Candidate Questionnaire
David D. Ingram, FSA 1984, CERA 2007, MAAA 1980
Actuarial Risk Management
Brief description of current work:
Risk Management, Research and Writing.
Primary Area of Practice:
Risk Management
Other Areas of Practice:
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Professional Background
Provide a description of your professional background and the type of work you have performed. 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 concentrated exclusively on Risk Management for insurance companies from 2005 to 2020. In 2005, I led the work at Standard & Poor's to incorporate ERM into their insurance ratings process; training analysts; explaining the process to the industry by speaking at public events; and writing articles for publication. I participated in ERM reviews of over 100 Life, P&C, Health and Financial insurers globally.
From 2008 to 2020, I led the ERM Advisory practice at Willis Re for North America. In that position, I helped almost 200 Property/Casualty and Health insurers to start or improve their ERM programs. Most recently, that work concentrated on large ORSA projects. I produced almost 100 educational ERM webinars for insurer risk managers, executives and board members, wrote over 75 blog posts and about 95 articles for actuarial and insurance industry publications. Four papers that I wrote won the prize of "Best Practical Paper" at the ERM Symposium.
In 2020, I retired from full time work and since then have worked part time writing, podcasting and consulting for the firm Actuarial Risk Management.
Prior to 2005, my professional experience was as a Life Actuarial Consultant for a major consulting firm and as an executive and staff actuary at two U.S. life insurance companies where one recurring activity was the analysis of risk and reward for life insurer products.
My experience working with so many insurance companies over the past twenty years has provided me with a perspective on what management says about how the insurer should be operated. I want to share what I have learned with the SOA Staff and Board in hopes that will help with decisions about the future of the SOA organization and the actuarial profession.
Volunteer and Governance Experience
Describe how your volunteer and governance experiences would strengthen your contributions to the SOA Board, the SOA, and strategic plan execution. List your relevant volunteer experience. Include the name of the organization, your role, and approximate dates.
2000 – 2003 Founded and Chaired the SOA Risk Management Task Force which established over 10 working groups with over 100 volunteers. RMTF produced white papers used on original CERA syllabus.
2004 – 2006 Founded and Chaired the SOA Risk Management Section which has expanded to be joint with the CAS and the CIA.
2009 – 2016 First Chair of the ASB Enterprise Risk Management Taskforce. Lead the actuaries who drafted the first two actuarial standards of practice for ERM.
2011 – 2015 Chair of the IAA Enterprise and Financial Risks Committee. Sharing ERM activities of actuaries globally and initiating research and educational projects of broad interest.
2009 – 2017 First Chair of the ERM Task Force of the Actuarial Standards Committee of the IAA. Led the team of actuaries that drafted the first international actuarial standards of practice for ERM.
2020 – 2021 Unpaid Researcher for project funded by the Joint Risk Management Section “Modelling the Variety Of Decision-Making”
2020-2021 Unpaid Researcher for project partially funded by the SOA “COVID Mitigation Monitoring Project”
2021 – 2024 SOA elected Board member. Served on International, Membership, Audit and Risk and Finance Committees. SDG Task Force and liaison to Societal Purpose Committee.
Writing for Section newsletters, The Actuary magazine and speaking at SOA meetings many times.
Leadership/Managing Change
Describe a significant project that you led in the workplace or in your volunteer activities. Describe how you addressed changes that were proposed, whether changes were made, or were not made after considering all options. How did you influence alignment in the final outcome, and what were the biggest challenges you had to overcome?
In 2005, I led the work at Standard & Poor's to incorporate ERM into their insurance ratings process; training analysts; explaining the process to the industry by speaking at public events; and writing articles for publication. I participated in ERM reviews of over 100 Life, P&C, Health and Financial insurers globally.
This project started with a blank piece of paper and ended with a new major part of the rating process for insurers that was accepted by S&P Insurance ratings team and by the rated insurers. A good ERM rating became a sought after distinction by some of the largest insurers in the world.
To achieve this result, the proposed rating process needed to be something that the analysts could do with a reasonable amount of training within the parameters of the existing rating process. They also had to be confident enough in the significance of the findings of that process that they could rely on it as a factor in assigning a rating. We tracked this part of the process and found that six months after rolling out the ERM rating process, there was little to no impact on the ratings. However, when we revisited that at the end of the first year, we found that ERM was identified as an important factor in the final rating decision 10– 15% of the time in the second half of the year (it was one of 8 major factors in the rating).
During this time period, I attended every rating meeting with an insurer that was held in the S&P offices and assisted with the ERM part of the review if requested by the ratings analyst. I was able to then walk every individual New York Based analyst through an ERM program evaluation of one or more of their assigned companies. During that year, I also spent about 12 weeks in Europe, repeating that same process with the European insurance credit analysts.
On the other side, the rated insurance companies also needed to be made comfortable with the rating process. The S&P Insurance rating management believed in complete transparency of the rating process. During the roll out period, I wrote rating criteria and commentary articles, eventually totaling almost 200 pages that were published by S&P. In addition, I accepted every invitation to speak to all large and small groups within the Insurance industry, explaining the new ERM rating criteria.
Diversity
What should the SOA’s goals be in the area of diversity, equity and inclusion? You can read more about current efforts by the organization at www.soa.org/programs/diversity-inclusion.
When I joined the SOA in the early 1980’s there were only a handful of women actuaries in the city of Philadelphia where I worked. In the past three years, I have served on the SOA board where there has been a majority of women. At the last board meeting, someone remarked on that fact and asked if one of the female board members knew why that had happened. No explanation was offered. My guess is that the women elected were the best candidates.
The SOA and many other organizations set numerical goals for participation of many groups, but in my mind the goal should be that we recognize all members based upon their ability to be good actuaries and that we develop a reputation for treating our members in that manner. If we are able to do that, our members will tell that story to people that they know that we would not otherwise be able to reach.
That being said, with our decade long travel time to becoming an actuary, it could take a century to reach the situation where all groups in our society feel that they have equitable access to become actuaries. The SOA has to make special efforts to recruit and help candidates from a variety of groups that are currently underrepresented in the actuarial profession. Those efforts should be continued and assessed regularly to make sure that we are accomplishing much improved representation of diverse groups in the SOA.
International
The SOA has been growing internationally. How would your experiences help the SOA further the needs of the membership outside of North America?
While I have never lived outside the US, I have had work and actuarial volunteer experiences in at least 30 countries. Most recently as a representative of the SOA Board in India and Saudi Arabia and as an attendee at the ICA meeting in Australia. From those experiences, I have learned that actuaries all over the world have many things in common, that people in general have plenty in common but that there are real differences between cultures that are very important to almost everyone.
My volunteer experiences outside of the US have included serving on the IAA Enterprise and Financial Risk Committee as a member, vice Chair and Chair. In addition, I have provided ERM training as a volunteer in Africa, Middle East, Asia and Europe.
I believe that with my experiences, I can comfortably interact with actuaries from any part of the globe. I must admit, my most challenging experience came last year when I was visiting Saudi Arabia. There, a large fraction of the actuarial candidates are women and while the situation of women in KSA has liberalized significantly in the past 10 years, women and men do not publicly socialize. I attended a reception sponsored by the SOA for candidates and I found that the men and women attending were at opposite ends of the room. As the only SOA Board member in attendance, I felt that I needed to attempt to speak with the group of women. I decided to break the ice by telling them about the SOA board which was 2/3 women at that time. It worked and I was able to have a reasonable conversation with the group and got several questions from them about the SOA and the actuarial profession and choices that they needed to make in their careers. Barrier crossed successfully.
Emerging
The SOA needs to continue to attract the brightest students to our actuarial profession and now there are more technical career options available. What do you recommend that the SOA do to continue to attract the right people to the actuarial profession?
I think that there are two issues in play here. The first is the fact that the actuarial profession is small and very specialized which means that many of the people with the underlying math aptitude to become actuaries do not know about the profession. We are constantly working to up our game about messaging about the profession and we need to keep improving and updating our outward facing materials and our ability to reach future potential actuaries with the message. The second issue relates to our exam process. All actuaries are rightly proud of our accomplishment of completing the exams and obtaining the fellowship. But with a process that often takes a decade, we stand out as having one of the longest training periods of any profession. To a young person with math aptitude, there are now many options and signing up for a decade of difficult tests is not the most appealing one. With the recent FSA redesign, the SOA has taken the first major steps in a long time to rethink our educational requirements. We need to continue that process with the associateship exams, being very careful to preserve the essence of the actuarial education without degrading the value of the credential. But the process must be made more attractive or at least less off-putting to a young person looking to make a career choice.
As a board member, I have been involved in the creation of a new Societal Purpose effort that should also have a positive impact on our ability to attract new candidates to the profession by highlighting and advancing actuarial work that supports efforts to tackle some of society’s most difficult problems such as Environment, Health, Longevity, Retirement, and inclusive insurance. I hope to continue that work.
Personal Experience
Share a personal experience, trait, or characteristic that will help the membership to better understand you and your candidacy.
I have always gravitated to positions in my work life where my work required me to learn about new topics. And I always enjoyed that process. I dreaded the prospect of retiring because I thought that process of learning and discovery had to end. But I found that it can be very different. I started my career as an actuarial programmer and in the past three years, I have immersed myself in a series of projects that required that I learn about a variety of technologies, some new and some just new to me. For my church, I manage a mixing desk for a four camera zoom broadcasting system, I have learned how to edit movies on my computer, I now produce a podcast, https://crossingthinice.podbean.com/ and most recently, I am working on creating and training a customGPT that uses over 700 pages of my writing about risk management as a source. I undertook that last project because of board discussions about the implications of AI for the actuarial profession. I decided that I needed to bring some real hands-on experience with AI into future discussions. And that is how I plan to continue to live into the future.