Interview with Victor Carter-Bey, CEO of the CAS

Victor Carter-Bey is the newly appointed CEO of the CAS. Recently I was given the opportunity to interview him to learn more about him, his role and his vision for the CAS.

The author (left) with Carter-Bey.

Rehan Siddique (RS): What is your professional background?

Victor Carter-Bey (VC-B): My background has largely been in credentialing, development, member engagement and organization management. I spent the last nine years working with one of the premier certification-focused organizations in the world, the Project Management Institute. A lot of my work over the years has focused on how the development of workforces translates into value for industry and enterprises. One of the things we can do to help people be better at their jobs is to offer education, training and professional development. As a member association, we also need to ensure that we are keeping our members as engaged as possible by continuously building value.

RS: What does the CEO of the CAS do?

VC-B: The CEO's role is specifically focused on the execution of CAS strategy. I have a partnership with the CAS Board and the president to help develop that strategy, then I work with staff on implementing the strategy across the business.

RS: Can you compare your role to that of the CAS president?

VC-B: I have come to know Steve Armstrong, our current president, very well. He and I have developed a very close connection and bounce ideas off one another. Steve's position is focused on governance, oversight and strategy development. I take the ideas that he and his team [the CAS board] create and ensure that they are communicated effectively to the CAS staff and executed successfully.

RS: Could you talk about your goals for 2020?

VC-B: My areas of focus fall into four categories: innovation, differentiation, growth and member centricity. I'll start with member centricity because it is the undertone for all of the other areas. For anything that we do, think or create, we always start with the question, "How does this benefit our members?" Having that kind of focus in everything that we do — and I want to underscore everything — is absolutely critical to how we want to do business going forward.

Next is innovation. CAS staff need to reciprocate our members' commitment to the CAS — their time and energy — by being the best that we can be and ensuring that everything we do is what's good for the members. We want to be known as a cutting-edge organization that is leading the charge on the development and delivery of different solutions that will ultimately meet the needs of our members as well as the organizations that they work for.

The next area, differentiation, has always been very important to me. Innovation and the ability to succeed, they really go together on a lot of fronts. Differentiation leverages all the things that make the CAS and its members unique and then develops a specific mix of strategies and options that meets the needs of that audience. We are going to challenge ourselves to contemplate things differently than we have in the past. We need to set ourselves apart and serve as partners to our members as they move along their journeys.

The final piece is growth. Make no mistake about it: We want to grow, and we want to be successful. If the CAS is growing, it means our members are doing well and that we have found a way to provide sustainable value to those members and to the organizations that employ them. We don't want to increase just the number of members; we want to make sure that we are cultivating the skills our members have to deliver. I really think about growth as two-fold in terms of the things that we are doing and the growth that has taken place within our members. I can't state this enough: As our members are more successful, we are more successful.

RS: What interested you in the role for the CAS specifically?

VC-B: I love the idea of workforce development and how it can become something that can create and deliver value for industries. In regard to the CAS, I really love the potential of actuaries today and the actuary of the future, and how they offer value to businesses and industries all around the world. I'm thinking about the ways that we can help our members excel and have the CAS be a true partner to them in their careers, something that is especially exciting to me. I was thrilled to have this opportunity! The other thing that interested me is the broad relevance and applicability of the actuarial skillset. Our actuaries have skills that are used in all sorts of ways and in all sorts of disciplines. It's quite a dynamic profession in many ways, and I gravitated towards that immediately.

RS: How do you see the volunteer-based model evolving as the CAS grows in the future?

VC-B: The model is absolutely critical to what we do because volunteers are an incredibly important component of who we are and always will be. We want to go through some exercises across all areas of our business to learn how efficient we are being with our staff and volunteer resources. One of the purposes of these exercises is to understand and model how we can improve and better evolve the relationship with the volunteers. But no matter where we go, we are excited about volunteers being with us as partners.

RS: What do you think are some of the greatest opportunities for improvement in the credentialing process?

VC-B: Great question! Incorporating more best practices is something we can improve. We can look at several qualification standards from organizations that help associations like ours meet the highest standards of excellence and credentialing. The use of technology throughout the process is also a great opportunity. We are actively exploring how we can use technology to deal with the scale and complexity of the work that our actuaries do. We also want to see how leveraging partnerships and technologies can help us more quickly create and deliver content. Frankly, some of these organizations are better equipped than us to handle certain tasks, so we should investigate bringing them into our supply chain.

RS: What are some of the current and future initiatives planned to address emerging areas like predictive analytics?

VC-B: The CAS is currently undertaking a research initiative to understand the content and structure of our examinations to ensure that they are fully assessing the knowledge, skills and abilities of our members and their work. We are excited to see the results of this initiative and how they will translate into enhancements to our syllabus and exams. In short, we are looking at all the skills that actuaries use, including predictive analytics, to make certain that our exams reflect those skills, are as strong as possible and are valuable to those who sit for them.

RS: What are some of the things you do in your free time?

VC-B: I love spending time with family and friends. I also got into boating about a year ago. I'm looking forward to beautiful summers on the Chesapeake Bay. I'm a big pro football fan — I love my Baltimore Ravens, my hometown team. All those things plus the occasional pick-up game of basketball and running around with my kids keeps me pretty busy!