Actuaries

Who is an Actuary?
An actuary is a business professional who deals with the financial impact of risk and uncertainty. Actuaries provide expert assessments of financial security systems, with a focus on their complexity, their mathematics, and their mechanisms (Trowbridge 1989, p. 7). Actuaries mathematically evaluate the likelihood of events and quantify the contingent outcomes in order to minimize losses, both emotional and financial, associated with uncertain undesirable events

What does Actuaries do?

a) Actuaries Make Financial Sense of the Future Actuaries are experts in assessing the financial impact of tomorrow's uncertain events. They enable financial decisions to be made with more confidence by: Analyzing the past Modelling the future Assessing the risks involved, and Communicating what the results mean in financial terms.

b)

Actuaries

Enable

More

Informed

Decisions:

Actuaries add value by enabling businesses and individuals to make better-informed decisions, with a clearer view of the likely range of financial outcomes from different future events. The actuary's skills in analysis and modeling of problems in finance, risk management and product design are used extensively in the areas of insurance, pensions, investment and more recently in wider fields such as project management, banking and health care. Within these industries, actuaries perform a wide variety of roles such as design and pricing of product, financial management and corporate planning. Actuaries are invariably involved in the overall management of insurance companies and pension, gratuity and other employee benefit funds schemes; they have statutory roles in insurance and employee benefit valuations to some extent in social insurance schemes sponsored by government. Actuaries apply professional rigour combined with a commercial approach to the decision -making process.

 In traditional life insurance, actuarial science focuses on the analysis of mortality, the production of life tables, and the application of compound interest to produce life insurance, annuities and endowment policies. Contemporary life insurance programs have been extended to include credit and mortgage insurance, key man insurance for small businesses, long term care insurance and health savings accounts (Hsiao 2001).

 In health insurance, including insurance provided directly by employers, and social insurance, actuarial science focuses on the analysis of rates of disability, morbidity, mortality. In the pension industry, actuarial methods are used to measure the costs of alternative strategies with regard to the design, funding, accounting, administration, and maintenance or redesign of pension plans. The strategies are greatly influenced by short-term and long-term bond rates, the funded status of the pension and benefit arrangements

Initial development
In 1662 from a London John Graunt, who showed that there were predictable patterns of longevity and death in a group, or cohort, of people of the same age, despite the uncertainty of the date of death of any one individual. This study became the basis for the original life table. One could now set up an insurance scheme to provide life insurance or pensions for a group of people, and to calculate with some degree of accuracy how much each person in the group should contribute to a common fund assumed to earn a fixed rate of interest. The first person to demonstrate publicly how this could be done was Edmond Halley (of Halley's comet fame). Halley constructed his own life table, and showed how it could be used to calculate the premium amount someone of a given age should pay to purchase a life annuity (Halley 1693).

Car insurance
If you have a car, you would have a car insurance. How old are you? How old is your car? With every successive year, as the car ages, the value of the car will also go down. How does the rising price of petrol effect your usage of the car? What is the popularity with thieves, cost to repair etc. All these and more factors are considered by the actuary when pricing auto insurance

Planning for present and future

Actuaries try to strike a balance between designing and pricing products so that company has enough money to run business and has enough business to continue running!! Life insurance actuaries help design products, price them .Pension Mortgage Credit insurance Health insurance - In the same way that a health insurance company assists customers to plan for unforeseen events, the actuary function helps insurance companies understand their risks and plan for their futures accordingly

Qualification for Actuaries

ACET Actuarial Common Entrance Test is applicable to those who plan to enroll as student members of IAI and wish to take actuarial examinations from the IAI Eligibility criterion student should have passed 10+2 examination or an equivalent examination with English as one of the subjects at 10 + 2 level. Student is examined on basics in Actuarial/Mathematics and Statistics