Board Member Candidate Questionnaire

Haifeng Tan, FSA

AI / Technology

Describe your experience understanding, applying, and/or overseeing technology, particularly AI, data, and analytics to support strategy, operations, and decision-making, including how you consider technology’s limitations, risks, and impacts on business models, workforce needs, governance, and long-term growth. 

Technology — particularly AI, data, and analytics — is the strategic variable most likely to reshape the actuarial profession this decade, and I engage with it as both a senior leader and a builder.

Application: At Sun Life Asia I have led as AI champion for AI deployment, data and analytics workstreams supporting markets. I build and operate multi-agent AI systems (combining LLM, reinforcement-learning, and classical statistical agents) that turn unstructured market signal into structured decision support — practical experience with what production AI actually requires. The use cases consist of sales consultation, market intelligence, data analytics, investment research and trading, AI coaching, etc.

Oversight: I have overseen model governance, validation, and regulatory signoff, which translates directly into AI governance: explainability, controls on training data, drift monitoring, and human-in-the-loop checkpoints. I am active in the SOA Emerging Topics Community AI Subgroup and volunteered for the SOA Research POG on Early-Stage Risk-Benefit Analysis of AI Projects.

Limitations and risks I weigh: model brittleness on tail events, hallucination on longitudinal reasoning, data-lineage and IP exposure, concentration risk in foundation models, talent displacement, and reputational risk from over-claiming AI capability.

Business model impact: AI compresses cycle times for pricing and experience studies, unlocks personalised products, and changes the unit economics of advisory work. The SOA's role is to make sure members lead — not lag — this transition through standards, research, and education that take both the upside and the harms seriously.

Board Experience and Readiness

Describe your prior nonprofit or corporate board experience and how you approach the board’s governance role (strategic oversight and mission stewardship), including how you distinguish governance from management and how you uphold fiduciary duties (care, loyalty, and obedience) in acting in the best interests of the organization. 

My governance work spans not-for-profit, professional-society, and statutory community settings, with a consistent emphasis on the line between governance and management.

Current and recent roles: SOA Emerging Topics Community — Advisory Team candidate (2026); SOA Societal Purpose Project — workstream lead for the Data Analytics chapter of the NFP Guide for Actuaries; Professional-society: I am the Board director of multiple life insurance companies in my professional fields, including Board director of Aviva COFCO Life, Aviva plc Board Evolution Council member, Board director of Sun Life Everbright Life (current), Board director of Sun Life Vietnam Life (current), and chairman or members of various Board committees.

In Singapore, I serve on the Council of MCST 3489, a statutory governance body responsible for fiduciary oversight of a community's finances, audits, and contractor decisions — practical board-level discipline (annual audit review, council resolutions, regulatory compliance).

How I distinguish governance from management: I focus on the “what” and “why” — strategy, risk appetite, mission alignment, talent stewardship, financial sustainability — and leave the “how” to staff and committee leaders. I push for clear delegations of authority, defined committee charters, and decision rights that prevent the board from drifting into operations.

Fiduciary duties: duty of care (informed decisions, prepared reading of materials, asking the difficult question rather than the comfortable one); duty of loyalty (declaring interests, recusing where appropriate, putting the organisation's mission ahead of personal or employer agendas); duty of obedience (acting within charter, bylaws, and applicable regulation). I treat these as live disciplines, not boilerplate.

Corporate Leadership

Describe your senior leadership experience in corporate and/or not-for-profit environments, including examples of leading people, guiding decision-making, managing complexity, and providing strategic direction while upholding strong governance standards. 

I have held senior leadership roles across three multinational life insurers in Asia, with accountability for actuarial, finance, business, and strategy decisions affecting policyholders, shareholders, employees, and regulators.

Sun Life Asia (current): Vice President of emerging markets overseeing Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, China for business growth, P&L, risk and governance. Plus, Board director seats on Sun Life Vietnam Life Insurance and Sun Life Everbright Life (the Sun Life / China Everbright JV).

Aviva Asia (2019-Mar 2025): Director, Actuarial & Finance of Asia (Asia CFO/CA equivalent). Reported to Aviva Asia CEO and Aviva Group CFO. Member of Aviva plc Board Evolution Council; Board director of Aviva COFCO Life (China JV). Singapore-based role with responsibility for actuarial strategy, capital, IFRS 17 readiness, and finance transformation across multiple Asian markets (China, India, Vietnam, Indonesia, Singapore, Hong Kong). Led teams through major regulatory and accounting transitions while keeping commercial outcomes intact, overseeing M&A, corporate development, strategy reviews.

Aviva Vietnam (2017-2019): Chief Financial Officer/Chief Actuary/Appointed Actuary Across these roles, my approach: hire and develop strong technical talent, push decisions to the level closest to the information, frame trade-offs in commercial and policyholder terms, and hold the line on governance — model controls, sign-off discipline, and transparent communication with auditors, regulators, and the board.

NTUC Income (2014–17): Head of Valuation, Actuarial
AXA Singapore (2012–14): Head of Actuarial Product
Pricing ING-BOB Life (2004): Head of Product

Financial Oversight

Describe your experience providing financial oversight in a corporate setting, including your ability to understand and scrutinize key financial documents and reports, identify financial risks, develop mitigation strategies, and ensure regulatory compliance.

Financial oversight has been central to my career in both line and statutory roles. 

Statutory and corporate: As Appointed Actuary, I held personal accountability for reserving adequacy, the financial condition report, capital adequacy under regulatory frameworks, and dialogue with external auditors. At Aviva Asia (Director, Actuarial & Finance) I led IFRS 17 implementation work — reading and scrutinizing contractual service margin movements, risk adjustment calibration, transition impacts, and audit-committee-ready disclosures. I am fluent in reading audited financial statements, management accounts, actuarial valuation reports, and ICAAP/ORSA-style capital documents, and I know what a clean versus a strained set of numbers looks like.

Risk identification and mitigation: tail-risk concentration in long-duration savings products; assumption setting in volatile rate and inflation regimes; reinsurance counterparty exposure; FX mismatch in dollarized emerging markets; conduct risk in distribution. Typical mitigations I have implemented or overseen include reinsurance restructuring, ALM duration matching, dynamic hedging program reviews, and tightening of assumption-setting governance.

Regulatory compliance: direct experience with China NFRA, Vietnam MoF, Singapore MAS, and IFRS 17 reporting obligations. Statutory community work via MCST 3489 includes annual audit review, journal-level expense interrogation, and sign-off on auditor reports — small scale, but the same fiduciary discipline.

For an SOA Board role, I would bring a working insurer-finance lens to oversight of reserves, investments, research budget allocation, and member-program ROI.

Global

Describe your international experience (e.g., multinational corporations or significant projects abroad) and how your understanding of global markets, cross-cultural communication, and international business practices would contribute to SOA’s strategic positioning and international relationships. 

Global perspective is the contribution I am most uniquely positioned to bring — lived, not observed.

I have spent two decades operating across Asia's most strategically important insurance markets and have lived the cross-cultural realities that desk-based 'international strategy' often misses.

Geography and roles: China (ING-BOB Life, 2004–2012, including JV leadership), Singapore (NTUC Income, AXA Life, Aviva Asia regional, current Sun Life Asia), Vietnam (Appointed Actuary; current Sun Life Vietnam), with working exposure to Hong Kong, Indonesia, India and broader APAC markets.

Markets and practices: emerging-market regulatory regimes (Vietnam MoF, China NFRA lineage, Singapore MAS), IFRS 17 implementation in East and Southeast Asia, bancassurance JV dynamics, agency distribution economics, takaful/sharia adjacency, and capital regimes ranging from RBC frameworks to traditional solvency margins.

Cross-cultural communication: I work daily in English and Mandarin, and I have led mixed-nationality teams under regulators with very different expectations about transparency, pace, and consultation. I understand why a North American playbook frequently does not transfer cleanly, and how to adapt without compromising on standards.

SOA international relationships: current active member of the SOA Asia employer committee for years, and a vocal supporter of the recent bylaw amendment opening the Board to internationally resident Fellows. The SOA's long-term growth is international; an Asia-based, Fellow-credentialed director with operating roots in the region would help the Board make that pivot more confidently and credibly.

Not-for-Profit

Describe how, through your involvement with not-for-profit organizations, including the SOA, you balance mission-driven objectives with strategic success and operational sustainability especially in volunteer recruitment/coordination and incorporating diverse points of view. 

My not-for-profit and professional-society involvement is current and active, not historical.

SOA volunteer roles: Member of SOA Asia Employer Committee for 3 years until now. Candidate for Emerging Topics Community Advisory Team (2026); workstream lead for the Data Analytics chapter of the SOA Societal Purpose Project — NFP Guide for Actuaries (helping non-profits use actuarial thinking for financial management); engaged participant in the Emerging Topics Community AI Subgroup.

Other NFP / community governance: Council member, MCST 3489 (Singapore), a statutory community management corporation — fiduciary responsibility for an audited budget, contractor management, and resident interests.

Balancing mission with sustainability: in the Societal Purpose Project I have argued for defining 'success' for actuarial volunteer work in terms of measurable adoption by NFPs, not deliverables produced. The same lens applies at SOA level — research, education, and convening must be funded sustainably and prioritised against where members and the public actually benefit.

Volunteer recruitment and coordination: my approach is to make commitments small, specific, and visible, so volunteers complete what they start. I deliberately seek diverse viewpoints — geographic, employer-type, career-stage, and credentialing-path — because the SOA's blind spots tend to be exactly where unheard voices already see clearly. On every working group I encourage explicit dissent before consensus is declared.

Professional Education and Development

Describe your experience developing professional education programs for actuaries or other professionals—for example, in a university, employer, professional association, or SOA setting. Include examples where you designed, led, or managed learning programs, curricula, mentoring frameworks, or structured development pathways and how your approach was informed by how professionals learn. 

Professional education and development is one of the SOA's highest-leverage activities and an area where I have direct, multi-setting experience.

Employer settings: At Aviva Asia and Sun Life I have designed and run internal actuarial development programs—structured rotation across pricing, valuation, capital, and ALM; IFRS 17 technical bootcamps for finance and actuarial teams across multiple Asian markets; AI and analytics upskilling pathways for actuarial associates moving into data science adjacencies. I mentor junior actuaries through SOA exam progression as a normal part of leadership work.

SOA and association settings: contributor to the Societal Purpose Project NFP Guide (a professional education artifact for actuaries deploying skills into NGOs); engaged with affiliate-membership program AI video curriculum discussions in the Emerging Topics AI Subgroup.

How I think about learning design: professionals learn fastest when (a) the material is anchored to a real decision they own, (b) feedback is fast and concrete, and (c) the learner is asked to teach the concept back. I push curricula toward case-based, decision-anchored formats and away from passive lecture, and I am skeptical of CPD-hour theatre that produces compliance without competence.

At Board level the question I would press on: is the SOA's education portfolio actually building the capabilities — AI, climate, longevity, public-interest work — the next decade will demand of Fellows, or is it optimising for what is easiest to deliver?

Risk Management

Describe your risk management experience, including how you have identified and evaluated organizational risks (including reputational risks) and assessed or implemented appropriate risk mitigation measures. 

Risk management is woven through my line work as an Appointed Actuary and senior risk leader, and through my SOA volunteer involvement in AI risk.

Insurance and enterprise risk: As Appointed Actuary and interim risk officer, I have personally signed off on reserves, capital adequacy, and assumption frameworks under regulatory scrutiny. At Aviva Asia and Sun Life I have led work on ALM mismatch, longevity and morbidity emerging experience, reinsurance counterparty exposure, FX and inflation regimes in dollarised emerging markets, and product conduct risk in agency distribution.

Model and AI risk: I built and currently operate multi-agent AI systems for market analysis, which gave me first-hand exposure to the failure modes of production AI — drift, hallucination, data-lineage gaps, prompt-injection-style attacks. In my professional society, I have been working on a framework for surfacing these risks before deployment.

Reputational risk: I treat reputational risk as a first-class category, not residual. Misstatement of AI capability, over-promised customer outcomes, slow disclosure of adverse experience, and tone-deaf communication in sensitive markets all erode institutional trust faster than financial loss.

Mitigation: aligned messaging, transparent disclosure, scenario rehearsal, and a stated bias toward saying less but meaning all of it.

For SOA Board oversight, this translates into asking sharper questions of management on research integrity, exam-process trust, member data security, and AI use in SOA's own operations—areas where reputation can be lost quickly and rebuilt slowly.

Strategic Planning

Describe your involvement in strategic planning (including in a corporate environment), and how you have helped formulate vision, establish priorities, and allocate resources to support long-term success and effective organizational positioning. 

Strategic planning has been a recurring responsibility across my regional leadership roles, and I approach it as a portfolio of choices, not a document.

Corporate experience: At Aviva Asia I contributed to regional actuarial and finance strategy — M&A, strategic review of geographic portfolio, capital allocation across markets, IFRS 17 transition prioritization, finance transformation roadmaps. At Sun Life Asia I am currently shaping market benchmarking, AI-enabled analytics roadmaps, and market strategic positioning, with a focus on translating market signal into prioritized investment choices.

Vision and priorities: I treat vision as the short list of outcomes leadership is willing to be judged on three to five years out. Priorities are then the small number of bets that are necessary and sufficient to make that vision plausible. Anything not on that list is, by definition, a distraction or a hygiene item.

Resource allocation: I push for explicit trade-offs — which initiatives are funded TO WIN, which are funded to maintain, and which are explicitly stopped. I am skeptical of strategy decks that grow line items without removing any, because they are usually a signal that no real choice has been made.

At SOA Board level I would push for a strategic conversation about where the profession itself is heading — AI fluency, climate and longevity, international member growth, public-interest mandate — and which SOA programs deserve disproportionate investment to position members for that future.

Strategy at the Board is not what we do; it is what we choose not to do, so that the most important things get the focus they need.