Associate Professor Timothy Kyng from the Department of Actuarial Studies, discusses his latest research into a new retirement village calculator designed to protect seniors from making financial mistakes.

Tell us a bit about your background and what excites you about your field
My background is in mathematics and actuarial science. I worked in the financial services industry for 15 years before becoming an academic, and I found it interesting and intellectually challenging to unravel the complexity of financial contracts and projects.

Describe the nature of your research and the problem you are tackling
One significant project involves a free online financial calculator that helps senior citizens understand retirement village contracts and compare different offerings. It’s a worthwhile project that protects consumers by making them aware of the true costs of retirement villages living. This multi-disciplinary project involves actuarial science, financial modelling, programming, legal issues, communication of complex ideas and evaluation of the impact on consumer’s financial literacy and decision making.

What is the real-world impact of your work?
We are in the user experience testing phase of the development of our RV calculator. We have built a version of it for consumers (senior citizens), and another for advisory professionals such as financial planners, accountants and lawyers. I believe the long-term impact will be that people can shop around for a better deal, encouraging retirement village owners and developers to offer simpler and fairer contracts to consumers in the future.

How have you collaborated with colleagues from both your own disciplines and other Faculties in reaching your results?
I’ve assembled a team of people from various backgrounds including actuarial science, computing, law, geography, psychology and education to help us to build, test, update and evaluate the online calculator. Our legal research assistant analysed the regulatory arrangements in Australia and New Zealand and advised whether retirement village contracts are a form of insurance or a financial product. The geography research assistant provided advice about data sources for estimating and modelling real estate prices. The actuarial and computing people built the calculation engine and the user interface for the calculator. My psychology and education colleagues are helping with the user testing and evaluation aspects of the project.

What is it about Macquarie that has allowed your research to flourish?
At Macquarie I have support from my faculty for this work and access to fellow academic researchers from a range of different disciplines to see it through to completion. I am lucky to be working in a faculty where multidisciplinary research is encouraged and where access to researchers from other disciplines is easy.