Farewell Remarks from 2023-24 Academy President Lisa Slotznick at the American Academy of Actuaries' Annual Meeting on Nov. 13, 2024
What a privilege to serve as the President of the Academy this past year. Before handing the reins over to Darrell Knapp, I want to share just a few highlights, well maybe more than a few, from the past year of the important and strategic activities that have advanced our mission to serve the public and U.S. actuarial profession, ensuring the Academy remains strong for the future. Our dedicated volunteers and tremendous staff have been hard at work this year on many of these critical activities plus our full array of public policy and professionalism projects and initiatives. As actuaries and members of the Academy, we all should be grateful for their efforts.
Over the past several years, the Academy has engaged in much self-reflection and deep work to strengthen our place as the national organization for actuaries who practice in the United States. We developed a competency framework for new Academy members that emphasizes basic and foundational knowledge coupled with an understanding of U.S. laws and regulations, which we unveiled earlier this year. This Framework specifies the knowledge required of a new Academy member regarding general actuarial topics, U.S. laws and practices, and U.S. actuarial professionalism. We updated our membership requirements to be consistent with this framework, and these new requirements will become applicable on January 1, 2026. Be aware that, if you are already an Academy member and maintain your membership, the new requirements won’t apply to you. But I strongly recommend that you familiarize yourself with this framework because you’ll be hearing a lot more about it in Academy education, outreach, and volunteer workstreams. In addition, we encourage all our members to be ambassadors for what it means to be a member of the Academy and the importance of our sole focus on the U.S. profession. We are certainly stronger together!
Professionalism is central to our mission, and we have continued our substantial offerings, ranging from papers, articles and law manuals to webinars, videos, and seminars. This year, the Academy also launched the Academy learning portal, a new member benefit that aims to support your actuarial continuing education journey with a library of these very webinars, practice notes, and other resources that is expanding every day. In addition, we celebrated the 35th anniversary of our award-winning magazine Contingencies in 2024.
A clear understanding of our organizational values supports our execution of the Academy’s strategic objectives as we deliver value to members. To that end, in May this year, the Board adopted our Core Values Statement. Our core values are independence, objectivity, and balance. I invite you to read the description on our website, in the hopes that you will find your own values reflected in this document.
We also continue to carry out our goals related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, with efforts spearheaded by our DEI Committee. The committee has focused and coordinated the Academy’s DEI work across membership, public policy, and communications projects, and in Academy staff training on DEI issues. These projects range from our support and partnerships with actuarial affinity groups to spotlighting our diverse volunteer base in Actuary Voices podcasts and Member Spotlights and working on bias and equity issues in different practice councils.
One of the public policy “firsts” of this past year happened at the very beginning of my formal term in office, right after the Envision Tomorrow meeting last November. The Academy’s Health Equity Symposium brought together Academy volunteers as well as government and industry representatives at the federal and state levels to discuss improving health equity. We received excellent and very useful feedback from this event that informed the ongoing work of the Health Equity Committee and our cross-practice DEI Committee.
Using a similar format, in June this year, we held an ERISA at 50 symposium, providing a timely discussion among leading figures—members, public officials, and external stakeholders--on ERISA’s history, current situation, and the context it has set for retirement security going forward. I am proud of both these events, which highlight the Academy’s ability to bring various stakeholders together to discuss issues and constantly expand the reach of its public policy work to meet emerging needs and milestones.
In April of this year, Academy volunteers, fellows, and staff from the health, casualty, and risk management & financial reporting practice councils visited Capitol Hill for their annual “Hill visits.” In meetings with federal policymakers, regulators, and other external stakeholders, they discussed key public policy issues and shared relevant Academy resources on cyber and climate risk; Medicare, Medicaid, and insurance markets; AI; and financial reporting and solvency. These visits are an opportunity for the Academy to present its unbiased, nonpartisan, objective perspectives on key issues with elected U.S. officials and staff, a particularly valuable contribution to fulfilling our mission to serve the public and U.S. actuarial profession.
We have continued to participate meaningfully in the NAIC’s meetings throughout the year, and we will attend the upcoming meeting three days from now in Denver. The Academy continues to offer its professionalism breakfast to regulators at these meetings. The NAIC asked us this year to develop knowledge statements for life actuaries who serve as appointed actuaries, illustration actuaries, and qualified actuaries. We expanded this to cover health appointed actuaries. A follow up request has come to review existing NAIC casualty knowledge statements compared with the syllabi of US actuarial credentialling organizations. This underscores the relationship of trust we have worked hard to establish, maintain, and grow with the NAIC over time.
Furthering this relationship, NAIC President Andrew Mais and CEO Gary Anderson gave us a look at insurance issues last month at Envision Tomorrow, also known as our Annual Meeting.
The Envision Tomorrow event was a great way to cap off the year, highlighted many of the activities I’ve shared with you today, and others: global risks and leadership going into this year’s elections and beyond, seizing opportunities and governing risk associated with AI, bridging insurance gaps, changing longevity from a risk to an opportunity, and self-regulation in a complicated world. It also provided me with the honor of presenting this year’s Academy Awards to our deserving winners.
Thank you to all our volunteers who were involved in the Academy’s 2024 accomplishments that I have touted in my remarks. All that we do is the result of our fantastic volunteers and supportive members. Our 20,000 members will benefit from our enhanced membership requirements, large output of material, public policy efforts and most importantly our professionalism focus.
Before I sign off, let me remind you that in 2025, the Academy celebrates its 60th anniversary, which I know you will be hearing more about in the coming months. Thank you for your trust and the privilege of serving as your Academy President and thank you for being active members and supporters of the American Academy of Actuaries.
