By Steve Siegel
Over the past year, the SOA Research Department has been ramping up its efforts to produce meaningful and useful research related to general insurance. At the October 2015 SOA Board meeting, the formation of the General Insurance Research Committee was officially approved, and the committee has hit the ground running. This committee is now meeting monthly to identify relevant research topics and potential partnering organizations with the goal of furthering the SOA’s activities in general insurance. As well, the committee is dedicated to providing members with results that will help them in their day-to-day activities. The committee welcomes ideas for consideration and is seeking additional members. If you are interested in either submitting ideas or becoming a member, please contact Steven Siegel, SOA Research Actuary at ssiegel@soa.org.
Concurrently, the SOA has launched five new research projects in the general insurance realm and is seeking individuals to join one or more volunteer Project Oversight Groups (POG) to help guide and oversee the projects. The research projects include:
- Methodologies and Techniques for Agricultural Insurance including Impact of Climate Change—This project will first focus on modeling and forecasting crop yield distributions and then turn to propose a new premium principle for agricultural insurance.
- Hedging of an Insurance Company’s Portfolio—This project will research how hedging an insurance company is impacted when both life insurance and property-casualty insurance coverages are present.
- Cybersecurity Insurance: Modeling and Pricing—This project will develop a framework to address problems associated with cybersecurity insurance.
- Application of Predictive Modeling for the Local Government Property Insurance Fund—This project will develop cutting-edge predictive modeling tools focused on censored and truncated insurance claims models, and claims triaging methods.
- Delta Boosting in Predictive Modeling—This project will refine and generalize the Delta boosting method in predictive modeling focused on its application to property-casualty insurance.
Each of the POGs seeks four to seven volunteers who may be FSAs, ASAs, or non-members with backgrounds in these topics. Volunteers are expected to participate in periodic, hour-long conference calls (a total of five to 10 calls expected over the course of a project) to review material and provide guidance. These projects provide a way for volunteers to network, build upon their experience in the field, and help support the SOA’s research efforts. If you have questions about the research projects listed above, contact Steve Siegel, SOA Research Actuary at ssiegel@soa.org. If you would like to volunteer, please complete the Volunteer Interest Form.
Steve Siegel, ASA, is a research actuary for the Society of Actuaries. He can be contacted at ssiegel@soa.org.