News & Views

Sunday 8 March marked International Women’s Day, which aims to celebrate the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women. As our own contribution to the occasion, two of APR’s female staff give their views on what it is to be a woman in the actuarial world today.

As you may have seen, the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA) are currently holding a consultation on changes to the CPD scheme for its members. But what will this mean in practice? In this article, Ross Gordon summarises the key changes being proposed and lets you know what to do if you want your opinion to be heard.

To help you keep on top of CPD opportunities over the coming weeks and months, Ross Gordon summarises some of the actuarial profession’s upcoming events and sessions. He has even drawn out those elusive Stage 3 Professional Skills sessions for those of us that need them.

We recently held our annual review and training days at APR and here we quickly recap the two days covering a few highlights from 2019, our plans for 2020 and then take a quick look at some of the training our staff undertook on the training day.

One very large part of actuarial modelling is the need to amend or update existing models. This presents a different set of challenges to building a model from scratch so in this article we lay out our top tips on what to do when inheriting coded actuarial models.

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.