Summary

10 years of actuarial experience in life insurance companies across various functions and product lines.

Extensive track record of achieving transformational improvements through creating and implementing innovative solutions based on broad knowledge in actuarial, technology, and finance.

Expert in actuarial modelling, financial statement modelling and forecasting, building actuarial systems, and automation.

Demonstrated ability to work collaboratively with all levels of management as well as coaching and developing actuarial staff.

Extensive expertise in AXIS, EnterpriseLink, Excel, Access, QlikView, SQL, and VBA.

Actuarial Exams

ASA:

Completed all ASA requirements

FSA:

Completed ILALP, ILALFVC, ILALRM

Work Experience

Apr 2019Present

Director, ORSA and LICAT Initiatives

Sun Life - Corporate Actuarial
Responsible for the end-to-end Life Insurance Capital Adequacy Test (LICAT) reporting infrastructure at Sun Life.
  • Rebuilt the LICAT calculation and reporting application in QlikView from scratch, mostly in spare time, to be more reliable, more accurate, and faster, reducing refresh time from 6 hours to 3-10 minutes
  • Reduced team's quarterly workload for application support and maintenance by 95%
  • Received the Shining Star Award and nominated for the CEO Award of Excellence for work on rebuilding the LICAT application and improved the application net prompter score by 80 points
  • Introduced agile development methodology and improved the effectiveness of testing and change management for LICAT development
Mar 2018Mar 2019

Associate Actuary / Data Scientist (Capital Reporting and Analytics Lead)

Manulife - Group Finance Actuarial
Responsible for leading the modernization of the QlikView application LICAT in an Agile framework.
  • Learned LICAT and QlikView quickly and rebuilt the LICAT QlikView application from scratch to increase the calculation accuracy and improve the performance by 1,000 times
  • Improved the accuracy of calculations for interest rate risk, insurance risk, currency risk, marginal solvency buffers, diversification, participating, and adjustable credits
  • Led the implementation of additional features for ad hoc what-if scenarios, solvency buffer allocations, analysis of change, and legal entity views
  • Implemented a version control and testing system for QlikView development, inspired by DevOps practices, that significantly improved the quality and velocity of QlikView development
  • Received Group Finance Actuarial award for work on LICAT
Jan 2017Mar 2018

Senior Actuarial Analyst (Actuarial Modelling, Systems & Data Lead)

Foresters Financial - Capital Management and Corporate Actuarial
Lead and manage a team of actuarial staff within the Actuarial Modelling function at Foresters Financial. Lead the valuation systems modernization and transformation efforts to reduce the ongoing structural cost and improve the capacity of the Actuarial function.
  • Designed a preliminary process to consolidate actuarial modeling platforms for the 3 insurance entities within Foresters North American Life Insurance and Annuity business unit
  • Designed a preliminary modelling framework for IFRS 17 and Principles Based Reserving (PBR)
  • Led the successful implementation and roll-out of AXIS EnterpriseLink infrastructure for all AXIS users at Foresters in Toronto and New York
  • Automated the migration and validation of 1000+ Hyperion queries and reports from Teradata to SQL Server
Jun 2011Dec 2017

Senior Actuarial Analyst (Capital Modelling Lead)

Foresters Financial - Capital Management
Responsible for the development, review, and validation of financial projection models for all product segments at Foresters. Provided thought leadership in the technological aspects of actuarial systems to ensure efficient use of existing resources. Managed, developed, and trained co-op and full-time actuarial staff on technical skills, insurance financial concepts, and modelling best practices.
  • Designed and implemented a comprehensive financial projection system for Foresters using AXIS, SQL, Excel, VBA, and Access to automate the production of financial statements (income statements and balance sheets under IFRS and US Stat, MCCSR, RBC, capital transfers, and sources of earnings)
  • Created a projection model in AXIS capable of accurately projecting future CALM reserves for all product lines by using the embedded block functionality in AXIS, significantly improving the accuracy and reliability of financial projections for Foresters
  • Collaborated with GGY to test and enhance the embedded block functionally in AXIS for CALM reserve projections
  • Developed a methodology of accurately approximating CALM reserves at the product and policy level without iteratively solving for an explicit discount rate that could materially reproduce the same result without multiple model runs
  • Developed and implemented a complete SOE/EBS formula that could explain all material sources of projected earnings with no unexplained amounts, giving stakeholder better insight into drivers of projected earnings under various sensitivities
  • Led the development of a 'tinker' model that could produce results instantly for various sales scenarios, allowing the executive leadership team to see the impact of various what-if scenarios live in strategy meetings
  • Became the go-to person for modelling, earnings analysis, projections, AXIS, GridLink, EnterpriseLink, Excel, VBA, Access, SQL, and Hyperion
May 2008Jun 2011

Actuarial Analyst/Senior Actuarial Analyst (Financial Planning and Analysis)

Foresters - Financial Actuarial
Responsible for improving the accuracy and efficiency of AXIS and Excel models for business planning. Produce and explain financial projections for business plans and DCAT under various scenarios.
  • Reduced AXIS run time by 95% without sacrificing accuracy by applying advanced knowledge of AXIS to optimize models
  • Automated the Excel model using VBA and reduced the Excel roll-up time by 95%, saving 40 minutes per run and up to 6 hours a day
  • Created a model to project US RBC capital needs for the US division to better illustrate the excess capital consumption of US Stat/RBC over CGAAP/MCCSR, resulting in management actions to reduce free surplus erosion through reinsurance
  • Created an automated query conversion tool in Hyperion to instantly convert hundreds of BI queries and reports from a legacy database to Teradata database, eliminating the need to pay external consultants to convert the BI report queries at 30 minutes each
  • Estimated the income impact of converting to IFRS4 Phase 2 (IFRS 17) by modelling existing business according to the exposure draft at the time
  • Created an expense study process using Excel, VBA, and Access to easily conduct a company-wide expense study and analyse expenses from the consolidated company level to the detailed product and budget centre levels
  • Analysed early claims data on new producer groups using statistical knowledge learned in school to measure the quality of new business and identify agents with poor experience in 2009 using predictive analytic techniques

Education

BMath, Double Honours Actuarial Science & Statistics - Co-operative Program (2008)

University of Waterloo