Even more than lawyers and accountants, actuaries - those maths wizards who try to work out life expectancy and risk for life assurance firms - have been the butt of jokes about how supposedly boring they are. How do you know an accountant from an actuary - the actuary looks at your shoes. Think about it!

But actuaries, with their arcane number-crunching skills, usually do rather well in their working life - even if the job does bamboozle everybody else in the life assurance business. Ever hear an actuary go through a financial results presentation? Not an experience to be repeated.

Ireland's life assurance companies, fund management companies and brokers are well populated with actuaries, who actually take pleasure in trying to explain what exactly embedded value is and why it's so important.

But Colm Fagan, who left Bank of Ireland's Lifetime life assurance arm to set up his own business, Life Strategies, has done very well from going out on his own. Mr Fagan is thought to be picking up the lion's share of the £5 million (#6.39 million) that British e-commerce group Marlborough Stirling is paying to buy out the Dublin company, with the balance going to his company's dozen staff.