Virtual actuary takes off
Virtual Actuary is disrupting the industry with an innovative remuneration business model
Since its formation in 2017, Virtual Actuary has been making waves with its new business approach known as “Organised Collaborative”, which allows employees to work together and share in over 82% of the company’s earnings – unheard of within the actuarial industry.
Organised Collaborative can be utilised across many industries, and a strong focus of founder
Adi Kaimowitz is encouraging members to break away from their present position in the corporate world where employees don’t share in the major part of the business’s revenue or profit. “Our business model is the most disruptive thing to happen to the corporate world in the last 50 years. With the affordability of computers, mobile devices and cloud computing, anyone can work as part of a collaborative and be more efficient than a big corporate with lots of outdated managers who’re just sticking around slowing everybody down,” says Kaimowitz.
Having worked as an actuary recruiter for 10 years, Kaimowitz gained great insights that assisted the creation of Virtual Actuary and its new-thinking business model. First, that the majority of other consultancy’s fees go to the business itself and second, that there was a lot of misuse in the corporate world. “The answer to rectifying all of this is embracing technology as a pillar of our business and allowing remote work be the norm. As a techempowered organisation, we chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) as our cloud partner, which allows us to interact with our clients’ data in a secure way without having to buy a R5-million server. As a start-up, it means we can compete with the leading corporations who until now were the only ones able to offer such a service.”
Elaborating on the Organised Collaborative, Kaimowitz explains that everybody works full-time and nobody is on a fixed salary. When the clients pay at the end of each month, the company splits the fee amongst those who worked on a specific client – not equally, but instead weighted on who did what. The company is only privy to a small percent of what the clients pay, with the bulk going to the pros. “Each senior actuary then nurtures two or three junior actuaries that will work underneath them and allow the senior professional to pick up on more work and build up their portfolio of clients. Everyone wins. Senior actuaries can make five times more than if they were working independently. Juniors could never get work if it wasn’t for the senior experienced actuary. The actuary can leverage their time to scale themselves up. With our nurturing process, the experts become partners of their own pipeline as it advances,” says Kaimowitz.
The remuneration model has proven fruitful, allowing Virtual Actuary to enter a market as an actuarial consulting firm which has formerly been controlled by the Big Four well known consultancies. “Not only have we been recognised by the market as equals to the Big Four, but we’re also receiving large portions of work which, in the past, would never have gone to a new player in the market. We’ve recently opened an office in the US and are entering that market and competing against the biggest consultancies in the world.”