IFoA Asia Conference 2025

Keynote Address by Madelena Mohamed, Assistant Governor, Bank Negara Malaysia

Delivered by the President of the IFoA – Paul Sweeting

Tackling the climate change challenge: where we stand, what it means for actuaries and can AI help?

Climate change is one of the most pressing challenges of our time, impacting all aspects of life for individuals across the world and future generations.

This session will give a brief summary of climate change challenges faced globally and in Malaysia, how different industries and insurers are being impacted and the roles companies and individuals can play. This will also include climate change disclosure requirements which are now moving from voluntary to mandatory such as ISSB’s IFRS S2 requirements for insurers. 

We’ll highlight and discuss key areas where actuaries are impacted by the disclosure requirements. We will leverage this to set out a high-level framework for scenario testing to integrate climate risks and opportunities into actuarial functions. 

We will then finish with how AI can be used to help address climate change challenges, including current AI-driven climate models.

The session will be a combination of presentations and open discussion.

Attendees will gain: 

• Insights into climate change challenges and opportunities globally and in Malaysia
• Understanding of where and how actuaries should be involved to successfully navigate the requirements of IFRS S2 
• Understanding of the role AI can play in help tackling climate change challenges including developing climate models

Speakers: Debashish Dey, Aviva, Ian Du Plessis and James Yap, Deloitte

Lunchtime session: Global health trends and medical inflation – are we facing the perfect storm?

Many countries face significant challenges as demographics shift, with escalating demand in ageing populations and rising prevalence of complex health needs. These put significant pressures on healthcare systems around the world, which are already struggling with healthcare staff shortages, burnout and rising healthcare costs.

This presentation will look at health trends around the globe, sharing insights on factors driving such trends. It will include trends impacting medical inflation and insights from the regional medical survey on health business practices in Asia. 

Speaker: Christine Fairall, Milliman 

Navigating IFRS 17 complexities: insights from multi-jurisdictional implementations 

This session is designed for actuaries, finance professionals, and implementation leads with intermediate to advanced knowledge of IFRS 17. It offers a practical exploration of persistent challenges in implementing IFRS 17, drawn from cross-border experiences in Asia-Pacific. The session will distill key lessons from actual engagements, covering technical complexities such as coverage units, risk adjustment calibration, reinsurance mismatches and PAA eligibility. 

Attendees will gain: 

• Strategic insights into managing post-implementation pain points 
• Real-world solutions to bridge actuarial-financial misalignments 
• Tools to anticipate regulatory expectations and audit scrutiny 

The session builds upon working party experiences and implementation advisory across Asia-Pacific, including engagements with regulators and industry associations.  

Speakers: Harun Kannan Rajagopal and Toh Yi Jean, EY

Legends of Takaful podcast series: reflections and the unfinished journey 

Over the past year, the Legends of Takaful podcast series captured the voices of pioneering leaders who shaped the Takaful industry from its earliest days. Their stories reveal defining moments, hard-earned lessons, and the original spirit of purpose that drove the movement. 
 
This session distills key insights from those interviews – not just as a tribute, but as a challenge. While the industry has made significant strides in regulation, scale, and technical advancement, the journey remains unfinished. 

Are we still aligned with the values that founded Takaful? 
Where have we strayed, and where must we return? 
 
The session will provide a reflection on leadership, legacy, and what today’s generation must carry forward to ensure Takaful remains true to its mission of risk pooling and mutual protection. 

Speakers: Hassan Scott Odierno 

Resilient leadership in remote and multi-market teams: lessons from a hybrid digital analytics career

Rishika Gupta has worked across India, Indonesia and Singapore, often leading teams remotely and handling clients from different cultures and time zones. She has seen firsthand how much leadership today depends on adaptability and empathy, not just titles or tools. This paper is a reflection of those experiences, especially the lessons learned while managing digital analytics projects and campaigns in a hybrid setup. 

From working with government clients in Southeast Asia to global FMCG brands, Rishika has navigated everything from language barriers to sudden market shifts, team silos, and tight turnarounds. The goal of this session is to share what worked (and what did not) when it came to building trust, keeping teams motivated, and delivering results. Even when they weren’t in the same room or even the same country. 

It’s not a textbook on leadership; it’s a practical guide for anyone trying to lead with resilience in a remote, fast-changing environment. Whether you are in data, marketing, or tech, these insights can help you grow as a leader while staying grounded, collaborative, and human, no matter where your team is. 

Speaker: Rishika Gupta

Building reliable conversational AI with RAG and tool calling: practical lessons from UK Pension Bot

LLMs are powerful. But building a reliable, domain-specific AI assistant that people actually trust and use requires solving real engineering problems. 

This session will share practical lessons from developing ukpensionbot.com: a live, LLM-powered assistant. It helps both pension savers and professionals (including actuaries and scheme administrators) navigate complex pensions content using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and dynamic tool calling. 

This system goes far beyond general-purpose chat. It integrates scheme rules, government regulations, administrator guides and actuarial calculations to deliver accurate, contextual responses in a conversational format. 

With live demos, we will explore key challenges and optimisation techniques across the RAG pipeline and beyond: 

• Document pre-processing 
• Chunking and embeddings that balance context with precision 
• Retrieval tuning to improve answer quality and relevance 
• Tool calling for actuarial calculations and real-time data access (APIs, databases) 
• Mitigating hallucinations and managing token limits 

The examples are drawn from pensions. But the architecture and techniques are readily transferable to insurance and other domains where internal teams and customers need AI systems they can rely on. 

If you’re building AI tools to support technical communication, modelling or operational enablement, this session offers a grounded, implementation-led perspective. 

Speakers: ChengVoon Tong, Independent AI Developer, ex-KPMG UK (Pensions – Actuarial) 

Life actuaries face dual challenges: making accurate, data-driven pricing and underwriting decisions while staying ahead of medical and demographic shifts that reshape mortality and morbidity risks. 

Advancements in medical science – ranging from earlier disease detection to transformative treatments – are altering life expectancy and disease progression in ways that directly affect how we assess and price risk. At the same time, evolving customer behaviours and underwriting practices are creating new opportunities to refine selection and improve outcomes before changes are visible in experience data. 

These trends raise important actuarial questions: 

• Will we continue to experience mortality improvements?
• How is technology reshaping life expectancy?
• What are the impacts of global emerging trends, and how do they affect risk pools?
• What is the actuarial value of understanding these trends early? 
   

In this session, we’ll explore the powerful synergies between pricing and underwriting analytics, and medical insight. Our focus will be on anticipating risk costs for shifts in underwriting and selection before they materialise in experience data by presenting real-world examples to illustrate these points:

1. Revolutionising Risk Costing through Application Form Changes – We’ll examine how adjustments in application forms can lead to significant shifts in risk costing and selection processes, ultimately transforming the landscape of underwriting.  
2. Predictive Models: Enhancing Underwriting Accuracy and Pricing Strategies – We’ll dive into the role of advanced predictive models and how they provide insights that improve the precision of underwriting and the efficacy of pricing strategies.  
    

By uniting developments in medical science with actuarial innovation, attendees will gain practical tools and insights for navigating tomorrow’s risk environment. Aimed at actuaries working in product development, pricing, or risk, this session provides a strategic overview with practical takeaways.

It will help equip actuaries with the insight needed to anticipate and respond to a world where life, data, and disruption intersect. 

Speakers: Ting Dai and Shilpa Mangla, Pacific Life Re

Navigating geopolitical risks in the financial sector

The primary objective of this session is to discuss the fundamentals of geopolitical risks. We seek to provide actuaries and risk professionals with an understanding of geopolitical dynamics and their implications on global business, and the operational resilience of financial institutions such as banks, insurers, hedge funds, and pension funds.

We seek to help you identify, evaluate, anticipate, quantify, and mitigate geopolitical risks, using a blend of theoretical frameworks and practical, real-world applications to answer the following questions:

• Which part or parts of a business may suffer?
• In what way?
• What are likely to be the second, third, and even fourth-order impacts?
• Geopolitical risk mitigation and operational resilience
• Who will lead the responses?
• What business-critical continuity plans need to be in place?
• Has rigorous reverse stress testing and war gaming taken place?

Resources:

• Read more about the topic at: Geopolitical risk in finance | Risk.net
• A paper is in the process of being published by the British Actuarial Journal on operational resilience in the UK financial sector

Speaker: Lawrence Habahbeh, HedgeGenomics and speaker TBC

From GLM to GBM: evolving predictive modelling in the insurance world

In today’s data-rich environment, insurance professionals are faced with increasingly complex datasets that demand smarter, more adaptive analytical tools. Traditional actuarial techniques, such as generalised linear models (GLMs), have served the industry well for decades, offering a structured way to model claim frequency and severity. But as the volume and variety of data continue to grow, there is a rising need to explore more powerful approaches that can capture non-linear relationships and hidden interactions within the data.

This session introduces ‘gradient boosting machines’ (GBMs) as a logical next step for actuaries and analysts looking to enhance their modelling toolkit. It is designed specifically for a beginner audience with little to no prior experience in machine learning.

The session starts with a simplified explanation of GLMs: their core principles, advantages, and known limitations. We then transition into an intuitive, visual walkthrough of GBMs. This will demonstrate how they iteratively build a series of small decision trees, learn from their own prediction errors, and progressively improve model performance.

The session focuses on building conceptual clarity rather than diving into code. Through illustrative charts and real-world insurance case studies, participants will see how GBMs can outperform traditional models by identifying complex patterns that GLMs may miss.

By the end of this session, attendees will gain a clear understanding of how GBMs work, when they might be more appropriate than GLMs, and how to start exploring them in their own actuarial or analytical work.

Speaker: Husain Feroz Ali, DD Consulting

Climate change impact on mortality in Malaysia

Climate change is emerging as a critical factor influencing global health, with both direct and indirect effects on mortality. This presentation examines a holistic approach to assessing the impact of climate change on mortality, integrating both quantitative and qualitative perspectives. We will review key methodologies, including statistical modelling to quantify temperature-mortality relationships, as well as qualitative analyses from literature review. 

Speakers: Sze Won Tan and Nadiah Zabri, Actuarial Society of Malaysia 

Pricing out the less fortunate? Rethinking risk pooling through Ta’awun

As actuarial pricing becomes more granular, affordability has emerged as a critical concern –  especially for the less fortunate. This session explores how the traditional pooling mechanism is being challenged, and how the concept of Ta’awun (mutual assistance) in Takaful can offer a solution.

The session will begin with a short presentation on current issues and industry responses to Ta’awuni pricing, including regulatory considerations under RBC 2 and IFRS 17.

A panel discussion will follow and examine how the Takaful industry can strike a balance between technical fairness and social solidarity.

Speakers: 

• Wan Saifulrizal Wan Ismail, CEO Prudential BSN Takaful Berhad
• Kamaludin Ahmad, Group CEO Etiqa Insurance and Takaful
• Professor Dr Engku Rabiah Adawiyah binti Engku Ali, Deputy Chairman of Shariah Advisory Councils at BNM

Regime change in Asia: a tour through the evolving regulatory capital landscape for non-life insurers

Recent years have seen significant changes in the solvency regulation and financial reporting landscape across Asia. There has been a shift towards risk-based solvency assessment and economic value-based assessment both for solvency and financial reporting.  And this process is ongoing, with Bank Negara Malaysia – the regulator for the conference’s host nation – recently publishing its exposure draft for RBC 2, for example. 

Based on engagement with some of the industry players and regulators in the key markets where changes have taken place, the paper will present an overview of these changes. It will focus on the implications for underwriting, finance, and risk management (rather than operational or technical considerations) – and how actuaries can help to manage the transition. 

Speakers: Edward Plowman and Tony Tan, Guy Carpenter

RBC 2 Exposure Draft: key updates from the ASM RBC Focus Group – Takaful perspective

The long-awaited RBC 2 Exposure Draft introduces significant changes to capital adequacy requirements for insurers and Takaful operators. This session presents key highlights and discussion points from the Actuarial Society of Malaysia’s (ASM) RBC Focus Group, with a specific focus on the implications for Takaful. 

We will cover: 

• Major updates and structural changes in the exposure draft 
• Takaful-specific considerations, challenges, and areas requiring further clarity 
• Feedback provided by the ASM Focus Group to Bank Negara Malaysia 
• Practical insights for actuaries and operators preparing for implementation 

This session aims to provide an informed and balanced view of what RBC 2 means for the future of capital management in Takaful. 

Speakers: Farzana Ismail, Milliman and Nazrul Hazim, Malaysian Re 

The casualty landscape in Asia: measuring and managing the risk 

The paper will give an overview of casualty insurance (including motor liability) in each of the main Asian markets: the products, characteristics, main risks, and performance metrics.  

Asian insurers and their clients, particularly exporters, can be exposed to large risks in the US and other litigious jurisdictions.  The paper will cover some examples of this and some of the drivers of loss trends in these markets, such as social inflation, litigation funds and reserving issues. 

The paper will also look at the evolving science of catastrophe risk analysis in casualty, identifying the potential for clash, systemic and latent risk. And it will explore some of the emerging concerns around climate change, electric vehicles and autonomous driving that may affect casualty and motor liability risk. 

Finally, the paper will examine the available risk transfer and mitigation solutions for these risks. 

Speakers: Bryan Shen and Edward Plowman, Guy Carpenter 

Optimising actuarial processes with cloud computing: with real-world case studies 

In today’s fast-evolving financial landscape, actuarial teams are under increasing pressure to deliver faster, more accurate insights while managing growing volumes of data and adhering to strict regulatory standards. Traditional on-premises systems, while once sufficient, often struggle to scale with these modern demands. Cloud computing presents a transformative opportunity to modernise actuarial operations, enabling scalability, automation, enhanced collaboration, and real-time data processing. 

This session explores how cloud technology can be effectively leveraged to optimise actuarial processes, enhance productivity, and reduce costs. By migrating key actuarial workflows to cloud platforms such as Milliman Mind, organisations can significantly reduce run times for complex models, improve version control, and streamline actuarial processes. 

The presenters (which may also include existing Milliman Mind clients) will discuss:  

• How cloud computing aligns with the strategic goals of actuarial departments, including speed, scalability, and innovation. 
• Understanding pain points in traditional actuarial workflows such as long model run times, manual processes, and versioning issues, and how cloud-enabled solutions such as Milliman Mind can help. 
• Review real-world case studies where insurers and Takaful operators have successfully transitioned to cloud-based actuarial processes, demonstrating measurable improvements in efficiency and collaboration. 
• How adopting cloud platforms can prepare actuarial teams for future technological advances, including integration with AI/machine learning tools. 

Speakers: Mohamad Muzakkir Abdul Ghafar, Milliman 

Hush hush: keeping neural network claims modelling private, secret, and distributed using federated learning

The IFoA’s Federated Learning Working Party will present a novel way for insurance companies to build machine learning and AI models together, without sharing any customer data.  

This sessional will walk through the working party’s recently highly commended paper for the 2024 Brian Hey prize. The meeting will show how it has applied Google’s federated learning algorithm (2016) for text prediction on smart phones to insurance modelling.  

This concept enables the direct training of machine learning models on users’ devices, such as smartphones. It eliminates the need to share or transfer potentially sensitive data to a centralised server.   

Unlike traditional machine learning methodologies, federated learning adopts a model where the algorithm is brought to the data, rather than transferring the data to the algorithm. It will be hugely important as AI becomes more commonplace.  

In our paper and sessional we show how insurance companies can collaboratively develop a neural network model to predict claims frequency specifically. We achieve this using the Flower package in Python along with PyTorch. We show that if companies cannot share customer data, they can achieve near double their model predictive performance by using federated learning while keeping their customer data secure.   

The working party is part of the IFoA Data Science and AI practice area. 

Speakers: Harry Loh, EY 

Panel discussion with:

Speakers: Christine Fairall and Pang Hsiang Chye, Milliman, and Wooi Chen Khoo, UCSI University

Speakers: Madhav Samariya, Oliver Wyman and Manosha Hansini, Deloitte