The greatest challenges facing South African Actuarial Teams
09 December 2025
1.5 min read
At the 2025 ASSA Convention, we polled over 300 actuaries on what they believed was the greatest challenge currently facing their team.
While there was a lot of variation in responses, several themes emerged.
Based on a word cloud analysis of the raw data, we can see that data, capacity/resourcing, AI and automation are on a lot of actuaries’ minds.
The greatest challenges facing actuarial teams
We then grouped the responses into a number of categories to enable us to summarise the data and show more high-level themes at a glance. This analysis reflects more or less what we see in the word cloud, with resource constraints and workload being cited by nearly 70 of the 300 participants as their greatest challenge. This category was followed by data challenges, modernisation and automation, systems, growth and retention, AI, processes and controls, and market/industry conditions – all of which were cited by more than 10 respondents.
The greatest challenges facing actuarial teams (grouped)
The responses to this poll correspond to what we found in our industry-wide survey conducted earlier this year in which we asked South African life insurers about their progress on IFRS 17 and their focus areas in a post-implementation world.
Download the report (as well as those of previous surveys) here.
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- By Pamela Hellig