Adam, based in the firm’s Los Angeles office, specializes in property/casualty actuarial services, helping clients quantify and understand their insurance exposures.

“For our clients, I wear the hats of statistician, translator, and sometimes fortune teller simultaneously,” he says. “I like to think of my role as bridging the gap between risk/insurance, safety, and finance within an organization.”

He was drawn to the profession out of a deep, lifelong passion for mathematics. “I knew I wanted to do something that applied math to business,” Adam says. “I was drawn to actuarial consulting as an exciting blend of quantitative problem solving, where all work required supporting documentation and logic, with the translation element of explaining deep technical results to various stakeholders in a business, each with a unique perspective.”

He foresees clients facing a range of challenges as a hardening insurance market for property-and-casualty coverage forces the price of insurance upward and puts firms face-to-face with complex risk transfer/retention decisions. “Companies familiar with a fixed insurance premium may need to evaluate expected losses under a loss-sensitive/deductible-type policy or other new insurance structures, and may need guidance to understand the balance sheet and cash flow impact of each option,” says Adam. “These problems are the perfect opportunity for actuarial analysis to help quantify and understand these risks and the associated costs of keeping or transferring them.”

These challenges present new opportunities for people just entering field, and makes property-and-casualty actuarial consulting an exciting and evolving field. And while he acknowledges that the actuarial exams can be intimidating, he sees them in a positive light. “I’d encourage people entering the field now to start the exams right away and keep an open mind for the evolution of analytics and programming language, but also the traditional actuarial math and techniques,” Adam says.