17 May 2023
Life Board Update
Clarence Er, Deputy Chair provides an update from the latest board meeting.
The most recent series of Life Board meetings were held 21 and 28 March 2023, which were the first set of meetings I have attended since I’ve joined the Life Board as Deputy Chair. A wide range of topics were covered during the meetings and I have the pleasure of sharing a summary of some of the key updates.
Update on IFoA initiatives
- An update from Richard Scott on the IFoA’s engagements with employers:
- to ensure that employers have access to right resources, opportunities and insights to support their business and grow the profession; and
- on Diversity, Equality and Inclusiveness
The Board provided some feedback on items to be considered as part of the work planned for this year.
- An update from Neil McCrae on changes made to IFoA website which some of you may have already noticed. The changes were aimed at ensuring the website meets best practice standards and improving the user interface of the website, which includes optimising the website for mobile viewing.
- An update from Katy Stephenson on the Digital Community Platform which has been launched to all members. Katy shared some of the functionalities that members have found useful and we would encourage members to start using the platform to facilitate discussions and to share useful information.
Creating Transformative Change
We welcomed Naomi Burger from EY to share feedback from the webinar session that EY hosted recently. The webinar touched on several aspects of transformative change including the importance of transformative culture, the roles that actuaries have to play in this and what organisations can do to make a start.
The webinar resulted in a number of areas for the IFoA to consider to support transformative change within the profession:
- Training needs which involves greater focus on technology skills (such as emerging technology solutions, coding languages, agile techniques) and softer skills (such as leadership, communication, collaboration.
- Emphasising the role of technology in the definition of the future work of actuaries and highlighting technology and innovation career paths available to actuaries.
- Other initiatives that could be taken such as running hackathons, tech competitions and promoting engagement with other developer communities (such as developer communities, data scientist etc).
Responses to Consultations
Since the last Life Board meeting, the IFoA responded to the Bank of England Discussion Paper 5/22 on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (submitted 17 February 2023) and is currently pulling together responses to the following consultations:
- HMT Consultation Paper – Introducing an Insurer Resolution Regime (due 20 April 2023)
- PRA Consultation Paper (CP14/22) – Review of Solvency II: Reporting phase 2 (due 8 May 2023)
There are number of important consultations in relation to Solvency II/UK which are expected to be published June and September this year.
Details of the consultations and the IFoA response can be found on the Public Affairs and Policy Consultation webpage.