News & Views

At APR our partners have over 50 years combined experience hiring and developing student actuaries. Recently two of our junior students, Claydon Peaker and Jack Miller, sat down to interview one of those partners, Gary Heslop, to get his views on what makes a good actuarial student. This article summarises their conversation.

Following another stellar set of exam results in December, our FIA study co-ordinator Adam Smith and his fellow student Deven Rickaby decided to take a more detailed look at the exam results, specifically to test if our exam results were anything more than good luck.

APR took on our first cohort of students for the Certified Actuarial Analyst role in September 2017. Having since qualified as a CAA and progressed onto the FIA exams one of this cohort, Morgan Smith-Woodhams, gives her views on the qualification itself and its merits as an alternative route into the actuarial profession.

Most actuarial managers who engage with contractors will be aware that changes to the IR35 rules coming into effect from April next year will have an impact on their teams (and many will already have started to feel the effect), but the longer-term impact of the legislation is less clear. In this article we summarise the key things actuarial managers need to think about to prepare.

IR35 is a complex topic, and while it’s still not entirely clear where the market will land, what is clear is that it could have a significant effect on many actuarial projects and departments. In this more detailed article we explain the forthcoming changes, and give our view of their impact on the market, to help to equip managers to prepare.

This year’s APR Charity Day took place on 27 November, and yet again we exceeded all previous years’ totals, with 27 staff and 7 contractors combining with the APR partners to donate over £13,000 across eight different charities selected by our staff. Find out about how it works and the charities we are supporting here.

At APR we have built our reputation as providers of high-quality interim resource, but for many years we have also worked successfully with clients on a consulting basis. In this article we reflect on how our consulting business, based firmly on our exceptionally talented team, has grown over the course of 2019.

As well as being of fundamental importance to society at large, climate change is becoming an increasingly hot topic in the finance sector. In this article we look into two areas related to this: the recommendations and supervisory statement from the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, set up by the PRA; and some of the wider considerations around Environmental, Social and Governance investment.

In October three APR staff attended and spoke at the two IFoA ‘Count Me In’ events in Edinburgh and London. These events were aimed at giving prospective actuaries tips on joining the profession, with a particular emphasis on increasing diversity in the profession, something we ourselves are increasingly focusing on.

Following the April 2019 exam sitting, the first under Curriculum 2019, we took a look at the changes and how they affect employers, managers and actuarial students – we have now updated this article with further observations from the September 2019 sitting.