Board Member Candidate Questionnaire

Arthur da Silva, FSA, FCIA

PERSONAL EXPERIENCE: Share a personal experience, trait, or characteristic that will help the membership to better understand you and your candidacy.

I have always been passionate about technology, curious, and driven to make an impact, particularly in developing others, and hope to do the same for the actuarial profession as part of the Board. I particularly believe in the importance of incorporating the intersection of multiple practices in order to craft a unique skillset that also stays relevant for a long time

Back in 2010, I became very inspired when I saw predictive analytics being applied to claim termination modelling in the Group Long-Term Disability. Ever since then, I drove myself to learn more about predictive analytics and expressed my interest in the area during my time at Deloitte. This led to me joining a group that worked with data scientists to apply analytics and produce Tableau and Qlikview dashboards to solve problems in banking, M&A, and retail consumer goods. As a result, I became determined to put these tools and other emerging technologies into the hands of actuaries and show them how they can unlock a new way of working with the goal of saving time and producing more sophisticated analysis.

PROJECT LEADERSHIP / CHANGE MANAGEMENT: Describe a significant project that you led in the workplace or in your volunteer activities. Describe how you made decisions and addressed changes that were proposed, whether changes were made, or were not made, after considering all options. How did you achieve buy-in in the final outcome, and what were the biggest challenges you had to overcome?

I led a project where our team implemented two new processes leveraging the R programming language and Tableau for processing experience studies. At project kick-off, our team collaborated with the client to list all the desired outcomes and features of this new process. Then, we prioritized them between "must-haves" and "nice-to-haves".

We encountered several challenges during this project. The first was related to the R programming, which was meant to replace a complex data wrangling process that was not well documented due to how old it was. These delays started eating up time and budget, and we had to have further conversations with the client about priorities. Long story short, the client indicated that their top priority was replacing their data wrangling process and that the Tableau dashboard was secondary, so we focused on the former at the expense of the latter, all while negotiating a small increase in budget to complete the work. While a Tableau dashboard was created, it was understood that cuts had to be made to that workstream.

Towards the end, there was a change in the executive sponsor of the project. The replacement came in and was livid at the quality of the dashboard, showing me printouts of one of the pages of the dashboard and voicing extreme displeasure. We calmly diffused the situation and conversed through this sponsor’s concerns and feedback, ultimately producing a higher quality output that addressed the client's primary goals without spending exorbitant amounts of time to produce this extra work.

ACTUARY OF THE FUTURE: What does the future of the actuarial profession look like to you? What strategies should the SOA implement to grow the actuarial profession, especially in light of more competition for analytical skills and data science job opportunities?

The actuarial profession is coming to a unique time with the advent of generative AI (GenAI), particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), providing us with powerful tools to analyze datasets we couldn't easily analyze before, to learn new things rapidly, and to intelligent automate processes much easier than previously available. Actuaries fundamentally understand models, risk, and their financial consequences. LLMs are just another type of model or algorithm that should become part of the actuaries' toolkit. I believe actuaries are well positioned to act in a Data Scientist role since actuaries are well equipped to apply the use of models in an appropriate and ethical fashion, while being able to translate the impact of those models to various stakeholders in a manner that is meaningful to each group. In my view, the SOA should equip actuaries with the foundational knowledge to understand these modern tools and techniques, where they should and should not be used, their strengths and weaknesses, and how they can be applied in the real world. Furthermore, the SOA should showcase innovative examples of where actuaries are applying these innovative techniques to serve as inspiration for the profession as well as potential candidates choosing between the actuarial career path and alternatives.

INNOVATION / ADAPTION: How has your experience prepared you to lead through challenges such as AI, technological disruption, climate change and generational shifts? How would you guide a knowledge-based workforce, including actuaries, in addressing these emerging issues?

My entire career has been focused on navigating diverse sets of change, being forward-looking towards trends and their impact on actuaries, and educating colleagues and the profession on how to tackle these changes. In consulting and at a young software company, you're constantly on the lookout for new opportunities and problems to solve. Part of that is reading where the wind is blowing to see what challenges will be faced in the coming years and strategizing solutions to solve those. This applies to current challenges we face as well. My career experiences have often put me situations where the problems are not concretely defined and solution set to address them is potentially open-ended

My approach to guiding a knowledge-based workforce would be, firstly, to sell them on why they should care, structure the issues in a way that makes them easier to understand and then educate them on how to adapt to these changes.

The education piece needs to include the following:

• Fostering opportunities for innovation: I believe the SOA has plenty of ways to do this, such as providing incentives for actuaries to enter contests utilizing AI, encouraging SOA volunteers to utilize new tools, and providing ways for more asynchronous collaboration to be more inclusive to members across global time zones.
• Showing and not just telling excellence: The SOA should showcase inspiring actuaries tackling these emerging and unique challenges.
• Adopting a nimble mindset: The SOA needs an approach that can adapt to rapid changes in the environment. A slow-moving mindset will mean investments quickly become obsolete. The approach I recommend would be to deploy fast and learn fast, with a tailored approach depending on the risks associated with the circumstances.