Actuaries and Top Managers in the Boardroom: Gaps We Need to Close and Opportunities We Should Grab

The role of actuaries in companies has been massively changing in the past few years: on one side, Solvency II and IFRS 17 led to a radical increase in the relevance of probabilistic and technical skills in managing companies, but on the other side disrupting insurtech models have been gaining space and jobs traditionally held by actuaries have seen the fierce competition of new profiles (e.g. data scientists). In this context, we want to share the experience of a qualified actuary who became the CFO of an PE-backed insurtech startup and in 5 years brought it to profitably grow and become the leading European insurtech, leader in Italy direct motor market, structuring a fully fledged finance team, driving strategic planning, building internal controls and managing investor relations.We will discuss about the gaps currently envisaged in the actuarial preparation, tools and culture (e.g. on corporate finance, business awareness, pyramid thinking, ...) and opportunities they should grab in today's context in order to become top managers, decision makers or key influencer in the Board of Directors.To reference a classification from Prof. Buhlmann, welcome to the "actuaries of the fifth kind".