How did you come to choose a career in re/insurance?

When I first heard of an actuarial career at a school career fair I was intrigued as I had never heard the word “actuary” before. Following some research, I quickly became fascinated at how actuarial science operates at the very intersection of math, finance, and computer programming and immediately knew that this was the career for me.

After obtaining my actuarial degree from Concordia University in 2011, I was fortunate enough to land a job at Intact Insurance, the largest P&C insurer in Canada.

In 2016, after five years rotating through various valuation and pricing roles, I was ambitious for a fresh challenge and moved into reinsurance by taking a job at Swiss Re Canada, where I was promoted to the role of appointed actuary and led the Canadian actuarial practice for a little over two years.

In 2019, I moved to Bermuda and joined Aeolus as a reserving actuary. Three years on, I am proud to say I am now the chief reserving actuary of the firm.

What makes the re/insurance industry attractive to young professionals?

It’s a particularly absorbing field for those who are quantitatively-oriented. The work/life balance is much better than in several finance-oriented fields such as investment banking. Importantly, there are opportunities for a broad spectrum of interests and personality types—more social types can work in external-facing roles such as an underwriter, a broker or in investor relations, providing plenty of client exposure, while those who prefer more of a back-office role (such as my own), can also enjoy interesting and highly rewarding careers such as an actuary, accountant or catastrophe modeller.

There are complex mathematical problems to be solved on both sides of the fence: underwriters are concerned with adequate pricing that balances competitiveness and profitability, while actuaries must carefully analyse cedant loss data to ensure the company’s loss reserves are adequate.

The industry is so dynamic and new roles are appearing all the time, with emerging global problems such as climate change leading, for example, to the creation of new research-related jobs within our industry.

What are the opportunities and challenges you’ve faced?

When I started my career at Intact Insurance, I benefited from the opportunity to gain a valuable grounding in various actuarial roles, including reserving, pricing, and predictive modelling so early in my career.

When I joined Swiss Re’s Canadian actuarial team my line manager resigned only a few months after I joined for personal reasons, resulting in my promotion to lead the team which was both an amazing opportunity for me and a challenge. This resulted in increased visibility for me and was a great push forward in my career. Since I was now appending my signature to each of our actuarial reports, I quickly learned to quadruple-check all the work that my team sent out.

Taking the job at Aeolus in 2019 was challenging given the timing and the tumultuous years of 2017 and 2018 for the ILS space. However, I have gained considerable experience within the space, sharpened my actuarial skills and will continue facing new challenges head on.

What differences does your generation bring to the industry?

Millennials have been described as the first generation that grew up in the internet age and as a result tend to be very connected and tech savvy. We are eager to learn and dig down into new software and think carefully about how it can improve our employer’s business.

We are hungry for success, but I think sometimes it’s important for us to be patient, slow down and to remind ourselves that a career is a marathon and not a sprint. It’s important to maintain an appropriate respect for senior colleagues and take the opportunity to learn from them because they often know things that we don’t—and vice versa.

Millennials tend to be entrepreneurial and ambitious, so it’s increasingly important for employers to keep this generation engaged and challenged because there does seem to be a greater risk of career boredom than for previous generations. I am confident we’re seeing a well-rounded young workforce who have the experience of operating at all levels and sectors of reinsurance. Neither better nor worse, but certainly different.

What are your career goals?

My primary goal is simple: to continue to learn new things every day in order to become a highly respected technical expert within the re/insurance industry. To date, I have predominantly acquired valuation expertise in the primary P&C insurance industry, including personal, commercial and specialty lines, as well as in reinsurance including the ILS space.

My immediate focus is to further develop my expertise in reinsurance pricing. My longer-term aspirations include continuing to boil down complex loss movements and various other socioeconomic interactions into simple and concise messages to be communicated to our key stakeholders, and eventually taking on a more visible role within our firm. Aeolus is a very dynamic and fast-paced company to work for and I am confident that my contributions will keep growing over time.

If you had chosen a different career, what would it have been?

It was clear to me from a young age that my future career lay in a technical field and, when thinking about this question, accounting and engineering certainly made my shortlist. However, if I had been more adventurous in my early twenties, I think I could have done pretty well in professional poker.

While poker is relatively easy to understand for most, the amount of math that can be applied to the game is simply staggering. Notably, there exists a strategy referred to as Game Theory Optimal (GTO) poker. To boil it down, a GTO strategy uses math to help form a solid base for optimal, unexploitable play and teaches, among other things, how to bluff at just the right frequency to keep opponents guessing.

However, there remains an element of luck as even the best players have days where they lose much money despite having made a series of mathematically correct plays. This is better known as variance, a concept that shares its woes in poker and in the re/insurance space.