I did my Bachelor of Science Econometrics & Operations Research, as well as a Master of Science Quantitative Finance and Actuarial Science with Netspar track, at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. Afterwards, I completed an Executive Master of Actuarial Science at TIAS school for Business and Society. Since 2017, I have officially become a Fully Qualified Actuary of the Royal Dutch Actuarial Association with international recognition. During my studies, I gained a thorough understanding of the interplay between financial markets and insurance markets. I also learned a wide array of sophisticated mathematical and statistical models, with applications in risk management, empirical finance, insurance, pension and aging, and capital investment. 
 

Over the past seven years, I have worked in the finance and insurance industry mostly in the roles of Consulting Actuary and Quant for several renowned international financial companies. I have observed that capital markets solutions play a crucial role in the insurance companies and pension funds.  I have also noticed that there is a cross-fertilization of concepts and techniques between the finance and the insurance industry, as Dr. Paul Wilmott said in August 2008 for The Actuary magazine : “Before 1973 derivatives were being valued using the ‘actuarial method’.” As an Actuary, I would like to bring more actuarial sense to the field of quantitative finance and explore the ways that financial mathematics can add value in the modern risk management framework through the laboratory of quantitative models.

Since that was my goal from even the early years of my studies, I have been looking for ways to enhance my quant skills and put them into practice. In January 2018, I decided to enrol in the Certificate of Quantitative Finance program shortly after I became a Fully Qualified Actuary. During the CQF course, I found many of the lectures were extremely useful to my work and understanding, including the lectures on the Black-Scholes model by putting different kinds of mathematics into practice, derivatives pricing, advanced Greeks, stochastic calculus, portfolio management, machine learning, reinforcement learning, CVA, XVA, algorithm trading, advanced risk management, and more. In addition, the CQF program also helped me develop my programming skills in C++, Python, and Matlab and I figured out how to apply these programming skills to solve practical problems. My final project was about designing an algorithmic trading strategy in Python, where I used the different quantitative techniques that we had covered in the modules. All the topics that I encountered in the CQF have proven to be very useful in combination with my actuarial practice to the present day. 
 

Currently, I am starting my own company, basically doing consultancy between Asia and Europe, as the worldwide business landscape is growing. In my spare time, I still enhance my financial engineering skills by watching the CQF lifelong learning lectures, CQF Institute events, Alumni extras and the latest CQF curriculum, which help me to advance towards my career goals. 

All in all, as a Fully Qualified Actuary, the CQF is one of the golden keys to open more doors and help me succeed in my field now and in the future. Even though the combination of work and study is very intense while you are in the program, it is definitely worthwhile, and it is flexible enough for those who are also working full-time. After six months of hard work, I was truly delighted to complete the CQF in July 2018 and I recommend it highly.