Shaping the future
Evolving the foundations to be future-fit
As a global organisation working in a fast-paced world, we are constantly evolving our systems and processes to support our ambition to be a leading professional body.
Governance reforms
Working in partnership with members has been at the heart of our governance reform process
One key area of focus this year has been on our governance framework, ensuring that our decision-making comes with transparency and clear lines of accountability. Creating lasting and effective structural change is a challenging process. IFoA Council has worked in partnership with members, embarking on the biggest member engagement programme in our history to listen, gather feedback, and understand a broad range of views. Together, we have agreed a framework that follows best practice on corporate governance while ensuring our organisation continues to be led by actuaries. We’ve been working hard to recruit the new IFoA Board and our new board chair, Lord Currie of Marylebone, has been appointed. The focus moves to bedding in the reforms and clarifying details around the roles and responsibilities of the new board and how that aligns with the role of Council.
John Jenkins
IFoA Fellow and Principal at Milliman LLP
As one of the objecting group, I am pleased to note that, following the webinars and engagement with the membership, the changes made addressed the concerns that I had. I now support the path that is being followed.
Future of Council
Council is seeking member views on how it takes a more visionary role in the future development of the profession
Under the new structure, the IFoA Board, composed of actuaries and independent directors, will assume responsibility for the day-to-day running of the IFoA, aligning with best contemporary governance practices. This shift allows Council, as the voice of the membership, to focus on developing a long-term vision for the profession. This year, we began the process of consulting with our members on the purpose and future role of Council. The process is being led by the Council Working Group and we are gathering feedback from across the membership, first informally through open meeting discussions and then through a formal call for views.
Peter Tompkins
Chair, IFoA Council Working Group
This is a welcome opportunity for us to work with IFoA members to set out clearly the roles and responsibilities of Council and the way we engage with them. We want to ensure that the IFoA is structured and governed for the long term so that the actuaries of tomorrow can benefit from it, as we do today.
Enhancing the digital experience
Focusing on digital upgrades to help get the most out of IFoA membership
This year, as part of our commitment to enhancing the digital experience for our members, we made an important upgrade to the members’ area of our website. We launched our new member portal which allows us to introduce additional self-service features and future upgrades that will help members to get the most out of their membership. We worked extremely hard to reduce the impact this upgrade had on our members and as a result, over two-thirds of our members registered for the new portal within the first five weeks of launch.
Our Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) was relaunched in 2022 to help members support members with their learning and continuous professional development. It has expanded this year with a strong focus on personalisation so that members can be directed to relevant content based on areas of interest. We’re now providing interactive content to support members in honing their professional skills. We’ve also put together a new research hub for our working party and member interest group outputs, and our event papers are all now housed in one place. And we’ve launched the the hot topics area that brings together IFoA content and external resources in one, easy to navigate space (with AI being the first).
Melissa Leitner
IFoA Fellow and IFoA Sustainability Board member
The VLE is an effective platform for disseminating relevant sustainability-related content that supports continuous lifelong learning for IFoA members. More specifically, it has been useful for publishing informative reading lists about the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals, curated especially for actuaries and by actuaries from the volunteering community.
Hearing from our members
Our annual member survey is an opportunity to hear how we are serving our members
Staying fit for the future means hearing directly from members on what is working well and where we can improve. This year’s all-member survey has helped us to better understand the member experience. We know there were some challenges for the IFoA in 2023 and members told us that, they felt the impact of that with the satisfaction rating dropping slightly from 65% to 63%. One area that was a significant issue was membership fees. Prior to 2023, we had frozen membership fees for three years, which represented a decline in real terms. But this year, with costs rising around us, we were unable to keep doing so.
We also gained valuable insight on what’s working well. 90% of respondents said they had used our new, online member portal and 63% of those said it made fulfilling the requirements of membership easy. And we have some pointers as to where to channel our efforts in the coming year, with 61% asking to see IFoA content around AI and 57% on data science.
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