identifying, quantifying and managing financial risks.

Risk is the possibility that an undesirable event will occur. It can also be an opportunity. What to expect, when to expect it, and how to manage or exploit its impact are difficult questions with complex answers. That’s where actuaries come in.

Actuaries analyse the pos­sibility, probability and financial impact of risk. They study the possibility of expected and un­expected future events, the likelihood that those events will occur, and how those events can impact financial performance, particularly of insurance and pension programmes. They then look for ways of reducing the probability of risky events and minimising their impact if and when those events ever occur.

An actuary’s job is to help an insurer or pension fund predict and plan for the future and to protect itself from losses that would impact clients.
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P.S. Becoming a fully credentialed actuary requires passing a rigorous series of professional examinations, usually taking several years in total. In some countries, such as Denmark, most study takes place in a university setting (Norberg 1990, p. 407). 

In others, such as the U.S., most study takes place during employment through a series of examinations (SOA 2012, CAS 2011). 

In the UK, and countries based on its process, there is a hybrid university-exam structure (Institute and Faculty of Actuaries 2011a). 

Related link
What is an Actuary  (Department of Mathematics, University of Illinois) 

Source: Times of Malta