By Scott Lennox
The General Insurance Research Committee continues to meet 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 Scott Lennox, SOA staff fellow at slennox@soa.org.
The SOA has the following five general insurance research projects in progress:
- 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.
In addition to the projects currently in progress, the research committee is finalizing two requests for proposals to be sent out to the research community:
- Takaful Insurance Primer—This project will perform a review of existing literature produced by actuarial organizations, insurers, consulting firms and trade associations supporting the insurance industry and governmental agencies on Takaful insurance and produce a primer that can be sent to SOA membership.
- General Insurance Trends—This project will look at general insurance pricing trends in a way that goes beyond the common practice of extrapolating past experience by looking at a systematic review of all trend drivers.
Anyone interested in submitting a proposal on either of these requests can refer to the request for details. Once a submission is chosen, the SOA will be seeking individuals to join one or more volunteer Project Oversight Groups (POG) to help guide and oversee the projects. 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 Scott Lennox, SOA staff fellow at slennox@soa.org. If you would like to volunteer, please complete the Volunteer Interest Form.
Scott Lennox, FSA, FCIA, FCAS, is a staff fellow for the Society of Actuaries. He can be contacted at slennox@soa.org.