Over the past few years, the demand for interim actuarial services in the UK has greatly exceeded supply. We believe it is highly likely that there will continue to be a strong demand for such support for many years. This future demand is driven by a number of major regulatory changes in the pipeline such as Solvency II and IFRS Phase 2, as well as commercial pressures on clients to reduce permanent headcount.
Our key strategies to tackle this issue are to increase the number of candidates available for actuarial contracting opportunities and to invest in training so that a higher proportion of the available resource meets clients’ required skill-sets. The steps we have already taken include:
1. Recruitment of high calibre graduates: Using our significant experience of graduate recruitment, we have recruited a number of the UK’s brightest numerate graduates as our permanent employees (our “employed associates”), who are then available for clients to draw on as and when required. We have successfully recruited three intakes of employed associates in the past two years.
2. Strategic partnerships: We have developed partnerships with a leading actuarial recruitment company and an overseas actuarial outsourcing company, in order to identify additional actuarial personnel who are interested in contracting.
3. Training and development of resource pools: We have increased the level of skills and technical ability of our resource pools via in-house training and through the funding of external training courses, conferences and seminars. Courses delivered internally include introductory and refresher courses for skills commonly demanded by our clients such as Excel, VBA, spreadsheet reviewing, UK reporting framework, etc, as well as providing an introduction to topics likely to be in demand in the future, such as Solvency II.
4. Development of technical library: We have developed a significant and expanding library of technical material in many actuarial disciplines, commonly focussing on current issues and in key areas of demand for flexible resource from clients. In many cases, this material can be used by the people we place at clients’ offices prior to commencing the project to ensure the time taken for our people to start contributing to a project is minimised.
We know of no other companies in our sector using such a wide range of innovative strategies to increase the quality and size of the resource pools. Clients may wish to consider which companies are able to confirm that their services offer the following features:
• Provision of exclusive resource pools which we deliver via our permanently employed actuarial resource and contractors who choose to work solely through APR.
• Real strategies to increase the amount of contracting resource rather than just looking for a slice of the current market.
• Highly competitive margins with a significant proportion of that margin being used for the benefit of other key stakeholders in the market ie clients and resource.
• Substantially cheaper costs of interim actuarial services which we deliver when clients use our employed associates because we remove the premium normally associated with self-employed contractors.
• Explicit, transparent margins which means there is no scope for discontent between our resource and us.
• Greater control over performance of self-employed contractors since, uniquely via our bonus scheme, remuneration of contractors is directly linked to performance as assessed by our clients.
• Demonstrable investment in training and development of self-employed contractors, which we have delivered via the provision of training, and the funding of attendance at conferences and seminars, creating a more satisfied and loyal resource pool.
• Face-to-face meeting and rigorous taking up of references which we carry out before any new individuals are added to our resource pool.
• Organisation of travel and accommodation arrangements which we carry out so there are no distractions for our people when on-site at clients’ offices.