Longevity 19 Plenary & Panel Speakers

Douglas Anderson is the founder of Club Vita (www.clubvita.net) which specialises in applying modern data science techniques to innovate in longevity and mortality risk management.  Club Vita is currently embarking on an exciting new chapter, collecting longevity data in the United States, its third country.  The smarter collection and structuring of data enables more cost-effective ways both to reduce the risks of financing in later life and to help our societies face up to the challenges of ageing populations. He passionately believes that an international longevity “currency” would increase the security of pension promises.

Douglas has thirty years’ experience in practicing as a consulting actuary, across a diverse spectrum of engagements.  He is a fellow of the UK’s Institute of Actuaries, and a Chartered Enterprise Risk Actuary.  Douglas lives in Edinburgh, with his wife and two teenage children.  To stay fit, Douglas enjoys cycling and skiing, and has recently taken up running to suit his nomadic lifestyle.

Professor David Blake is Director of the Pensions Institute at, City University of London, and chairman of Square Mile Consultants, a training and research consultancy. He is also: co-designer of the PensionMetrics life-cycle financial planning software; co-author of the A2Risk attitude to risk  questionnaire; co-inventor of the Cairns-Blake-Dowd stochastic mortality model; and co-founder with JPMorgan of the LifeMetrics Indices. In 2014, he was appointed Chair of the Independent Review of Retirement Income. Its report We Need a National Narrative: Building a Consensus around Retirement Income was published in March 2016 (pensions-institute.org/IRRIReport.pdf). He won the 2016 Robert I. Mehr Award for ‘A Two-Factor Model for Stochastic Mortality with Parameter Uncertainty: Theory and Calibration’ (with Andrew J. G. Cairns and Kevin Dowd) published in the December 2006 issue of the Journal of Risk and Insurance, the journal of the American Risk and Insurance Association. This Award is presented each year for the paper published in the JRI ten years before that has best stood the test of time.  He has a PhD from LSE.

Alexandre Boumezoued is Principal, Research & Development Director in Milliman’s Paris office. He is Professional Fellow of Louis Bachelier Institute and holds a PhD in applied mathematics.

With around ten years of experience in the insurance industry, Alexandre has led the development of scientific solutions and consulting services over a range of different risk modelling areas, including Economic Scenario Generators, mortality, policyholder behavior, and Economic Capital Models. His current research interests cover : climate risks and their impacts on mortality, cyber risk, economic forecasting, computational efficiency, and applications of Artificial Intelligence in insurance. As part of his scientific activity, Alexandre is lecturer in actuarial centers in France, and referee for actuarial journals.

Eilidh Brown is an associate in Willkie’s Corporate and Financial Services Department in London. She advises insurance and reinsurance clients on a range of non-contentious matters, with a particular focus on risk transfer transactions in the life (re)insurance sector, having advised European and US-based clients on a number of high profile longevity-only and asset intensive reinsurance transactions. Her practice also includes advising on a wide range of corporate transactions, including Part VII transfers, group restructurings and acquisitions.

Andrew Cairns is Professor of Actuarial Mathematics at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh and at the Maxwell Institute for Mathematical Sciences.

He is well known both in the UK and internationally for his research in financial risk management for pension plans, life insurers and, more recently, renewable energy projects. In recent years, his research has focused on the modelling of longevity risk: how this can be modelled, measured and priced, and how it can be transferred to the financial markets. Amongst his work in this field, he has developed a number of new and innovative stochastic mortality models, most notably the CBD family. He has also worked extensively on inequalities in all-cause and cause of death mortality, and the evolving impact of Covid-19 on current and future mortality.

His research has received several international prizes including the Halmstad Prize in 2008, the Society of Actuaries Annual Prize in 2009 and the Robert I. Mehr Award in 2016.

Much of his research is focused on delivering rigorous solutions to problems of practical importance. This has resulted in three highly-rated impact case studies for the UK's Research Excellence Framework (REF) and the award of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society's inaugural Impact Prize in 2022.

He is an active member of the UK and international actuarial profession: he qualified as a Fellow of the Faculty of Actuaries in 1993; he has held senior editorial roles at ASTIN Bulletin - The Journal of the International Actuarial Association (1997 to 2017) and Insurance: Mathematics and Economics (since 2023); and in 2005 he was elected as a corresponding member of the Swiss Association of Actuaries. From 2016-2020 he was Director of the Actuarial Research Centre of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries.

In 2016 he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland's national academy of science and letters.

Patrick Cheung is a Senior Vice President and Head of Longevity Product at RGA.  He is based in London.  He leads a broad range of initiatives around longevity products, risks, assumptions, data and modelling.

Patrick has been with the company since 2012.   Prior to RGA, Patrick worked in the pension consultancy industry and for insurance companies in the annuity area.

Patrick holds a Bachelor of Commerce and a Bachelor of Applied Finance and a MSc in Financial Engineering.  He is a Fellow of the Institute & Faculty of Actuaries.

Guy Coughlan has over three decades of experience in pensions, investments and risk management. He is currently Chief Operating Officer at Clota Varde, a corporate finance boutique focused on impact investment. He is also a member of the Advisory Board at Longitude Solutions and a non-executive director of J.P. Morgan Pension Trustees.

Guy’s career spans investment and risk advisory, pension advisory and pension management. He spent 17 years at J.P. Morgan where he was a Managing Director holding different global, US and European roles, finishing as co-head of European Pension Advisory.

Guy was then Chief Risk and Analytics Officer at Pacific Global Advisors, a US pension investment advisor and fiduciary manager.  Most recently he spent nearly eight years at the University Superannuation Scheme (USS), a UK pension plan with £90bn of assets as at 31 March 2022. At USS he held the positions of Chief Risk Officer, Valuation Programme Executive and Senior Strategic Advisor, serving on the executive committees of both USS and its investment management subsidiary.

Guy has a D.Phil (i.e., PhD) from Oxford University, an MBA from Henley Business School (UK) and a BSc (Hons) from the University of Western Australia.

Cara Dowell is an Associate Data Science Actuary in RGA’s Global Financial Solutions (GFS) division. Cara is responsible for building and maintaining GFS’s predictive models for longevity. Cara has previous experience at RGA reviewing client experience studies, conducting third party data research, and contributing to mortality improvement research. Prior to joining RGA in 2018, Cara had three years of actuarial experience with John Hancock. Cara is a Fellow of the Society of Actuaries and received a bachelor’s degree in statistics from Harvard University.

Marine Habart is the Life & Health Chief Actuary at AXA Group. She is an actuary and holds a PhD (on the pandemic modelling).

With 20 years of experience in the insurance industry, and 2 international companies (BNP Paribas and AXA), Marine has evolved from the modeling area (by contributing to build from scratch Solvency 2 models), to the Risk function and then to the Actuarial/Finance area.

Her current topic of interest is IFRS17, and how to manage the actuarial assumptions / modeling.

Marine is also the co-director of EURIA, one of the French actuarial school.

Wichert Hoekert is a pensions consultant at WTW. He is a member of their Retirement Leadership Team in the Netherlands with responsibility for knowledge and innovation. He is a full member of the Dutch Actuarial Society and holds Master’s degrees in econometrics, actuarial sciences and Dutch language and literature. Prior to joining WTW in 2005, he worked as an options trader and as a literary agent. He is an expert on the new Dutch pension legislation and advises corporates, pension funds and insurers.

Andrew Hunt heads up the team within Pacific Life Re that specialises in projecting trends in mortality rates internationally. In this role, he has over eight years of experience in developing both best estimate and stressed mortality trend and mortality shock assumptions, for valuing both best estimate and capital across both mortality protection and longevity lines of business and for countries as diverse as Vietnam and the USA. Prior to this, he obtained a PhD in Mortality Modelling and Longevity Risk Management from Bayes Business School, which focused on the development of new mortality models and their application in measuring longevity risks in portfolios of annuities. He is also a member of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries

Paul  Kitson is an Actuary and UK Leader of EY’s Pensions Consulting team who advise pension funds, their corporate sponsors and several providers in the pension fund eco-system. Paul has led several ground-breaking longevity hedging transactions in the UK, including British Airways Pension Fund’s longevity swap with a panel of global reinsurers.

Paul has developed several techniques to use technology to better understand longevity risk for UK pension funds, and has acted as a longevity expert in relation to insurance company transactions.  Most recently Paul has been helping pension fund clients think about how best to manage longevity risk as they consider whether to run-on or move to insurance.

Sune Lehmann’s work focuses on quantitative understanding of social systems based on massive data sets. A physicist by training, his research draws on approaches from the physics of complex systems, machine learning, and statistical analysis. He works on large-scale behavioral data and while his primary focus is on modeling complex networks, Sune’s research has made substantial contributions on topics such as human mobility, sleep, academic performance, complex contagion, epidemic spreading, and behavior on twitter. Sune has served as a member of the task force established by the Danish government to model the COVID spread in Denmark, and he am currently part of the expert group advising the Danish government on the Tech Giants.

Rohit Mathur leads Prudential’s International Reinsurance business, where he is responsible for the longevity risk transfer (LRT) and funded reinsurance businesses in the UK and Europe. Prudential's reinsurance activities have led the firm to being named “Reinsurer of the Year” for four consecutive years. The team has closed over $95 billion in longevity reinsurance transactions since 2011, covering members of nearly 200 pensionRohit Mathur funds in the United Kingdom including British Airways, HSBC, Marks and Spencer, and Rolls-Royce.

Prior to this role, Rohit was head of Global Product and Market Solutions, where he was charged with assessing the corporate finance implications of pension risk management to cultivate a consistent recognition of pension de-risking solutions. Partnering with Prudential's distribution team in the service of its clients, Rohit focused on promoting an understanding of pension risk issues among credit and equity analysts, treasurers, chief financial officers and investment bankers. Rohit has been involved in structuring and executing several large and innovative transactions in the United States, including the agreements with Kimberly-Clark Corporation, Philips and J.C. Penney to transfer pension liabilities.

Before joining Prudential, Rohit was an executive director and led the Capital Structure and Strategy advisory team for UBS Investment Bank. There, he advised clients in multiple industries, focusing specifically on corporate finance, risk advisory and pension issues. Prior to that, Rohit was with Moody's Investors Service, where he published research on accounting and pension issues and worked with credit analysts to incorporate those risks more systematically into company ratings. He also co-authored Moody's methodologies on assessing risk of multi-employer pensions and other post-retirement healthcare obligations.

Prudential Financial Inc. (PFI) and its affiliated companies are not affiliated in any manner with Prudential plc (United Kingdom) or with Prudential Assurance Company, a subsidiary of M&G plc, incorporated in the United Kingdom.

Marc Meertens is currently heading the Balance Sheet Management & Reinsurance team and NN Life & Pensions in the Netherlands, responsible for amongst others ALM, Strategic Asset Allocation, Capital Management and Reinsurance. Prior joining NN Life & Pensions in 2022, Marc had a similar role at Athora and prior to that worked within the actuarial field on pricing and valuation/reporting (both Life and Non-Life). During his career, Marc has executed a number of indemnity-based longevity reinsurance transactions.

Marc has a PhD in Mathematics/Game Theory from the Radboud University of Nijmegen and is a part-time teacher at the Actuarial Institute in the Netherlands.

Avery Michaelson is the Founding Partner of Longitude Solutions, a transaction-oriented consultancy with expertise in longevity and mortality risk management. His company functioned as the exclusive adviser to NN Group on a Dutch index-based longevity transaction that protected EUR ~3bn of liabilities in 2017, a transaction which was nominated for “Life Transaction of the Year” in 2018 by Trading Risk Awards. He has extensive experience in the life risk and insurance-linked securities markets having previously held positions at Société Générale and Deutsche Bank, with posts at Coventry and Peachtree in the Life Settlement market. Mr. Michaelson graduated Magna Cum Laude from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and is a frequent speaker at financial and longevity conferences.

Andrea Stähr is Head of Hannover Re’s International Longevity Business, responsible for both annuity transfers and individual retirement solutions with worldwide scope. During the last years, Hannover Re has actively worked on transferring longevity risks from pension schemes and insurance companies onto its books. Andrea and her team have written longevity deals in countries around the world, such as in North America, continental Europe and the Australasia. Different structures e.g. longevity swaps, index coverages and reserve release swaps are the basis for these transactions.

Andrea holds a degree in Financial Mathematics and Mathematical Economics, and joined the Hannover Re Group in 2009. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries and a CERA.

Tinhinane Talbi is an actuary, affiliated with the French Institute of Actuaries. She currently serves as a consultant in the Research and Development team at Milliman in France. In her role, she applies advanced mathematical and statistical techniques to tackle insurance-related modelling topics, including mortality/longevity, insured behavior, and claims development.