Candidate Questionnaire
Roger Loomis, FSA 2007
Principal
Actuarial Resources Corp.
Overland Park KS
Brief description of current work:
Actuarial consulting with focus on modeling and Latin America
Primary Area of Practice:
Long-Term Care Insurance Modeling
Other Areas of Practice
Predictive Analytics Modeling
Why do you want to be on the Board?
I am a creative, strategic thinker. I want to help the board focus on staying on the cutting edge of research and education.
Professional Background
Provide a brief description of your professional background and the type of work you have performed and explain how these experiences have prepared you as an Elected Board Member and qualify you in carrying out the strategic direction of the SOA.
I have been in the actuarial profession since earning my master’s degree in Economics 24 years ago. For the first 10 years of my career I worked at insurance companies in several product lines including life, health, long-term disability, and long-term care. Most of my responsibilities involved valuation and forecasting, and I always found myself trying to create better models, more insightful reports, and innovative ways to add value to the process.
For the last 14 years I have been at Actuarial Resources Corporation where I’ve worked as an actuarial software developer and a consultant. One of our specialties is creating cutting-edge actuarial models using Monte Carlo Simulation that do a better job of helping actuaries understand and manage the risk of their product designs.
I am fluent in written and spoken Spanish and have consulted in Mexico, Chile, Argentina, and Brazil. These projects have exposed me to innovative ways insurance is used in different countries and the unique market and regulatory challenges faced abroad.
Having worked with actuaries in several countries across virtually all product lines has given me insight into the creative ways actuaries in different situations deal with problems. The insights, creativity, and communication skills I have developed will be valuable assets when collaborating with the Board and other actuaries who share our vision of actuaries being highly sought-after professionals who solve complex financial problems.
Volunteer, Governance and Personal Experience
Describe how your volunteer, governance and personal experiences would strengthen your contributions to the SOA Board, the organization, and strategic plan execution. Please list your relevant volunteer experience. Please include the name of the organization, your role, and approximate dates.
My biggest strength on the Board will be my ability to take a step back, more clearly frame problems and issues, and design creative solutions that address the real issue. For example, my research paper on the Life Pricing Exam, “Understanding the Volatility of Experience and Pricing Assumptions in Long-Term Care Insurance” gets to the heart of understanding uncertainty in assumptions and emerging experience. As another example, my work on the LTC Pricing Project has innovative ways of measuring the risk of newly-priced LTC policies needing future rate increases. Both of these projects involve helping actuaries with the mission of the SOA: measuring and understanding risk.
- LTC Experience Committee: 2021 to present
- Predictive Analytics Exam Committee: 2017 to present
- SOA Presidential Award: 2018
- Lead Researcher LTC Pricing Project: 2015 to 2017
- Co-Chair Long-Term Care Think Tank: 2012 - 2014
- Long-Term Care Section Council: 2009 – 2012
Agility/Change
What did you learn in the COVID19 pandemic that will help you, post-pandemic?
I learned:
- Black-swan events can happen anytime
- When these events happen, the economy can adjust quickly
- There are winners and losers when the economy changes
- Actuaries can work effectively from home
Motivating/Influencing
Describe a constructive conversation you had in a group setting or one-on-one during which opinions varied and you needed to get to a consensus.
In May, the management team of my firm discussed when and how we would reopen our office. There was a myriad of issues we discussed: should going back to the office be required? Would we allow a hybrid solution of continuing to work part-time from home? Would masks be required in the office? Vaccinations? When should this happen?
As you can imagine, opinions varied widely. We began the conversation by listing all of the possibilities. For example, we considered a highly structured and regulated return to work, setting up rules regarding masks and social distancing that were in strict compliance with government guidelines. On the other extreme, we considered a laissez-faire approach where everyone could go back how and when they wanted.
After brainstorming the possibilities, we considered the legal and risk implications of each possible course. Was there a risk to requiring employees to return to the office? Was there a risk to requiring people to be vaccinated? What were the national and local government guidelines saying?
We then considered how the different approaches would affect the company’s long-term productivity. Could we work from home indefinitely? What would that do to our culture? How would employees react to a mask mandate in the office? How would they react if the new office environment did not require masks or vaccinations?
At the beginning of the conversation, opinions varied sharply. But by considering the options and possible ramifications in a systematic way, a consensus emerged.
Diversity
Describe how your awareness of diversity, equity and inclusion has evolved throughout your life.
I grew up in an American suburb where nearly everyone around me was a white, English-speaking Christian. As a child I didn’t really have many thoughts about diversity, equity, or inclusion, because I rarely encountered anybody that was different than me.
This began to change when I went away to college. I was energized by being in an environment with intelligent people from more diverse backgrounds and learning about their life experiences that were so different than mine. I met people from big cities. I met people from small towns. I met people with different skin color. I met people of different religions. I met people with no religion at all. In my second year, I moved into an apartment with five other men who were from South Korea, Peru, Senegal, India, and Iran.
I then had the opportunity to take a year off of college and live in Argentina for a service project. While I was there, Argentina was going through extreme economic turmoil; the inflation rate that year was officially 4,923.3%. I met hundreds of people and learned about their outlook, skills, ambitions, and fears as they navigated through life under economic duress. It became clear that for many people I was working with, their economic opportunities were not limited by their aptitude, intelligence, education, or work ethic, but rather by environmental factors outside of their control.
I became an avid reader of people with different life experiences. I gained empathy for others. To the extent I had thought about it, I always knew that diversity, equity, and inclusion are the right things to do in terms of being fair. The key insight I learned is that diverse and inclusive teams are better teams. Diversity fosters fresh ways of seeing old problems and finding creative solutions.
International
How would your experiences strengthen your understanding of international issues?
While I was in college, I got married in Argentina to an Argentine. For the first several years of our marriage, Spanish was the first language of our home.
My fluency in Spanish led to multiple professional opportunities. These include supporting international offices at a multinational insurer and consulting opportunities in Mexico, Chile, Argentina, and Brazil. In addition to racking up nearly one million frequent-flyer miles, I had the opportunity to open a consulting office in Mexico City, where our focus was to help Mexican insurers comply with Solvency II. Being an American working with Mexicans to implement a European solvency requirement turned out to be an invaluable learning experience about different ways of thinking about the same problem and evaluating what works best.
Great organizations are cosmopolitan by nature and seek to aggregate and appropriate the best ideas from wherever they may be found. For example, China and the United States have different cultural, economic, and regulatory environments. In that sense their actuaries have different needs. However, more international communication and idea-sharing will broaden the perspectives, enhance the creativity, and sharpen the skills of actuaries everywhere.
Emerging
How does the SOA need to change to meet emerging challenges and opportunities?
The SOA needs to help actuaries sharpen their focus on adding value in a quickly changing world.
For example, the U.S. is now spending nearly 18% of its GDP, or $4 trillion a year, on healthcare. This is by far the most expensive healthcare system in the world, both as a percentage of GDP and spending per person. Despite being number one in healthcare spending, we rank 35th in terms of overall health, according to Bloomberg’s Healthiest Country Index. Spending so much for such dismal results isn’t acceptable, yet health spending continues to increase faster than the GDP.
The problem is incredibly complex, and there are strong economic and sociological pressures to maintain the status quo. However, the opportunity to improve health outcomes while significantly reducing costs is too large and important to ignore. Actuaries should be at the forefront of solving this problem, and the SOA should provide the research and education to help them do it.