Board Member Candidate Questionnaire

Gregory Warren, FSA MAAA, FCA

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. 

Throughout my 8+ years at Walgreens, I led Reporting & Analytics teams that served internal financial and executive leadership with insights for business-critical decisions and also client analytics that consultatively guided clients in pharmacy benefits and clinical program decision-making. During my time leading the finance department of Walgreens’ PBM, I also had strategic financial responsibility for 8-figure technology investment decisions and the overall technology investment portfolio of the organization.

Later, while serving as Chief Actuary leading Optum Advisory Services’ 270 actuarial, underwriting and pharmacy consulting associates, we maintained and applied some of the largest healthcare data assets in the world on behalf of our clients’ research and analytics needs and our own product and technology development. We maintained and enhanced extensive Medicare actuarial bid development and reporting tools and products and later developed the Group Risk Analytics offering for commercial health insurance underwriting and led our StepWise underwriting automation software (for which I also had strategic and business responsibility) to deliver innovative and advanced risk analytics to dozens of U.S. health plans.

More Recently, as a Partner and Consulting Actuary at Axene Health Partners (AHP), I’ve led the efforts to expand our boutique health actuarial consulting firm’s health data assets.

These experiences have developed leadership and oversight skills that have expanded our actuaries’ professional capabilities and insight development for our organization and our clients.

I look forward to the opportunity to apply these skills and experiences to further strengthen the actuarial profession’s abilities and broaden our opportunities to help people all over the world.

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. 

I have learned much from my opportunities to serve on the Boards of four different nonprofit organizations serving the local communities in which I’ve lived. This has included six years on the Deacon Board (three years as Chair) of a local church in Illinois and six years on the Board of Directors (five years as Chair) of a local healthcare and counseling ministry serving the residents of three counties in Illinois. I subsequently served for two years on the Board of Directors of a private school in Illinois before our family moved to Colorado. While in Colorado, I also served on the Elder Board of our local church.

As a Partner at AHP, I have also served alongside our other Partners on our Board for over three years in providing collective corporate leadership and strategic decision-making for our company.

Serving on Boards has grown my appreciation for collaboration and mutual support with my Board colleagues as we learn from each other's diverse perspectives and build consensus for direction and decisions. This can be quite different from the more singular decision-making process, authority and responsibility that are often employed in the corporate context.

These experiences have refined my ability to focus on directional and strategic issues as a Board member while deferring day-to-day operational decisions to staff to accomplish within the broad parameters of the strategic framework the Board defines for the organization. They have also taught me how to provide oversight for the establishment of legal, regulatory, financial and human resource compliance and risk management frameworks so the staff can manage those risks and the Board can fulfill its oversight responsibilities.

I am eager to apply these skills and experiences on the SOA Board of Directors.

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.

My roles as Board Chair at two nonprofit organizations (3 years as Chair at one and 5 years as Chair at the other) taught me to prepare for and guide Board deliberations about strategic, financial and missional decisions.

My time functioning as the chief financial officer of the pharmacy benefit manager business owned by Walgreens (approx. $2 billion in annual revenues) taught me a lot about financial management and accounting governance and technology investment and implementation while working with non-financial executives to ensure the enablement and resourcing of their teams to accomplish corporate goals.

My season serving as Chief Actuary of Optum Advisory Services’ 270 actuarial, underwriting and pharmacy consulting associates taught me a lot about setting goals and vision and leading five different consulting practices into greater collaboration to accomplish our clients’ goals and our own business and career growth.

Significant compliance and financial and human resource governance was required in order to ensure risk mitigation processes were in place so as not to jeopardize the achievement of our goals through critical momentary failures of judgment.

As a Partner at AHP, a boutique health actuarial consulting firm, I have been blessed to participate in the furtherance of an entrepreneurial pace and mindset while also furthering a strong familial culture of mutual care amongst colleagues as we collectively pursue personal and business growth.

I am excited to potentially draw upon the skills and experiences gained by working shoulder-to-shoulder alongside other Board members and executives in both corporate and nonprofit organizations to positively impact the SOA's effectiveness in strengthening and growing the actuarial profession.

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. 

As Chair of two nonprofit Boards in Illinois, I worked with staff to prepare annual budgets and monthly financial reports to guide Board deliberations and decisions impacting or impacted by finances.

At Walgreens, during my time functioning as the CFO of Walgreens’ PBM subsidiary (approximately $2 billion in annual revenues), I led the internal business analytics team and then the financial planning & analysis team that prepared annual budgets, monthly budget variance analyses and monthly financial forecasts.

As the Chief Actuary of Optum Advisory Services, I held sole responsibility for the income statement and the business operations of the actuarial, underwriting and pharmacy consulting businesses which collectively drove over $120 million in revenues during my last year leading the group. I worked closely with the finance and operations teams to ensure I had a thorough understanding of our monthly financial statements and quarterly financial forecasts so I could make the best business decisions to drive our profitable growth and achieve our strategic goals.

As a Partner at Axene Health Partners (AHP), I am solely responsible for the financial outcomes of the consulting practice I own.

I look forward to the potential opportunity to leverage the skills and learnings developed from these financial management and oversight experiences at both large and small, for-profit and nonprofit organizations to help the Society of Actuaries (SOA) leverage its finances (and control its financial risks) to both strengthen and broaden the actuarial profession.

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. 

Life has brought a number of opportunities to live and/or work in international and/or cross-cultural settings. I learned a lot from ten weeks living and working in a youth hostel in Amsterdam before beginning my actuarial career in 1994. That youth hostel provided housing and meals for usually more than 20 different nationalities each day which created opportunities to interact with and learn from numerous diverse perspectives.

My wife and I adopted our son (now 17 years old) from Ethiopia in 2010. I’ve been blessed to travel to Ethiopia five times, including a 2023 missions trip in which our entire family lived and served in Ethiopia for almost a month. Each time we came away with deeper appreciation of how we can all be enriched by learning different ways of communicating, thinking, celebrating, challenging and growing together.

I have had the opportunity to lead team members who lived and worked in both Ireland and India. I also led a 10-week pharmacy consulting engagement for the National Health Service of England and a health strategy consulting engagement for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Health.

More recently, while at AHP, I’ve been engaged with Tsinghua University to educate Chinese health policy experts about the strengths and weaknesses of the United States healthcare ecosystem and to strategize together about approaches to growing and developing the commercial health insurance market in China.

These personal and professional international experiences have created in me a strong interest in helping the actuarial profession broaden its reach and impact the development of healthcare and financial security markets in Africa and Asia.

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 service on four nonprofit Boards has taught me about the importance of supporting the employed staff and the myriad volunteers who directly accomplish the missions of the organizations on a day-to-day basis. Non-profit staff face different challenges and receive different rewards than for-profit companies. Volunteers need missional inspiration and encouragement to maintain pace and consistency of service in accomplishing their mission rather than the compensation and sense of achievement and career advancement that so often drive corporate teams.

Within the SOA, I have volunteered leading the Pharmacy Subgroup of the Health Community for 8 to 10 years, recruiting volunteer presenters on pharmacy-related topics of interest each month and moderate the discussions amongst the 100-120 attendees.

I also led a dozen volunteers to write a series of articles published in The Actuary Magazine May 2020 (Actuarial Perspectives on Prescription Drug Financing - The Actuary Magazine) and in February 2021 (Additional Actuarial Perspectives on Prescription Drug Financing - The Actuary Magazine).

For the last four years, I have served on the SOA’s North American Employer Council (NAEC) with about 25 executives from large and small employers of actuaries across the health and life insurance and retirement benefit industries. We interact with SOA leadership around key strategic efforts of the SOA and emerging trends and topics affecting the profession so that SOA staff can hear the perspectives of significant employers of actuaries.

These opportunities to serve on nonprofit Boards and to serve the members and the staff of the SOA have enabled me to bring to my SOA Board candidacy a greater appreciation for the challenges and joys that nonprofit organizations encounter.

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. 

During the early part of my career, I volunteered on the Board of Directors for the local private school where my children attended. I learned a good deal about the teaching profession and the Board oversight responsibilities for the development and delivery of educational programs.

During the last 13 years, I have had the opportunity to design and deliver well over 50 half-day or full-day educational workshops for life science companies to train their market access, marketing, health economics and outcomes research and medical science liaison teams about the business and financial drivers and the competitive pressures of health plans, pharmacy benefit managers and health systems, including education about the actuarial profession and how actuaries uniquely contribute to each of those industries.

As Chief Actuary at Optum Advisory Services, I drove the development of a mentorship program for the actuarial, underwriting, pharmacy, data scientist and development staff so they could be matched with mentors who would invest in their skill development and career advancement through one-on-one conversations.

For about the last 8 to 10 years, I have been leading the SOA Health Community’s Pharmacy Subgroup where my co-chair and I recruit volunteer presenters on pharmacy-related topics of interest each month and moderate the discussion on those topics amongst the typical 100-120 attendees for the purposes of continuing education.

I recently had the opportunity to be a guest professor at the University of Colorado Anschutz Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences’ Outcomes Research PhD Graduate Program to teach them about the pharmacy benefit manager industry, its financial drivers and competitive pressures.

These experiences have only increased my interest in helping others grow through formal and informal educational experiences.

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. 

In both my roles functioning as the Chief Financial Officer of Walgreens’ pharmacy benefit manager business unit and then as Chief Actuary with full operational and financial responsibility for Optum Advisory Services’ actuarial, underwriting and pharmacy consulting and software businesses, I was also responsible for managing those business unit’s financial risk management (at Walgreens and Optum) and reputational and human capital (Optum) risk management mitigation strategies and operations.

In each of the four non-profit board roles, I was actively involved alongside other Board members in setting risk mitigation strategies and overseeing risk mitigation operations across financial, legal compliance, human resources and reputational risks.

These diverse leadership experiences at a mix of different organizations have prepared me to bear similar responsibilities and guide risk mitigation strategies and oversee risk mitigation operations as a potential member of the Society of Actuaries’ Board of Directors.

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. 

In my executive leadership roles at Walgreens (functioning as chief financial officer of the pharmacy benefit manager business unit) and at Optum Advisory Services (leading the actuarial, underwriting and pharmacy consulting businesses), I worked with my teams to develop long range strategic plans, both the business strategies and the financial strategies for those business units. Those business units’ long-range plans were then rolled up into the larger enterprise-wide strategic plans, and we were called upon to assist in working with the Corporate Strategy team to prepare content for the Board of Director meetings.

In my roles on the nonprofit Boards of Directors, I also had significant responsibilities for strategic planning. In particular, in my role as Chair of the Deacon Board at the church in Illinois, I worked closely with the staff leaders to map out strategic plans for upcoming years.

In my role as Chair of the Board for the healthcare and counseling ministry, I met weekly with the Executive Director to map out both weekly operational priorities but also annual strategic plans for future years.

In my role as Partner at Axene Health Partners, I annually lay out five-year strategic goals and operational plans to meet those goals.

I look forward to the opportunity to apply my experiences with for-profit (large and small) companies and my experiences with nonprofit organizations in developing and then executing strategic plans to fulfill those organizations’ missions to help the Society of Actuaries develop strategic plans and then oversee the execution of those strategic plans to achieve the organizational mission.