News & Views

2018 has got off to a fast start – we have already seen a high level of demand from clients in a range of areas, and are anticipating a very busy year. We look at some of the factors fuelling this demand.

Over the past two years, APR has provided training services to the actuarial staff of nine clients across the Life and GI sectors, primarily in the core technical areas of Excel and VBA; building on the success of these courseswe are now expanding the range of training we are able to provide to clients.

It is now approaching a year since APR employed our first CAA-level Actuarial Analysts, so we thought this would be a good time to share our experiences, look at how our CAA cohort might develop and, not too shamelessly, give a bit of a sales pitch to potential clients and analyst recruits.

Chris Nash gives us his report on this years EUSprig (European Union Spreadsheet Risk Interest Group) Conference. It was here that he attended a series of lectures on a variety of spreadsheet related topics such as developing spreadsheets with three or more dimensions and whether or not digital natives are spreadsheet natives.

APR’s staff have provided another fantastic set of exam results with an overall pass rate of 89%. Roger Austin congratulates all of our staff and highlights some of their exceptional achievements.

Having established in our second article that IFRS 4 has a number of shortcomings when it comes to insurance company profit reporting, the next article in the series gives a high-level introduction to its replacement, IFRS 17, and starts to look at whether and to what extent it will address these deficiencies.

Following the creation of the Certified Actuarial Analyst (CAA) qualification in 2014, APR recruited our first Actuarial Analysts in 2016, and now have four full-time staff working towards this qualification. We look at our top five reasons why choosing to work towards the CAA qualification with APR may be the best place to start a career in actuarial science.

The second of our articles introducing the key concepts of IFRS 17 looks back at the existing standard, IFRS 4, and explores some of the reasons why it doesn’t meet the desirable attributes for insurance company profit reporting, and why a change was therefore needed.

David Bennett reports on the Imperial College-organised conference “New Horizons in Data Science: from Machine Learning to Finance”, consisting of a series of talks on current research relating to the fields of finance and data science.

APR’s James Robinson returned to Comic Con at London’s Excel last month, attending with a team aiming to raise awareness of blood cancer and stem cell donations on behalf of Anthony Nolan. Learn more about the event, and how easy it is to donate.