From The Barbados Advocate

By next year, actuaries in the region will be required to meet international standards in their various practices.

President of the Caribbean Actuarial Association (CAA), Lisa Wade outlined that it was working to maintain the reputation of the profession through setting the standards of practice.

“We are trying where we can to look at international best practices with regards to our standards, because we want the Caribbean standards to be as good as those used internationally so we have looked towards the International Actuarial Association standards and where we can we have adopted them in full and where they need to be we have tried to adapt them for local conditions in the Caribbean,” she stated.

According to her, in 2009 there were only two standards of practice utilised by regional actuaries; one for life insurance and the other for pensions.

She noted however, that in light of the collapse of Clico, the CAA had been requested to set principles to be followed.

“We were asked by the region’s regulators to start setting some standards of practice so that actuarial work in the Caribbean would be at a minimum quality and a minimum level. We suspect this probably emanated from the situation with Clico.

The CAA took this mandate and established the CAA advisory council, which comprises many of the leading actuaries in the Caribbean who are all technical experts and we interface with the Insurance Association of the Caribbean, the Caribbean Association of Insurance Regulators, and the Caribbean association of Pension Supervisors on a bi-annual basis in order to discuss issues related to standards and the actuarial practice in the Caribbean,” she added.

Wade further stated that since 2009, the CAA had updated the APS-1, which is the standard of practice used by all pension actuaries in the Caribbean, and was working to pass APS-0, a general actuarial practice standard by 2015, which will apply to the quality of all actuarial reports.

She made the comments yesterday to members of the media at the 24th Annual CAA Conference at the Hilton Barbados. (JMB)

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