01-04-2004, 10:43 PM
The difference between Actuaries, CFAs and ACIIs is quite minor but not negligible... Actuaries basically specialise in Insurance and Pension funds... ACII is a study almost fully directed towards Insurance... However, a person who has attained BSc in Actuarial Sciences is subject to exemptions from all exams of ACII except the last one...
Sumaaan & Farhan, I have a question for both of you.
When you said, âActuaries basically specialise in Insurance and Pension fundsâ, did you mean literally these two are the practice areas for qualified actuaries?
That may well be true for a developing economy, such as Pakistan, but in more developed countries, people do also qualify as Investment and to differentiate Insurance, as General Insurance and Life Insurance Actuaries.
(I know that you did not mean that but I think the newcomers wishing to gain insight into the matter, could be directed in narrow spectrum, if we do not care about the legitimacy of our comments.)
I also think that the work of an actuary and an insurance professional is different and by no means similar.
I think by insurance professionals, we mean people working in the insurance companies and setting premiums for the customers, in technical language, people working for syndicates. I hope you would know that in the Lloyds of London, the biggest insurance place in the world, where all the big syndicates meet together and negotiate the insurance premiums, has only got 2-3 actuaries.
This is because the actuarial practice in the insurance business is not the same as the insurance professionals. The ACII charter, helps you to gain employment in the insurance sector, but the FIA etc statuses of actuaries help you to work for actuarial departments where they research, analyse and predict the future and give syndicates advice about how much their brokers should set a premium.
So, therefore, the work of insurance professionals, who work as insurance under-writers, is different to the insurance actuaries, who work as research kind of people, selling their expertise in the statistical inferences about the data available.
Sumaaan, please comment if I you have concerns about the above statement.
AHSAN
