RESPONSIBILITIES

Strategy Formation & Implementation

• Develop the strategy for a business area of significant function, anticipating mega-trends and complex challenges and opportunities. Ensure the strategy is successfully implemented and meets long-term business needs.
• Provide actuarial support to Head of Product and Pricing and CEO of 1Life.
• Ensure the effective management of product development and pricing framework.
• Responsible for implementing the Actuarial control cycle; ie development, deployment and monitoring thereof. Responsible for the management of key business metrics, such as value of new business, embedded value, and profit by product line.

Budgeting & Costing

• Take responsibility for setting and managing area budgets so they align with organisational strategy.
• Ensure the company is profitable through managing, setting and monitoring key drivers.
• Determine profitability of premium rates for all product lines as well as implementing annual reviews on existing policies.
• Perform budgets, forecasting and assumptions setting, in order to ensure profitability of the organisation.

Stakeholder Engagement

• Identify and manage stakeholders up to C-suite level, finding out their needs/ issues/concerns and reacting to these by leading and coordinating the development of stakeholder engagement plans to support the communication of business information and decisions.
• Maintain measurable service levels on business requests and provide feedback that speaks to the business issue observed.

Business Requirements Identification

• Elicit the most complex business requirements using a variety of methods such as interviews, document analysis, workshops, and workflow analysis to express the requirements in terms of target user roles and goals.
• Ensure business requirements need is clearly documented within the scope of use, definitions and assumptions made. Develop solutions that are in align with experienced assumptions.

Insights and Reporting

• Establish business-critical strategies to create, present, and communicate high impact data and analytics insights and recommendations to critical internal and external stakeholders.
• Ensure monitoring is accurate and complete and regularly validated against credible data sources.

Leadership and Direction

• Identify and communicate the actions needed to implement the function’s strategy and business plan within the business area or department; explain the relationship to the broader organisation’s mission, vision and values and motivate people to commit to these. Stay engaged and dedicated to achieving the business goals.

Improvement / Innovation

• Initiate, formulate and implement new business practices within a specific discipline while managing the development and/or delivery of a significant element of the organisation’s change management program.
• Continuously review and find effective ways to improve on efficiencies across the business. Stay up to date with business developments and develop solutions proactively with business. Maintain continuous development/research of actuarial techniques and share insights with the team.

Building Capability

• Implement formal development frameworks for a substantial department. Provide others throughout the organization with informal coaching and mentoring.
• Mentor and coach staff on a technical and professional front. Ensure staff develop further skills and capabilities to ensure better model development.
• Assist staff to increase own capacity to automate processes. Encourage staff to leverage each other’s strengths, to improve the teams overall performance.

Model deployment and testing

• Plan and deliver systems changes and manage the team on a day-to-day basis to meet project timelines and quality requirements. Engage with users to identifyrequirements and work with the team to design solutions.
• Oversee the effective impact and sensitivity analysis to be performed before any deployment is done. Translate results from the impact/sensitivity analysis to
• Business to provide insight and what various pricing changes will mean on profitability and policy growth.
• Ensure monitoring processes are in place to measure the performance of the model/pricing. Oversee the effective tracking of various products and pricing changes and cohorts.

Operational Compliance

• Ensure that business activities within a significant area of responsibility comply with relevant external regulatory and/or voluntary codes and with internal policies to minimize business risk and protect the reputation of the organisation.
• Maintain standards of integrity and professionalism as set out by the Actuarial
• Society of South Africa. Apply appropriate techniques in alignment with APN’s.

Actuarial Modeling

• Undertake strategic and tactical financial analysis, modelling, and evaluation to support business leaders in their decision making.
• Oversee the development, maintenance and implementation actuarial models and processes. Models need to be fit for purpose and able to estimate the reality accurately. Models (and any form of estimation) to clearly documented with the scope of use, definitions, data, and assumptions made. Ensure that there are process documents in in place to ensure that the models can be understood by external stakeholders. Ensure processes are in place to reduce the risk of incorrect modelling and support new users.

Data Collection & Analysis

• Make authoritative recommendations that have a significant impact on the business over the short and long term. Recommendations could be technical or professional in nature.
• Oversee the data used for actuarial models. Data/information to be reconciled against credible data sources (for example financials) to ensure the data is complete and accurate. Ensure definitions and assumptions are aligned to the problem statement.

Performance Management

• Manage and report on the performance of a substantial, diverse team; set appropriate performance objectives for direct reports or project / account team members and hold them accountable for achieving these; take appropriate corrective action where necessary to ensure the achievement of team / personal objectives. Manage the development of pipelines and succession planning as well as performance scoring and management including team administration, setup of performance contracts and ensure the alignment of the performance management process to the business objectives.

General Education

• Bachelors / Honours degree in Actuarial Science or similar (Essential)
• Qualified or near qualified Actuarial qualification with Life Insurance technical subject (Essential)
• FASSA (Fellow of the Society of SA)
• Qualified actuary (Fellow of the actuarial) (society)
• Any relevant management qualification: Degree / Diploma or relevant
• Leadership Development Program (Advantageous)

EXPERIENCE

General Experience

• 6 or more years Actuarial work experience in financial services (Essential)
• 5 years’ experience in Life Insurance Valuations and Life Insurance Pricing (Essential)

Managerial Experience

• 6 years to 10 years’ experience of planning, managing and organizing resources
• within short / medium timescales within the overall policy framework (Essential)