The changing shape of demand for APR’s services
As the scale of our business has grown over the years, so has the shape of how we work with clients.
Whilst many of our clients first got to know us via our bright, intellectually-curious, technology-savvy junior actuarial staff, we work with clients now on a much broader range of projects than we did 15 years ago. We enjoy high retention rates, and we can now claim a significant qualified actuary population including senior actuaries with deep technical specialism. We complement our graduate recruitment with selective experienced hires. We now have 85 actuarial staff, including 25 qualified actuaries, and our client work naturally represents the changing profile of our team.
Implementation projects
While the background for these projects can vary, we have a wide variety of practical experience including: model and software development, supporting a client’s new insurance licence application with their regulator, developing pricing and risk frameworks, capital release initiatives and documentation to support major model changes. The support model largely remains the same:
- You have a business problem which you cannot easily solve on your own and approach us for support.
- Once we understand your needs, we will construct a team of appropriately-skilled and experienced APR staff. Our lead will have an excellent delivery track record as it is important to us that your project is a success.
- On your behalf, we take on the delivery responsibility for the project, leaving you to focus on your other responsibilities.
- We will have regular check-ins with you to report on cost burn and discuss emerging issues with you until the project is complete.
Peak capacity support
Some of our clients have ongoing internal pinch points which can overburden their teams if no action is taken. Quarterly reporting is a good example of this; your reporting teams may be resourced to cope with the bulk of the working day timetable, but there may yet be a critical pinch point which the teams can only cope with by working long hours and/or weekend working.
We’ve successfully supported clients by supplementing their teams, with an APR team, only during their specific crunch period (for example, the first ten days of the working day timetable). Recurring pinch points lend themselves best to this support model – we aim to develop support materials for our staff to use and maximise knowledge transfer, minimising the support burden on the stretched client team.
Small or specialist team support: improving client resilience
Because they are small or highly specialised, some teams do not have natural resilience and are not always able to cope with the unplanned asks that inevitably crop up, leavers or long periods of parental leave. We work with teams like this to successfully improve their resilience. We do this, over time, by building knowledge of the client team’s processes, tools, and outputs within a number of our team. Then, if an unexpected crunch occurs, the client can call on us to provide additional bandwidth to work through the crunch without the usual lead-in time for someone new to add value.
Capacity and cost certainty
Some clients book capacity in advance. This is attractive to them because we will fix the rates at the point that the capacity is booked and provide certainty of resources. Both these features are particularly attractive for longer-term projects or where there is a significant lead-in time before work commences. For example, we supported a client’s 18-month major model change application, which involved phasing in different resource levels over the engagement period. Our client could be assured that we took on the responsibility for ensuring the right members of our team were available at the right times to support them.
Chris Bryce
November 2022
