EY has appointed Gareth Mee as UK actuarial leader to head up an expanded interdisciplinary team at the firm.
The professional service company's expanded 230-strong actuarial team is now led by Mee and eight partners across four UK offices in London, Bristol, Leeds and Edinburgh and will bring together pensions, insurance, investment, climate change and sustainability expertise to help clients.
Mee - who will become UK head of actuarial and UK sustainable finance consulting leader as part of the change - said the newly expanded actuarial team will support pension schemes seeking "holistic endgame solutions", particularly in the current economic environment where pension scheme surplus volatility is a challenge for large corporates.
Mee explained the new structure: "By bringing together expertise from a range of disciplines, our new team has been built to better support clients tackle increasingly complex challenges in a rapidly evolving environment. Within the investment space, EY has extensive experience advising clients on the design and execution of strategic asset allocation, supported by the firm's actuarial teams and leadership in sustainability and ESG. Our new structure looks to more tightly leverage this inter-disciplinary insight to provide our clients with targeted solutions to their biggest problems.
"Pension funds and insurers alike are facing a radically altered investment outlook - as well as dealing with major developments in regulatory regimes - and must respond accordingly in order to meet their long-term objectives. As the ESG paradigm evolves, our experience in mapping long-term valuation creation, reputational risk analysis and assurance over portfolio carbon footprint will help investors meet new regulatory requirements and manage emerging investment risks.
"Our clients have seen significant benefits from our visualisation tools, which enable monitoring and analysis of portfolio risk, rapid calculation of investment metrics and creation of ‘what-if' analysis, modelling performance across a range of different scenarios. Being able to bring a climate dimension to this scenario analysis is increasingly critical to our clients."
Mee is a qualified actuary who also chairs the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries' finance and investment board.