Xu Xuan and the art of getting people in the room

In December 2024, Xu “Vincent” Xuan described a team gathering with a combination of activities that deserves a place on an insurance executive’s calendar: reviewing the year, discussing the next one, a holiday party and NASCAR racing. The racing came, he added, “with a risk mindset though.” Even recreation had acquired a qualifying clause.

The gathering lasted two and a half days. Colleagues had said the previous June event was too short, so this one ran a day longer. Audit joined in. Xuan thanked co-host Julia Yun Zhang, the organizers, visiting Swiss Re presenters and the Equitable colleagues who had contributed. His account had the cheerful, crowded quality of someone trying to fit everyone into a group photograph.

It is a useful place to begin with Xuan, who became Equitable’s Head of Life Insurance in October 2025. His professional vocabulary includes valuation, modeling, pricing and enterprise risk management. Yet some of the most revealing moments in his career concern the less mathematical business of getting people to participate: inviting a writer, recruiting a volunteer, making room for another department.

The team photograph supplies its own footnote. There are enough festive sweaters to test the limits of any corporate dress code. The event belonged to a business responsible for serious financial commitments, but the people making those commitments work were allowed a little color.

The first invitation was to edit

Xuan’s volunteer story began with a mentor. In 2012, encouraged by that mentor’s involvement with the Society of Actuaries, he became an assistant editor of International News. He chose the international newsletter because he wanted to learn about actuarial practices and lives elsewhere. Curiosity supplied the reason to take on an extra job.

Eventually, the lead editor asked whether he would take over. Xuan considered the additional time and accepted. Editing brought him closer to the section’s council work; council membership brought further responsibilities. By January 2018, he could trace a progression through treasurer and vice chair to chair of the International Section.

That route makes the newsletter more than a minor entry on a résumé. It offered a practical introduction to an international professional community. Articles needed contributors, contributors needed encouragement, and an issue needed to arrive in readers’ hands. The finished publication was evidence that people in different places had managed to make something together.

His writing also reached The Actuary, where he served as a contributing editor. The magazine described that work as finding authors, advising them and reviewing submissions. These are unusually good exercises for anyone who expects to lead specialists: understand the material, ask useful questions and help another person make an argument clear.

An assistant editor in 2012.
A section chair by 2018.A volunteer route into professional leadership

A nursery next to the home office

For his June/July 2017 editorial on global insurance regulation, Xuan chose an opening far removed from a balance sheet. His daughter Chloe was five days old, asleep in a nursery beside his home office. He linked her name and the arrival of a new generation to the way new ideas could renew the actuarial profession.

The subject remained technical. He was considering changes in insurance regulation and financial reporting, and the uncertain direction of international convergence. But he approached it as a question about time: what an established profession inherits, what it changes, and what the next generation will have to work with.

The domestic opening made the scale of that question tangible. A financial rule can look permanent when printed on a page. Beside a newborn’s nursery, a few decades seem rather less remote. Xuan was writing about systems whose consequences would extend beyond the moment in which they were designed.

His conclusion included a compact admission: “no one has a crystal ball.” For a professional concerned with future outcomes, that is a useful sentence to keep within reach. The editorial argued for actuaries to keep learning and take part in developing and implementing rules. Its optimism depended on participation, rather than a prediction that change would take care of itself.

Learning the business from several sides

Xuan studied finance at the University of Science and Technology of China and earned a master’s degree in statistics at Columbia University. The combination joins questions about money with methods for examining uncertainty. His subsequent work moved across several parts of the insurance business, giving those academic subjects a succession of practical settings.

At Prudential, his responsibilities included regulatory valuation in individual life insurance, pricing in the pension buyout business, and reviews of models used for pricing, valuation and asset-liability strategy. He later led annuity model development. He moderated an early-career development panel in 2018, bringing that range of experience to a conversation for younger professionals.

By 2019, he had joined AXA Equitable as Head of Statutory Valuation. In his election questionnaire that year, he described a team of twenty actuaries, responsibility for statutory results and filings, and the task of explaining results to senior management. The job connected detailed analysis with decisions made elsewhere in the organization.

He subsequently served as Chief Actuary and Chief Risk Officer at Prosperity Life Group. When he left in 2024 after twenty months, his farewell named colleagues and the things he had learned from them: accounting, capital management, reinsurance, legal matters and working under pressure. He even credited a colleague with lessons in humor. The list reads like a reminder that seniority does not exhaust the supply of teachers.

The return came with a job opening

When Xuan announced his return to Equitable in 2024, he paired the news with a recruitment request. He wanted a chief of staff to work beside him and help an actuarial organization of more than one hundred people. The responsibilities went well beyond arranging a busy executive’s diary.

The proposed role covered team culture, objectives, talent development, innovation, budgets, resource planning and communications. It would sit on the Actuarial Leadership Team and report to him. Actuarial experience was preferred, but he explicitly left the door open to someone without it. Communication, presentation and analytical skills were central to the invitation.

That is a revealing set of priorities for a technical leader. A team can contain considerable expertise and still need help deciding how work fits together. Xuan’s recruitment message treated that coordination as substantial enough to warrant its own leadership position.

In October 2025, Equitable announced his appointment as Head of Life Insurance, succeeding Kurt Meyers. At the time, Xuan was Chief Actuary and also CEO of Equitable Financial Bermuda Re. His actuarial remit covered several valuation bases, experience studies, model development, and oversight of product and reinsurance pricing. The appointment brought that technical background into leadership of the life business. The company described twenty years of experience behind the move.

Three years, and a little division

His professional service had meanwhile reached the Society of Actuaries board. Members elected him in 2019, and he completed a three-year term in 2022. In reflecting on that service, he emphasized friendships, learning, responsibility and accountability. He also performed a small calculation: approximately 32,000 actuaries divided among eighteen directors meant roughly 1,800 members per director.

The arithmetic gave an abstract obligation a manageable scale. A board seat came with people to represent, spread across a profession and across countries. His farewell reflection treated the experience as an education in perspectives he would not ordinarily encounter in his day job.

That same season, he wrote about meeting Mandarin-speaking actuaries at the SOA’s ImpACT gathering. He noted the breadth of their work across insurers, reinsurers, consulting and technology, and welcomed the growing presence of actuaries with Chinese backgrounds in senior management. The post celebrated colleagues advancing within a profession he had spent years helping to connect.

Xuan’s interest in technology also predates the latest cycle of enthusiasm for artificial intelligence. In his 2019 board candidacy, he advocated programming, predictive analytics and changes to professional learning. Those were proposals about how actuaries should prepare for competition from other analytical professions. They show a leader thinking about the profession’s future workforce alongside its existing responsibilities.

A flight plan beyond the office

Outside insurance, Xuan has pursued another technical discipline with very literal consequences for preparation: flying. He earned an instrument rating in 2019 and a commercial pilot certificate in 2021. His qualifications also include diving and sailing, a collection that gives his calendar more variety than an executive biography usually suggests.

In 2019, he described flights to the Bahamas, Key West and the Manhattan skyline. He also wrote about joining Civil Air Patrol emergency services for air surveillance and disaster relief. His stated ambition was to pilot himself around the globe, making connections with actuarial societies along the way.

The proposed journey is a particularly personal combination of interests. An international professional network would become a set of places to visit; a flying ambition would acquire colleagues at its stopping points. The idea belongs comfortably beside the newsletter and the team gathering. Each begins with an activity and expands into an opportunity to meet people.

For now, the picture of the holiday gathering offers a satisfying place to leave him: colleagues assembled, the year discussed, the next one ahead. Xuan had listened when they asked for more time together and added another day. Among the technical responsibilities, board commitments and flight credentials, that small adjustment deserves its place. Someone had to make the room available, organize the occasion and send the invitation.