Who We Are
The Story of Maverick Actuary
Who We Are
The Story of Maverick Actuary
Maverick Actuary was founded by Dominic Lee in the summer of 2021.
Amidst a global pandemic, Dominic made a keen observation that the most consequential risk management challenge of the past century was largely being addressed with limited input from actuaries.
Dominic noticed that the narrative, analysis, and most importantly, decisions, were primarily driven by career politicians, the medical community, and media personalities.
While the pandemic was largely a medical event, there were several other risk management issues that warranted expert insights outside of the medical community.
These include diversification within the medical supply chain, triaging of critical healthcare supplies, risk/reward considerations of reopening institutions, and distribution of federal funds among other problems that actuaries are uniquely qualified to solve.
At that point, he identified three critical gaps within the actuarial profession that explained their limited impact during the pandemic response: name recognition, an explainable value proposition, and a strategic mindset.
Since then, Dominic has been on a quest to address these critical gaps so that actuaries and other quant professionals can maximize their impact and value.
The Maverick Mentality
Being a maverick in actuarial science can be summarized in three words:
Bold
A broader view of risk and bolder visions of how the actuarial skillset can be applied will expand our reach and increase our impact as actuaries.
Unconventional
Actuaries don't have to fit inside a box. There's room to dare, dream and explore in the world of risk and analytics.
Influential
Being deliberate with our messaging will allow us to tell more compelling stories that articulate the value we provide.
The Maverick Formula
[Media + Story + Strategy] = [Impact + Value]
Media
Quant professionals have a reputation for working behind the scenes, a tendency to fade into the background when high stakes conversations arise and no established relationship with the media. In a digitally connected world, impact is greatly limited in the absence of a recognizable and visible brand. In the golden age of media, brand identity on digital platforms is table stakes. To establish sustainable name recognition, quant professionals would benefit from modernizing their communication toolkit: short form copy, video, and podcasts across social platforms are three key areas of opportunity.
Story
Quant professionals are accustomed to working with complex data sets, performing highly nuanced analyses, and producing sophisticated results. They tend to distribute their effort in a way that places too much emphasis on technical rigor and too little emphasis on communicating business value. This pattern is not unexpected. For example, the actuarial profession has historically been over-indexed to technical skills. Its qualification processes require extensive rote memorization of academic formulae that became less valuable after the information age. Qualification processes are also inadequate in their ability to gauge communication proficiency. To establish an explainable value proposition, quant professionals would benefit from learning how to tell more succinct and compelling stories.
Strategy
Quant professionals often struggle with having a strategic mindset. One of the most common examples is how they have been conditioned to apply their skillsets. Quant skillsets are often applied to solve specific problems within specific domains. As a result, there are several institutions and individuals who don’t benefit from the expertise of quant professionals whose expertise is relevant across several domains and industries. For instance, most actuaries practice in primary insurance but their risk management skillset is highly applicable and highly underutilized in the broader economy: government agencies, the energy sector, and the global supply chain to name a few examples. To establish a strategic mindset, quant professionals might want to consider the world in an infinite state, not a finite state with static resource alignment.
Long Term Goals
Create multilingual content to help quant professionals amplify value with a focus on business acumen, strategy, and communication.
Create educational content to increase awareness of actuarial science, risk management, and analytics in the general public, focusing on institutions outside of financial services.
Publish formal research on modern topics to encourage expansion of the domains in which actuaries practice.
Influence advanced technology adoption in insurance and risk management.
Provide tools and resources to help industry associations, partners, and affiliates in quant professions develop an impactful modern media infrastructure.
Strategically collaborate with actuarial societies across the globe to establish a formal relationship between the actuarial profession and the broadcast media.
Influence broadcast media networks to hire formal contributors in the areas of insurance and risk management.
Establish a mechanism to prepare quant professionals to speak with and manage relationships with the press.
Work with industry associations to develop paradigms focused on value creation: professional education, recruiting, brand positioning etc.