APR launches Dublin base
We are delighted to announce that we have set up an operation in the heart of Dublin and have already appointed our first members of our Dublin actuarial team. We have been serving the Irish market since 2012 from our Edinburgh and London offices, but have felt for some time that we should open a Dublin base to better serve our Irish clients. This will enable our Irish clients to benefit from our high-quality staff, who love to solve problems and who hit the ground running, without having to incur the significant travel and accommodation expenses of bringing people over from the UK.
For those firms who have not used us before and are perhaps less familiar with our services and what sets us apart, I’d like to quickly summarise what we do and how we differ from others.
Our services
We have two main service lines:
- Resource augmentation: This is where we second a member of our staff to support your team, effectively providing you with an additional team member to bolster your ranks.
- Consulting: This service involves us scoping out a piece of work, agreeing deliverables and then putting together a team of our staff to fulfil the agreed deliverables; in essence, we take the load off your back.
We intend to grow our Dublin team steadily over the coming months, but at all times we will continue to be able to provide support from our team of over 55 UK actuarial staff.
How we differ
Right from founding our business back in 2006, we decided that we wanted quality to be inherent in all we did. Many companies talk about quality, but we felt that it would be most effective for us to demonstrate our quality through actions. Given our staff are at the heart of our business, it felt natural for them be our focus. This has resulted in the following key differentiators:
- Calibre of our staff: We are highly selective when recruiting our staff. Our assessment process consists of a phone interview, online assessment, presentation, test and face to face interview, and is highly selective at each stage. We use this process to identify those individuals who have the skills and aptitude to deliver a great service to our clients. In each of the past few years, we have typically had over 600 applicants from graduates wanting to join our team, out of which we have taken on around 5-6 per year. This selection process results in consistently high calibre individuals who proactively seek to solve problems and add value from the outset.
- Training: Once we recruit our staff, we then put them through our intensive induction training for the first two to three months. But the training doesn’t stop there: we continue to provide ongoing training and development for all of our staff, including after they qualify as actuaries, which contributes to our great staff retention record. This training is highly practical, honing their skills in areas often required on client projects, whether it is software-related (e.g. Excel, VBA, SQL, Prophet, etc.), wider skills (e.g. communication, project management, leadership, etc.) or industry knowledge (e.g. specific products, actuarial techniques, regulation, etc).
Essentially, we recruit great people and then grow them through investing in significant amounts of training. These two elements help ensure that our people can hit the ground running, something for which our clients regularly compliment us. This ethos will apply equally to our Dublin office, ensuring our Irish clients continue to experience the high-quality work we have built our name on.
Want to know more?
If you would like to know more, or explore how we could potentially help you and your team, please do get in touch with me at roger.austin@aprllp.com.
Roger Austin
September 2020
