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Previously in Part 1: John's journey from Jamaica to his ASA at Nationwide, and why he failed more Fellowship exams than he passed on the way to his FSA. Catch up here if you missed it.

Upon completing my FSA, I decided that it was time to experience a new company. I applied to Fidelity & Guaranty Life in Baltimore, MD; they liked my resume and I accepted their offer. This was a much smaller company. I would now be the Financial Reporting Manager; for all products. "All products" meant life insurance (traditional life and universal life), deferred annuities, immediate annuities and structured settlements. So now I had to learn enough about all these products to be able to give direction to a few competent ASAs. Importantly, I traded depth of knowledge for breadth of knowledge. I learned that in a smaller company with limited specialization, one only has time for the important stuff.

During my time at F&G Life, I encountered an ethical dilemma that led to me leaving the company. At the end of 1995, F&G Life was trying to be seen by its owners as a reliable and valuable company. Management had promised their owners $9 million in earnings for 1995, but it looked like we could deliver $13 million. So, the chief actuary asked me: could we somehow transfer the unneeded $4 million of earnings to the next year? My only idea was to reduce the 1995 earnings by tweaking FAS 97 assumptions, as requested, but there was no way to guarantee a reversal of the same amount next year. I could not see how to meet this objective. What happened next was that the chief actuary directed one of my reports to find $4 million of pending structured settlement cases, added them to the reserves (in advance of receiving the premium), and then of course, the $4 million of premium would be added next year without adding any more reserves. When I checked with my actuarial seniors at Nationwide, they assured me that this was not appropriate.

During 1996, when I raised the issue with my chief actuary, he didn't appreciate it and our relationship went downhill. Upon reflection, I think I should have gone to the ABCD, even though my Nationwide seniors did not suggest it. So, before you encounter an ethical violation, ask yourself "What Should I Do?"

Newsletter continues after job posts…

In February 1997, I was hired by Loyal American Life Insurance Company in Mobile, AL. Friends asked me: why would you, a black man, move to Alabama?; due to its checkered history on race. The recruiter involved and his wife were both African American. The wife had grown up in Mobile and assured me that things had changed. I took her word for it, and accepted Loyal's offer to serve as Appointed Actuary.

Loyal was even smaller than F&G Life; but it had multiple small, disparate blocks of insurance that made it very challenging to model. They had just hired experts from Milliman to re-build the cashflow testing model. Reporting was on a monthly cycle requiring a turnaround in 6 days or less. The staff at Loyal in Mobile were the nicest people I have ever worked with. Race was not an issue. I was the Appointed Actuary, and I was respected as such. I had two ASAs on my staff, and I answered to the Chief Actuary. The building had two stories; I was the only black person upstairs, and there were a few downstairs.

At Loyal, the General Counsel was one attorney, who contracted with outside attorneys as needed. He only had time for the most important issues, and I learned from him, as well as my own situation, that it was important to prioritize one's work.

The administrative system was an IBM DB2 relational database and could be read by MS Access, bringing policy data within relatively easy reach.

In October 1997, the owners of Loyal moved the company to Cincinnati, Ohio, to be near its sister company, Great American Life. So, I moved, with Bernice and now two daughters, to Cincinnati. Only about 12 members of Loyal's staff moved with the company, so we lost a lot of institutional knowledge. At year-end 1997, I signed my first (and only) actuarial memorandum as an appointed actuary, thanks to considerable assistance from the Chief Actuary of Great American Life, Mike O'Connor, and his team.

Somewhere in mid-1998, the value of the Loyal brand went to ZERO. No one would sell their products. This was a unique experience. In addition, I had difficulty attracting competent staff to replace my ASAs. I got a call from an actuarial department head at Nationwide: would I like to come back? Given that Loyal was likely on its last legs, the offer could not have been timelier.

My new role was financial reporting manager for private sector Group Annuity plans. (A separate actuarial unit covered public sector plans.) Group Annuity had no complicated reserve calculations. My focus was on designing a set of spreadsheets that would be used for our financial reporting. The administrative system for Group Annuity, Keynote, was an Oracle relational database, built by Nationwide staff. Based on my learning from Loyal, we used MS Access to read it, and this created important new opportunities for the techies on my staff. We constructed a series of queries that provided input into the quarterly financial reporting process. I created a rotation program for my staff so that each of them got to learn something new and not do the same thing ad nauseam.

I re-joined my soccer team; but the season was almost over and I had not played at all since leaving 3 years earlier. I was quite rusty. I didn't think I could contribute as much as I had before; so I effectively retired from the sport.

Diversity was first introduced to Nationwide in 1993. Our chief actuary, Harvey Galloway, was an early adopter. He mandated a training course for all Fellows; all white and mostly males. I was invited to attend, although I had not yet completed my Fellowship. The instructor was African American, and he challenged my white colleagues' "white privilege" (the term was not yet in common use). My colleagues felt affronted, no doubt because the exams ensure a certain level of equality; but being fair-minded, as I have found actuaries to be, they nevertheless embraced the concept of Diversity.

In 1999, soon after my return, I was asked to chair the Nationwide Actuarial Diversity Committee. The goal was simple: to increase awareness of the various forms of Diversity and promote understanding of and respect for the many ways in which Diversity manifests itself in the workplace. I launched a series of Diversity Round Tables and invited persons, from within and outside the company, with different forms of Diversity to share their experiences and insights. The series was quite successful, for those who attended. At one event, we played the movie "Crash"; one of my colleagues brought a box of tissue paper; and used every sheet.

From the outside, it appeared that everything was going well in all aspects of my life; but not so. In 2002, I decided to end my marriage. It was a hard decision, but from my perspective, our differences were irreconcilable. My first daughter had turned 18 and left home, and the younger one decided to live with Bernice. I had a few years of financial obligation to the two of them. I very carefully divided the assets equally between her and me, as the law requires; in a spreadsheet of course. I moved out of the marital home.

Near the end of June 2002, I contacted an old friend who was living in Winona, Minnesota. We discovered some "burning coals" and started a long-distance relationship. We met several times in Chicago, half-way between our homes. In summer of 2003, she and her son moved to Columbus, and we set about building a loving partnership. This partnership and love have been a great success. My divorce came through in November 2004, and Vicki and I were married by a marriage officer on December 31, 2004 (think tax savings). We then had a family-reunion-style wedding on April 2, 2005 in Rochester, MN. We celebrate anniversaries on both dates.

I invite you to look for a YouTube video; search for "John Robinson SOA" and you will find my presidential accession speech in October, 2022. My new wife's name are the first two words of that speech.

By the beginning of 2008, I had worked at one larger company (twice) and two small ones. The large company gave me a rather small portfolio, of which I became a deep expert. The small companies required breadth rather than depth, and so I learned to prioritize. The small-company learning actually helped me when I returned to Nationwide, because there were calculations being made that were taking significant amounts of time but were not really worth the effort, per my small-company mentality. So, I would eliminate what seemed unnecessary. This approach helped us to reduce the time taken to complete our quarter-end assignments, and this was appreciated by my boss and the Finance folks.

An example of this was statutory valuation interest rates. The rate for an issue year was typically set mid-year. To estimate a valuation interest rate for the first few months of the year, they had this rather complicated calculation. I tossed it out and decided to use the prior year's rate until this year's rate was available. My boss was fine with the change, but to at least one member of my team, this was seen as sacrilege.

In 2006, I was assigned to support a distribution channel. The work was neither challenging nor interesting and my morale, and therefore my performance, suffered. By mid-2008, I had learned all I could from my job, and I needed a change. I sought another job opportunity within Nationwide, but there was none; so, I updated my resume and began a search.

In August, 2008, I left Nationwide for the last time and started at what would be my last life insurance company, Hartford Life. We bought a wonderful wooden-floored white house in Bloomfield, CT with a big yard. We skinny-dipped in the hot tub in winter. We had a bobcat pass through the yard one afternoon. Over time, we hiked all the trails in Connecticut. We visited Richmond, VA on Amtrak. But; I digress.

My role would be to lead pricing and financial reporting for group life insurance. This was a new line of business for me. I faced three learning curves: the nature of the product, the culture of this business, and the culture of Hartford Life; all with minimum support from above me, as it turned out. The result was that my performance fell below acceptable standards. Now, Hartford Life had spent over $30K to relocate me from Ohio. If I resigned within a year, they could ask that it be returned. I had no intention of having that happen. I raised no objection to them firing me instead, in February 2009.

Fired at 55, in a new city, in a new line of business; what would you do next? In Part 3 next week, John reinvents himself in a field he'd never worked in, and shares the networking philosophy that made it possible.

Part 3 of 5 continues next week.

John Robinson served as President of the Society of Actuaries in 2023, the SOA's first Black president, but his path there was anything but conventional: from teaching high school math in Jamaica, to failing more Fellowship exams than he passed, to reinventing himself in an entirely new practice area after being fired at 55.