Description: This month, Expanding Horizons had the opportunity to interview Tim Boonen, the winner of the Society of Actuaries’ (SOA’s) second Actuarial Science Early Career Award.

Description: In this article I want to share my experiences coordinating an actuarial program at the UCAP (Universities and Colleges with Actuarial Programs)-introductory level. Let’s start with some context of my institution. North Central College (NCC) is a private, four-year, comprehensive liberal arts college with a semester academic calendar. It has about 3,000 students, primarily undergraduate, and the campus is 28 miles (a 30-minute train ride) from downtown Chicago.

Description: Increasing technology is available to create and disseminate educational resources worldwide. In response, this article advocates creation of open educational resources (OERs) that will benefit the actuarial profession with both recruitment and retention of members. Specifically, we describe OER contributions made at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and more recently through the ASTIN Academy, a working group of ASTIN, the non-life section of the International Actuarial Association. We advocate pushing boundaries and creating new ways of teaching effectively for the future. The innovative use of technology and open-source materials is a way to foster diversity, equity, and inclusion in the actuarial profession.

Description: This article discusses how to get data into and out of R, an open source language for statistical computing.

Description: Insurance companies are heavily regulated in every country with a well-developed financial system, with the regulation focusing primarily on solvency. The new regulatory system with an emphasis on introducing the risk-based capital regulation has been developed or revised in various jurisdictions in the past three decades. Risk-based capital (RBC) regulatory systems were first introduced in Canada in 1992 and in the United States in 1994. The National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) in the United States started its Solvency Modernization Initiative (SMI) in 2008, with the aim of reevaluating its RBC system. The most recent adoption of an RBC system was the implementation of Solvency II in the European Union (EU) in 2016, with a focus on the group supervision applied at both domestic- and foreign-market levels through internationalized insurance groups. This article will discuss the theoretical rationale for insurance solvency regulation, the general equilibrium framework needed to design and evaluate solvency regulation, and the cross-border impacts of solvency regulation, especially when regulation standards are inconsistent across countries.

Description: The Society of Actuaries' managing director of actuarial research provided an overview of research activities including the funding behind research projects and the staff/volunteers involved with research.

Description: Overview of the session “Analytics You Should Know, but Don’t” which took place at the 2007 SOA Annual Meeting in which R, an open source language for statistical computing, was discussed.

Description: Article recapping prizes for the five best presentations given by graduate students at the 43rd annual ARC.

Description: This article introduces CERA- Chartered Enterprise Risk Analyst including information on the examination requirements.