India needs to quickly expand the supply of professionally-trained and certified actuaries and should aim to increase the number of fellow actuaries to 4,500 by 2025 and 25,000 by 2030, from the current level of just over 600, Department of Financial Services Secretary Vivek Joshi said on Monday.
Addressing the 22nd Global Actuaries Conference in the capital, Joshi urged the Institute of Actuaries of India (IAI) to intensify its engagement with government, financial sector regulators, academic bodies and importantly, the new generation youngsters readying to choose their career paths.
To achieve all this, the IAI should start professionalising itself by adding diverse talent and expertise, he added.
“IAI has to carry out a series of efforts in the direction of taking actuarial applications and accreditation to school and college curriculum; reaching out to the mind space of GenZ of this country as well as their parents and teachers”, Joshi said.
Actuaries’ work is essential to the insurance industry. They analyse the financial costs of risk and uncertainty. They use mathematics, statistics and financial theory to assess the risk of potential events and help clients in devising policies that minimise the cost of those risks.
Although actuaries are commonly connected with traditional professions such as life, pensions and insurance, a growing number of actuaries are branching out into new areas like health, banking & finance, technology, and climate change.
In his virtual address at the same conference, Insurance regulator IRDAI Chairman Debasish Panda stressed the need to look at supply constraints for actuaries and noted that the current count is not sufficient to address the present demand.
“The need for fully-qualified actuaries is on the rise. We had 500-plus and is not sufficient for the present demand. We have proposed reforms to the Act, there may be a situation where the number of insurers may outgrow the number of actuaries.
IAI should look into this and also the possible reasons why number of actuaries are low despite the presence of the Institute for over one and a half decades”, Panda said.
He also said that actuaries are the real principal drivers of growth in the insurance sector. The responsibility lies on actuaries to take the sector to new heights, he added.
“You as actuaries have to look at the insurance sector with a fresh pair of eyes and new pair of lens. There is need to come out from a traditional role to a more proactive leader role”, he said.
Noting that data management is increasingly important for insurers, Panda said that the Insurance Information Bureau of India, which is in Hyderabad, is undergoing a major revamp. “We recently appointed a CEO. Very soon we will have a CTO, data scientists, CRO... Lot of data not being utilised by insurers would now flow in regular sequence and the analytics would be provided to insurers and regulators”, he added.