When Joshua Waters decided to pursue an actuarial career, he thought his decision was inspired by a university friend – until his mother reminded him of a much earlier influence.
“Once I’d started training, she told me my grandpa had put the idea in my head,” he says. “He’d been telling us about how airlines sell extra tickets for flights because their actuaries assume a couple of people won’t show.
“That was my actual introduction to the profession - but at the time I really just thought I was copying my friend.”
After a maths degree at Cambridge, Joshua started his training and immediately discovered he had a lot of new skills to learn.
“I had quite a baptism of fire when it came to communication,” he says. “I'd been told I was weaker on that side than the technical side.
“Around that same time I joined KPMG and suddenly found myself presenting to clients and speaking about all kinds of topics at IFoA events. So I went from weaker communication to presenting in every town and city across the UK.
“Today I enjoy presentations and communication. That early experience taught me a lot.”
In fact, communication is now one of the things Joshua finds most rewarding about his work.
“It’s special when you develop an insight and you get consensus across the business,” he says. “It’s equally rewarding when that insight is challenged, when somebody makes me reassess my view.
“You have to be receptive to other views, and willing to explain why you're making a recommendation. It’s about having and maintaining a two-way dialogue.”
“Chartered Actuary gives us a very simple way of communicating years of professional experience and professional study.” – Joshua Waters, Chartered Actuary (Fellow)
Dialogue proved vital to one of the biggest challenges of Joshua’s early career. “All the alarm bells were ringing at an insurer,” he says. "They'd rerun their pricing model, and half the prices had doubled and half of them had halved.
“All the brokers were asking what was going on, it was escalated all the way to the group chief capital officer and group chief risk actuary, it impacted how the business decided which country was most profitable and so on. There were some very heated debates.
“I was brought in to provide quantitative analysis to demonstrate what was going wrong. I started by having a dialogue with various stakeholders to summarise the model requirements. Then I investigated various techniques that would somehow meet these requirements.
“I ended up recommending a very obscure method that had previously only been used in the USA. It had the big advantage that it would respond to real changes in the world, but didn't move around for no reason and didn't take a supercomputer to calculate.
“Because it met stakeholder requirements, people got over the fact that they'd never heard of it. But it was so different to anything they'd seen before that it took months to get everyone over the line.
“In the end it was implemented and we got really good feedback from the regulator at the Bank of England. And it has fundamentally changed how that insurer operates – in fact, it’s still in place five years on.”
Joshua’s actuarial ability to take extremely complex information and distil it into a neat and meaningful solution is a process which, he says, is fundamental not only to individual projects, but to the profession as a whole.
“We're trying to branch out into new areas like climate change, go deeper into the banking sector, take on roles currently associated with data science,” he says. “In those areas, companies might be employing their first actuary.
“Chartered Actuary gives us a very simple way of communicating years of professional experience and professional study. It's concise, visible and distinctive. Most importantly, it helps people understand what an actuary is, what they can offer, how they can help the business.
“That’s going to be vital to our profession in the years to come.”
We’ll be sharing member stories from around the world on a regular basis, so keep an eye out for updates. If you’ve chosen to adopt Chartered Actuary status, or if you’ve employed an actuary who is helping to transform your organisation, we’d love to hear from you.
