The 2022 annual meeting of the South Asian Network of Actuaries was held online on December 6th, 2022, from 8 pm eastern onwards. It was very well attended and was a resounding success. We were pleasantly surprised when we had a total of 64 participants, many of whom were joining a SANA meeting for the first time.
The meeting started with a Slido exercise where the attendees were encouraged to tell us why they were attending the meeting. Not surprisingly, networking was the biggest factor! Our incoming Vice President, Rehan Siddique, kicked off the meeting by laying down the agenda for the meeting, and introducing SANA's core principles and raison d'etre.
The outgoing President, and Treasurer for 2023, Ritu Jain, then walked the audience through SANA's accomplishments for 2022, which included filing for 501(c)(3) status, and building solid relationships with other diversity organizations affiliated with the actuarial profession. Ritu also took us through all the work the various work streams have done during 2022 to move SANA's agenda forward. Ritu then ended her part of the presentation with heartfelt gratitude on behalf of the board and workstream chairs, to all the volunteers, who spent countless hours on SANA work.
Our incoming President, Arun Paul then took over to announce the board for 2023, and open positions on various work streams. Arun also laid down ambitious goals for 2023, which the board is very excited about!
The next section of the meeting was a panel discussion. But before that began, we had the honor of watching a recorded video of the SOA President, John Robinson, wishing SANA the very best in 2023, and professing full support for us! The panel discussion was lively and interactive. The panel consisted of Kumar Kanisan, FSA, MAAA, who is a Managing Director at Deloitte, and Arshil Jamal, FSA, FCIA, MAAA, who is President and Group Head at Canada Life.
Kumar and Arshil provided insight into various aspects of the actuarial profession, such as the role of the actuary in an increasingly AI driven world, challenges faced by immigrant aspiring actuaries in finding employment in North America, and whether they see practical applications of DE&I in their work, amongst other topics. The audience had many questions for the panelists, which we couldn't get through in the limited time we had. All in all, it was exciting to see that level of engagement from the audience, and to gather some insights from the panelists' experiences.
We ended the meeting by splitting into smaller breakout rooms for networking, where SANA workstream leads and board members were available in smaller groups discussions to answer questions.
We hope to see participation in our annual meetings continue to grow as our organization grows by leaps and bounds.
The link to the recording of the Annual Meeting 2022, is here.