Happy New Year, and happy Lunar New Year to those who celebrate it. Welcome to the first issue of The Actuary for 2022. I’d like to start by thanking Dan Georgescu for his work on the magazine during the past couple of years. I’m delighted to be taking over as the new editor.
In November 2021, the omicron variant of the coronavirus was designated a variant of concern. In this issue, I speak to Kit Yates, mathematical biologist and a member of Independent SAGE. Our conversation about the importance of, and challenges around, scientific and risk-related communication – especially in the context of COVID-19 – turned out to be prescient, with the omicron variant soaring during the Christmas period (p13).
Sustainability is a topic that is becoming more urgent by the day:
both for the world and for our profession. We open the year with an assessment of our industry’s progress and shortcomings so far with regard to climate change (p34). In the cover article, Colin Redman zooms in on social care, a topic that, he argues, deserves more actuarial attention (p28).
This month, with IFoA president Louise Pryor encouraging us to keep learning, we bring data and technology into focus. We envision the place where the valuable intersection of data and business knowledge in the actuary’s toolset can take us (p16), why we must seize this opportunity as a profession, and how we might get there (p17). We also look at concrete examples of how artificial intelligence and machine learning can enable us to extract value from health data (p24), and how technology and a digital-first strategy can help to drive insurance penetration (p20).
I hope you enjoy this issue.
Ruolin Wang
Editor [email protected]
