vice president & associate actuary, American National
First off, I’ll say that when we use the term actuarial, that really refers to a lot of different employees, roles, and responsibilities. To narrow it down, I’m specifically a product development actuary. There’s really two of us who head up units within this department. I have all the life product pricing and I have a team of four employees. The other lead heads the annuity and he has three people under him. Product development actuaries, in general, as you would guess, we’re very mathematically inclined. We are math nerds, that’s no secret. Sort of where what we do differs from other actuaries is we work with the marketing groups a lot more. We work with IT, we work with implementation and generally we need to have good communication skills sort of relative to the spectrum of actuaries. We’re still number crunchers, but the things we do and produce need be understandable and they have to be boiled down and that’s kind of key to this whole process we’re talking about here. Our teams really spend the vast majority of our time building these mathematic models that just basically are how a product works on a very macro basis. That’s really our key contribution of the process is building these models to support whatever goals and decisions the company is trying to make.