An interview with Daan Kleinloog | AG&AI

Nice to meet you, Daan Kleinloog. First of all, could you tell us about your educational background before becoming chairman of Royal Dutch Actuarial Association (AG) & Actuarial Institute (AI)?

“My name is Daan Kleinloog, I am 34 years old and I work as an actuary and partner at Sprenkels. After high school, I went to study Applied Mathematics at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA). The main reason for choosing this was because I have always been good at arithmetic and mathematics and I enjoyed it. This became evident when I noticed that studying came fairly easy to me and I graduated in three years. At the age of twenty, I had al finished studying and decided to work at Watson Wyatt, which is now WTW, where I had previously worked as a working student at the age of 19. In addition to gaining experience, I was given the opportunity to continue my studies and chose to persue the Executive Master of Actuarial Science (EMAS) at the Actuarial Institute (AI) to ultimately become an AG actuary.”

 

Was becoming an actuary your first choice or did you have other interesting career plans?

“During my studies, HvA regularly organized open career days. During one of these days, a consultant from Watson Wyatt gave a presentation about what the profession of actuary entailed and what the career prospects were. The enthusiastic presentation got me interested. After a second interview, I was given the opportunity to work at WTW as a working student. This was an ideal mix for me: my first steps as a consultant, gaining new knowledge during my studies and being able to immediately put this into practice.”

“As a young student I really had no idea what I wanted to be later in my professional life. I thought I would just study something I was good at. I really did not have a bigger plan at the time.”

 

Nowadays our study Econometrics is called Econometrics and Data Science. Is Data Science also a new field for the actuarial profession or has it always been a part?

“In my opinion, Data Science, or working with data, is something that actuaries have always done and still do: taking samples from the past and using them to make forecasts for the future. Data Science is of course more than just working and processing data. The programming that is involved is especially new for part of the actuarial profession. But at the same time I see that young actuarial professionals already have experience with Python and/or other programming languages.”

 

Would you like to tell us more about what you did within the AG before becoming chairman?

“When I completed the EMAS programme in 2014, I became a member of AG and was allowed to use the title Actuary AG (AAG). You can only use this (protected) title if you meet all the conditions (education and work experience) and become a member of the AG.

I soon wanted to make an active contribution to the association and became chairman of a working group that, on behalf of the AG Pensions Committee, conducted research into the possibilities of a flexible state pension. This theme was in the news a lot at the time and it was also election time. A number of political parties believed that the AOW should be made more flexible, so that people could decide for themselves whether they could take their AOW earlier or later. As a working group, we took up the theme and wrote up advice that we presented to the Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment. Our advice was that it was better not to introduce this flexibility. The main argument was that people with a modest pension had no choice to receive their state pension earlier, because otherwise they would fall below the subsistence minimum. If people have built up sufficient pension, they can choose to retire flexibly in the second pillar and then take it out early. In that case, it is not necessary to make the first pillar flexible, which was actually the core of our advice. Possibly partly due to our advice, the flexible AOW was not included in the coalition agreement, so in my opinion we thus made a valuable contribution.

In the summer of 2020, I was approached by AG if I wanted to become a board member. Ron van Oijen was chairman at the time and I was given the portfolios of Pensions, Mortality Research and Public Affairs & PR. After two years, when Ron's chairmanship term expired, I was asked if I might be interested in becoming chairman. Of course I fett honoured and it seemed enjoyable and educational to manage the association, so I immediately said yes.

 

How do you see the role of AG?

“As a professional association, AG mainly functions as a platform and connecting factor between the various actuarial disciplines, members and stakeholders, such as the Dutch Association of Insurers and supervisors such as AFM and De Nederlandsche Bank.

Various professional committees, working groups and circles are active within our association, all of which play an important role when it comes to the visibility and social importance of the profession and the professional association. In this way, the committees implement AG's policy and identify social and political developments that affect the actuarial field. If there is reason to respond to a specific theme as a professional group, committees will address this by responding with a report or a note. Working groups often play an important role in this.

Our circles also play an important role within the association by organizing meetings (presentations, round table meetings or company visits) with which they contribute to keeping knowledge up to date on the one hand and to facilitate networking within the association on the other. In other words, by being part of one of our committees, working groups or circles, you learn a lot and get the opportunity to further develop yourself. In my opinion, this is one of the most important benefits of membership.”

 

What challenges and opportunities do you see for the profession in the future, and what role will AG play in this? How do you see the future of the profession and how do you think new innovations will be applied within the profession?

“We are of course continuously training actuarial professionals, and the various courses are also continuously updated. The professional goals for AG actuaries are constantly being adjusted and now also include topics and skills such as Data Science. We need to ensure that people are constantly keeping up with the latest technologies. Our Actuarial Data Science Committee, which organized a hackathon last year, is a new initiative because we want to increasingly involve Data Science in our association. We are going to organize another hackathon, where we will focus on one specific topic and different groups will perform analyses on collected data.

It is actually quite special that we as actuaries are united, while many professional groups are not, such as data scientists. Yet we have a lot in common in what we do. However an actuary, as I said before, is also a data scientist, but not every data scientist is an actuary. As an association, we are considering how we can involve closely related professional groups, and therefore, a Data Science Circle is being established with which we aim to bridge that gap.”

 

Finally, I am curious how you plan to draw even more attention to the actuarial profession and its career opportunities?

“We like to use our members as ambassadors during career days to talk enthusiastically about what their profession and work entails, with the aim of increasing awareness of the field. I am convinced that it is essential to engage students in the profession as early as possible. Once they become familiar with the subject matter, they get used to it and are more inclined to go in that direction.”

 

Would you like to know more about AG, the field or how you can become an actuary? Then go to www.actuarieelgenootschap.nl for more information. You can of course always contact one of the agency's employees.