Monday, July 5, 2010

10,000 actuaries!

By Mely Lerman, July 5, 2010
According to Mike Fitzgerald in the Celent Blog there are 10,000 actuarial students in India right now.
I remember a time when the whole World thought they were smarter than India. It was not long ago I met the first Tata TCS guy and it took me seconds to understand the paradigm changed.
It is not only their potential, the quantity and the low cost: In a time Europe (and, for that matter, also my home country Israel) are sleeping and not really preparing themselves to Solvency II, somebody in India is thinking.
10,000 actuaries!
Such outburst cannot come out of nowhere. Somebody in India really thought, calculated, planned, prepared, published and brought ten thousand students to specialize in actuarial studies.
The result will be, of course, massive outsourcing of the actuarial work to India. The actuarial work will extent to software and probably risk management tasks.
In Mike Fitzgerald words: “There are barriers to this transition. Tradition and inertia will slow adoption. It may take seven to ten years, but the cost advantages and a need to redirect company talent will eventually result in a shift the norm to a multi-source, onshore / offshore actuarial model.”

3 comments:

  1. India has come a very long way in the last 20 years. Mind you, perhaps it has something to do with all that yummy food :-) Sigh....I really miss having access to the cuisine and really miss the vibrancy of India.

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  2. Yes, it must be something in the food. I am ashamed to say I have never been in India. On the other side I am not completely guilty: Nobody inveted me to work there. Not yet...

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