Meet the actuaries

Sylvain Fortier

ASA, CERA
Assistant Vice President
Laurentian Bank

Pursuing a bachelor's degree in actuarial mathematics was only the first step of Sylvain Fortier's career path. While enrolled in his undergraduate program, his interest was piqued in the ways finance and risk management could be combined. This led him to pursue his Masters in Business Administration (MBA) in order to deepen his understanding of risk management, and then his Chartered Enterprise Risk Analyst (CERA) credential. The educational process has paid off, enabling Sylvain to merge his business and actuarial skills to build a successful career.

Today, Sylvain is a valued advisor and leader in his field. Since 2006, he has held the position of assistant vice president of strategies and scoring systems within the credit risk management department at Laurentian Bank of Canada. In this role, Sylvain supervises a diversified group of people composed of statisticians and information technology and actuarial analysts. His team is responsible for all credit decision systems, models, loss forecasting, stress testing, risk strategies, credit reporting and fraud analytics.

Throughout his professional career, Sylvain has found the growth of responsibilities alongside his expanding math and risk skill set to be most exciting. While he enjoys using his mathematical knowledge and actuarial experience to solve management needs, he acknowledges that communicating his work to clients who are not accustomed to actuarial terms can sometimes be challenging, reinforcing the importance of strong communication skills.

Sylvain received his Bachelors degree in sciences/actuarial mathematics, with a minor in commerce from Concordia University, and his MBA with a specialty in finance and insurance from Laval University. Statistics and regressions courses were among his favorite subjects while he was studying to be an actuary, saying, "I found the material of the course to be simple to learn, yet applicable in concrete ways."

Sylvain hopes aspiring actuaries will view themselves as 21st century thought leaders and look into non-traditional fields such as credit risk or Enterprise Risk Management (ERM). Speaking from his own experience, Sylvain explains, "These fields offer great career opportunities."

He also has hopes the actuarial profession will continue to gain more visibility in non-traditional fields like broader financial services, and encourages young actuaries to, "continue developing risk management skills and collective knowledge." Certainly Sylvain has shown how financial, business and risk management skills can be combined to create exciting career opportunities.