Ofer Brandt arrived at City University in London with just a suitcase to his name. Twelve years later, he returned home to Israel with his family and a freight container following closely behind. Now, to give back to the profession, he is championing the education of actuaries in Israel and beyond
Teaching the actuaries of tomorrow
Ofer Brandt arrived at City University in London with just a suitcase to his name. Twelve years later, he returned home to Israel with his family and a freight container following closely behind. Now, to give back to the profession, he is championing the education of actuaries in Israel and beyond
Having completed the one-year postgraduate diploma course in actuarial sciences at City University in London, I thought I would stay for just one more year before returning to Israel and finishing my actuarial exams.
But, 12 years later, I received a phone call early on a Sunday morning. On the other end of the line was the CEO of Clal Insurance Company in Israel. It was the opportunity I'd been waiting for, a senior position with the largest insurance company in Israel. In November 2000, I found myself on the aeroplane to Tel Aviv, amused by the thought that 12 years earlier I had arrived in the UK with my then girlfriend and one suitcase, and here I was with my three little children and wife sitting next to me, knowing that a full freight container was following.
There is no doubt that my work in the UK provided me with the solid actuarial experience that I needed to develop my career. Working with Liberty Life, a medium-size unit-linked company, exposed me to a variety of essential technical actuarial work. After five years with the company, I moved on and joined Tillinghast Towers Perrin, now known as Towers Watson. There I worked with bright colleagues and actuarial friends, and developed a holistic approach to actuarial and management issues.
Coming home
Relocating to Israel called for all the actuarial experience I had gained in the UK. Not long after my arrival, a change of shareholder ownership required me to calculate the embedded value of the company. This was a great opportunity to work closely with my reporting staff, learning the company's business activities, and on a wider scale, familiarising myself with local actuarial practices, local regulatory framework and the structure of the local insurance market.
In recent years, the Israeli commissioner of insurance adopted and stated that he would continue to adopt international regulatory frameworks and practices, such as the IFRS accounting practice; European Solvency II and Market Consistent Embedded Value reporting. For a period of six years from 2005, I served as president of the Israel Association of Actuaries (ILAA). This was my way of contributing back to the profession, which I continue to do now by chairing the association's education committee. I started with what I regarded as the most important issue, education - the raison d'être of any actuarial association.
Being a small profession (with a total of about 300 members), the ILAA lacks the financial resources and manpower needed to sustain a continuous educational programme. This was when the tight partnership with the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA) began.
With the support of the UK Actuarial Profession, a memorandum of understanding between the two bodies was signed in 2008, allowing ILAA's students access to the UK education and examination system. Now, ILAA's students sit the UK exams, but with one twist - they are allowed to write their answers in Hebrew.
This agreement has been a great success and, to my knowledge, was the first of its kind between the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries and a non-English-speaking association.
In 2009, the ILAA joined the Chartered Enterprise Risk Analyst (CERA) global initiative, marked by a multilateral treaty, signed in Hyderabad, India, during meetings of the International Actuarial Association (IAA). The treaty was backed by 14 IAA member associations, based in 12 countries around the world. Last month, the ILAA was formally approved to award the new CERA qualification for actuaries with unanimous support from the CERA treaty board.
Amidst all this activity, an ongoing project that the ILAA is working on together with the IFoA is the mutual recognition agreement between the two associations. I truly hope it will be signed by the end of this year.
I am convinced that the solid educational infrastructure we put in place will ensure that the highest standards of the actuarial profession in Israel are kept into the future and will develop generations of actuaries to come.
Ofer Brandt is a Fellow of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, a Fellow of the Israel Association of Actuaries and a chartered enterprise risk analyst of the Society of Actuaries. He holds a BSc from Tel Aviv University and an MBA from both the Kellogg School of Management in Chicago and Tel Aviv Recanati Business School.