I have a question. I have seen that some firms treat their actuaries as a regulatory burden and try to keep their departments as small as possible, don't really hire star students nor emphasize exam progress and end up with a combined ratio in the 80s. I have seen other departments invest heavily in their actuaries, hiring fast-track students from top schools with generous pay and bonuses, loading up their departments with fancy predictive modeling and data-science doodads, only to see their combined ratios north of 100%.
And then I see some firms with good actuarial staff that are also doing well financially, and those with bad staff who aren't doing so well, and pretty much every combination in-between.
So, do actuaries actually have a meaningful impact on their firms? If so, how do we measure such an impact? How do we know actuaries are doing their jobs appropriately?
And then I see some firms with good actuarial staff that are also doing well financially, and those with bad staff who aren't doing so well, and pretty much every combination in-between.
So, do actuaries actually have a meaningful impact on their firms? If so, how do we measure such an impact? How do we know actuaries are doing their jobs appropriately?
Is a firm's success correlated with the competence of its actuaries?