Actuaries Institute president Scott Reeves says the profession can expand to serve more industries and members should adopt a new mindset.

“Even with all the change we’ve dealt with over the past decade, many of our roles are still in financial services, although many are broader than the legislative mandated roles,” he said in his first public address as president.

“We need to defend and extend areas where our skills are relevant … to constantly seek opportunities beyond our traditional sectors of strength.”  

Manufacturing, utilities and fast-moving consumer goods industries offer growth potential, Mr Reeves says.

“As actuaries, our ability to analyse, report back and deliver insight is a calling card. We’re trusted to meet the CEO or board’s brief and our mandated obligations with precision and at high quality.”

He says actuaries are “ideally suited to identifying an organisation’s problems, needs and opportunities, to building processes and systems that help the people and organisations we work with manage those issues.

“These actuarial attributes … give us the ability to say, ‘We think there’s a problem and we’ve got a solution.’ Our end state can be industry-agnostic.” 

Mr Reeves became president this month, taking over from Taylor Fry principal Win-Li Toh.

He was most recently Munich Re head of markets and left the reinsurer last September after 12 years, according to his LinkedIn. 

In his address, he also touched on artificial intelligence.

“I see several dimensions to the topic of AI,” he said. “AI will displace many rules-based processes. But if you take the outputs of AI and reach a point where what’s required is judgment and depth of insight – that’s where we’ve always played and can continue to do so.”

He says AI is an “incredibly powerful tool that could supercharge what we do with and for our clients. As an institute, we took our time to get our AI strategy right. We’ve adapted and will continue to adapt. I feel we’re on the right path to creating AI-powered actuaries.”