This essay is an expanded version of my remarks in 'The Year that Was’ webinar on 7 May 2021.

Qualifying is not easy, and you should be very proud to qualify as an Associate or as a Fellow of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries. I am delighted to celebrate your success with you.

This message will be my last as president, and I thought it would be fitting to address the issue of stewardship.

Twelve months on from the peak of the first COVID-19 wave in Europe, the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries hosted a fortnight series of events to showcase the range of ways in which the actuarial profession has added value, in the public interest, to the understanding and management of the current pandemic.

On February 19 the IFoA submitted its feedback and recommendations to HM Treasury on the Phase II Consultation of the Financial Services Future Regulatory Framework Review. [...]

The current pandemic is the first real global ‘VUCA event’ of our lifetime. I have experienced many uncertain and volatile situations before, from racial riots in Malaysia in my childhood to more recent financial crises and then Brexit. But none of those compares with this crisis. What can actuaries do in a VUCA environment?

A Point of Inflection

It gives me great pleasure to introduce this issue of the profession’s Longevity Bulletin, a publication that has been running for almost ten years now, helping ‘longevity stakeholders’ – not just actuaries – achieve a better understanding of the drivers behind mortality, morbidity and longevity.

There is a broad agreement that the IFoA and the profession need to be more agile and respond to changes faster, more courageously and more imaginatively. A senior actuary described the IFoA as ‘treacle’; I think Ira Progoff’s metaphor, that “under pressure of events, our lives have become hard-packed like soil” that has not been tilled for many years, is appropriate. I invite all of us to till the soil, so we can flourish on our own ground.

Actuaries for Transformational Change - our charter and purpose.

Here are sixty-one tips which I have distilled from my sixty-one years of life for young actuaries. These lessons are roughly in the order of my appreciating and applying them. [...]

LinkedIn Covid-19 Actuaries Response Group Charter

Professor Richard Smith of Singapore Management University and I published this short article, “Managing Across Borders” in May 2019. We contrast leadership traits between Asian and Western leaders. I have been a partner and guest lecturer of Professor Smith’s Human Capital and EMBA classes in SMU since 2012.

I represented NTUC Income on the Executive Committee of the International Cooperatives and Mutual Insurance Federation (ICMIF). In May 2014, I contributed a short blog on their website, where I argued that the time for business to adopt the Triple Bottom Line has arrived. The 3 Ps are Planet, People and Profit, coined by an Englishman, John Elkington many years ago.

In this first of two articles which were published in the national dailies, I reflected on my own learning. The gist of this is that for businesses to thrive they have to make social sense, and for social enterprises to thrive they have to make business sense.

The title of this article “Why did no one seemed to see the crisis coming” mirrored exactly what the Queen of Great Britain asked when she visited my alma mater London School of Economics in December 2008, at the height of the global financial crisis. In this article, which was published in our national daily The Straits Times, I attempted to answer the question.

On 20 August 2007, NTUC Income kick started a 1500-day transformation process which we called the “Cultural Revolution”. We had many good values like trust, teamwork and execution orientation. But we were weak in having a sense of ownership, independence of thought, achievement orientation, and creativity. We drew inspiration from Hofstede’s cultural dimensions to rally and sustain the Revolution.

In this article, I assured the public, that “doing good” remain the foundational value of NTUC Income, even as we embarked on our Cultural Revolution.