Update from the International Committee of the Joint Risk Management Section

Update from the International Committee of the Joint Risk Management Section

With global webinars and more activities, this committee is ensuring the risk management word is spread throughout the world.
By Dave Ingram

The International Committee is off to a roaring start both because of outstanding support from section member volunteers and due to very warm international responses. The activities have focused in three areas: newsletter translations, network building and joint projects.

Thanks to the CIA, the newsletter translation effort started with one non–English edition, the French edition. This was produced for the French speaking members of the CIA and it has also been circulated to actuaries in France. In addition, Ken Seng Tan, the editor of the newsletter, has been working with contacts in China to produce an edition in Mandarin Chinese. That edition should be available soon and consists of selected articles from the past year that are thought to be of high interest to non–North American actuaries working in risk management. A third project is a Spanish translation of summaries of the articles from the newsletters. That translation is being undertaken by the Mexican College of Actuaries. We are in discussion with actuaries in other parts of the world about possible translations of the international edition (or a summary) into other languages.

Our efforts to form affiliations with other actuaries around the world has had such enthusiastic response that we decided to give the effort a name. The International Network of Actuarial Risk Managers (INARM) now has affiliates from Australia, China, Germany, Hong Kong, Korea, Mexico, United Kingdom, Canada and the United States (via the section) and we have started discussions with a dozen more countries. Representatives for some of these groups have joined our monthly working group calls and others interact through a section volunteer who acts as the ambassador.

We are positioning this network similarly to the standing of a section within the SOA, that is, as a bottom–up membership driven group of volunteer practitioners and other interested parties. We hope to augment the IAA Enterprise and Financial Risk Committee (EFIRC) and are working toward forming a statement of understanding regarding the relationship. We expect to be able to support the IAA activities in risk management and in addition to pursue member initiated projects. We hope that this will work just as SOA sections work with the SOA and the AAA, recruiting volunteers for some projects and taking complete responsibility for others.

We have held one very successful international activity, the Global ERM Best Practices Webinar that had participation from more than 400 actuaries from more than 40 countries. This project was initiated by participants in the monthly International Committee/INARM calls, but quickly gathered support from actuaries in the United Kingdom and Hong Kong, in addition to the initial volunteers from the United States, Canada, Japan and Australia.

In the spring, the International Committee and INARM hope to regroup and decide if a regular Web program will be our primary activity or if we will seek to find other collaborative projects.

This is a truly amazing level of activity. However, there is more that could be done. We could use more volunteers to act as ambassadors and volunteers to support projects and future activities. We expect that future projects will be developed from member and IAA requests, so if you have any suggestions for future projects, we would be happy to have those ideas as well. Please note that our intention with the network is to promote risk management developments as our first priority. There is not a requirement that volunteers have an international job or work for an international company. Volunteers who are interested in risk management and who would be willing to cooperate with practitioners and learners in other parts of the world are what we are looking for.

At this point in time, everyone seems to agree that Risk Management is a borderless discipline. There is not a unique U.S. or Canadian or EU or Chinese or Japanese version of Risk Management. Through INARM, we hope to continue to develop the unique actuarial contribution to risk management. The borderless condition of risk management allows us to work together to use all of our collective skills, knowledge and experiences to build up the actuarial contribution. To volunteer, contact me at david_ingram@standardandpoors.com.

Finally, we realize that not everyone is able to volunteer. We would like to invite anyone who would like to follow our efforts on a real–time basis to join an e–mail group that will get at least monthly updates on INARM activities. This can be done by going to SOA Public Listserv and following the directions for the INARM listserve. Again, it is open to anyone and we encourage all to join. Once you join, send an e–mail to the group at INARM@list.soa.org. At last count there were over 130 members on the listserve.

Dave Ingram is director of Enterprise Risk Management for Standard and Poor's.