After considering, then discarding, the idea of hiring as many actuaries as the company could afford, Kapur considered hiring actuarial students, a potential recruitment pool of around 6,000. When that also seemed unfeasible, Patni applied to actuarial work what BPO firms have already done to other fields—break it down into a process.
Patni brought in a couple of senior actuaries as consultants to divide the work flow into simple, mid-level and complex tasks. They estimated that 50-60% of the work fell into the easiest category, with responsibilities such as cleaning up data and crunching numbers. To staff that section, Patni scoured the country for the colleges with the best mathematics and statistics departments, and headed out to places such as Cotton College in Guwahati, Bishop Heber College in Trichy, and St Aloscious College in Mangalore to recruit.
For mid-level tasks such as actually analyzing the data, they took actuarial students who had completed between four and eight of the necessary papers. For the top-end work of preparing the final evaluation and report, which would be less than 5% of the total process, they hired two certified actuaries.
To convince his first client that it could even be done, Kapur ran a six-month pilot where the client continued to do its work, and Patni set up a parallel run, charged at cost. Once the trial was successful, Patni scaled the process up to 125 people, who are now spread over three clients.
Patni runs a two-month training programme for its new hires, but relies on a split staff to manage the work. In company lingo, there are the “doers” and the “checkers”. While the mid-to-senior level employees create and test out financial models, they also double-check the work of their junior counterparts.
The pay scale within the actuarial process is a sliding one and depends on how many papers an employee has cleared. The salary starts at Rs3 lakh at the entry level, moves to between Rs5.5 lakh and Rs7 lakh with five papers cleared, and doubles again with experience.
The field is still a relatively small one, and for those further along in their course work, even finding it was often a fluke. Siddhartha Kalita, a manager in Patni’s actuarial process who has finished 11 out of 14 papers, only came across the possibility when he was finishing a degree in statistics at the University of Delhi, and interviewed with an insurance company. He didn’t get the gig, which would have included a stint in the UK to study actuarial science, but it piqued his interest. After finishing nine papers in the UK, he put in a few years at an Indian insurance company and with an Indian insurance consulting firm before joining Patni via a newspaper ad.
Kriti Kalra, a more recent recruit to the actuarial profession, had a more clear-cut route to Patni. She was finishing a degree in mathematics at Miranda House in Delhi University, and heard about the company’s actuarial department from senior classmates in the postgraduate programme. Her resume made it to Patni through a consultant, and she got the job.