Trailblazer

What motivated you to pursue an actuarial
career?
I enjoyed pure maths at school and was also very
interested in finance, so an actuarial career was
appealing.
Has the profession changed much since you
first came aboard?
Apart from technological advances, perhaps more
significant is the need to demonstrate why an
actuary’s role is unique and adds value. There was a
sense that actuaries were the people that society
relied upon to provide reassurance on issues that
were generally too difficult to understand. With the
explosion in the breadth and complexity of financial
products, and to some extent regulation, the number
of financial risk practitioners advising on the pricing
and valuation of financial risk has grown too. Hence
there are now many people doing similar work to
actuaries, and the traditional areas of life and pensions
are no longer seen as that complex.
Are you proud of the actuarial profession?
Yes, I am proud to be an actuary, although the
profession needs to keep abreast of the times and
keep itself relevant to the needs of the day.
You have recently moved to The Hague to
take up a new role in Shell with responsibility
for all the financing aspects of new projects as
well as M&A transactions. What excites or
intrigues you most about the oil business, and
how can actuaries make their mark outside
the traditional fields?
The top five oil states are all non-OECD countries
and hence this business is a fascinating mix of geopolitics,
huge capital investments, and long-term risks
as well as some amazing technical achievements.
Success demands much the same as that needed to
reach the top in traditional fields, although one is likely
to be competing against a wider range of professionals
while not having the comfort of a thorough
technical understanding of the business.
Do you feel your background as an actuary has
positively affected your career in finance?
My experience in life assurance, pensions, banking,
and the oil industry has invariably been about assessing
long-term profitability, for which discounted cashflow
models are the primary tools. I believe that our
actuarial training gives us the instinctive appreciation
of uncertainty and variability that is an advantage
when assimilating and interpreting the huge amount
of modelling data that can now be produced. What do you think the key challenges are for
those trying to break into the corporate
world, and how do you think that they can be
overcome?
Finding an employer to offer a comparable
remuneration package to do something different can
be a challenge. I would therefore suggest that the
move for a mid-career actuary is difficult, but in the
early years pay should be less of an issue and
potential employers will focus more on talent than
relevant experience.
Of your many career accomplishments, what
do you consider the most satisfying?
I have been fortunate to be involved in some very
interesting transactions, the most rewarding aspect of
which has always been the collective sense of achievement
accomplishing something beyond the individual
capabilities of the team. Now being given the opportunity
to apply this experience across such a large
portfolio of transactions is an exciting challenge.
What is the most important lesson you’ve
learned in business?
Understanding how individuals and organisations
make decisions. Be it selling a product or developing
an internal process, business is essentially an arrangement
between a supplier and a customer. Listening
plays a big part, but the real value comes from
interpreting the messages and developing a strategy
for building consensus then the challenge is to
execute the strategy to (hopefully) achieve something
close to your preferred solution!
What do you do to relax?
I am currently commuting on a weekly basis to The
Hague from London while preparing to move my family, so there is not much spare time, but I have
bought a bicycle for getting around The Hague, which
is much more relaxing than I had expected.
What do you think inspires young
mathematicians today, and how can the
profession ensure we recruit the most
talented ones?
I’m not sure that I know what inspires them, but I
think we should be broadening our potential intake.
For instance, should we be positioning ourselves as
a route into finance for science graduates?
What words of wisdom would you like to
share with aspiring actuaries?
In competitive and evolving employment markets,
the grounding and confidence that actuarial training
brings will serve you well in meeting the challenges
you will face to fulfil your ambition.