By Anthony Cappelletti
Welcome to the December 2017 edition of General Insurance Insights, the Society of Actuaries’ semiannual newsletter for those with an interest in general insurance (aka P&C or property and casualty insurance). Within this newsletter, we include several articles of interest to actuaries in the SOA’s GI Community. The first article is “The GI Track and the NAIC Job Analysis Project.” It provides my observations of the continuing efforts by the SOA to have actuaries with the FSA designation in the GI Track recognized as being qualified to sign property and casualty reserve opinions in the U.S. The article ends with the current state of these efforts, which is the NAIC Job Analysis Project. I hope to write an update to this article for the June 2018 edition of this newsletter. The second article is by SOA Senior Staff Fellow (my boss), Stuart Klugman. Stuarts’s article, “Society of Actuaries and Predictive Analytics,” provides a summary of the SOA’s recent efforts to increase the focus on predictive analytics in both basic education and continuing education. A third article, “AI in GI,” is my review of the 2017 SOA Annual Meeting & Exhibit session, “Use of Artificial Intelligence in General Insurance: Industry Opportunities and Regulatory Challenges.”
Also in this issue, SOA staff fellow Scott Lennox updates readers on the latest from the SOA’s GI Climate and Environment Sustainable Research Committee. Check out the “GI PD Opportunities Update” for a listing of recent and upcoming professional development (PD) opportunities with significant GI relevant content. In this update you will find a wrap-up of the recently concluded 2017 SOA Annual Meeting & Exhibit that was held in Boston.
In the June 2017 issue of this newsletter, I summarized three articles that looked into the issues of National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) reauthorization in “ National Flood Insurance Program: Reauthorization 2017.” The NFIP was set to expire on Sept. 30 of this year without reauthorization by Congress. Since publication of that article, the U.S. mainland experienced two major hurricanes (Harvey and Irma) that caused significant losses to homeowners from flooding. Before these two events, the NFIP owed approximately $23 billion to the U.S. Treasury. While estimates are still preliminary, it is possible that NFIP-insured losses from Harvey and Irma may be as high as $20 billion. Instead of reauthorization, Congress temporarily extended the NFIP for three months. It is now up for reauthorization on Dec. 8, 2017. It will be interesting to see how Congress will handle NFIP reauthorization. While too late to be included in this issue, I will likely re-visit the issue of NFIP reauthorization in the June 2018 issue of General Insurance Insights.
Our goals with General Insurance Insights are to keep readers informed on topics of interest to general insurance actuaries and to develop the general insurance actuarial community within the SOA. We welcome your feedback and ideas to help us achieve these goals. If you have questions, feedback or ideas regarding General Insurance Insights, feel free to contact me.
I would also like to take this opportunity to inform our readers that we are always looking for volunteers in general insurance at the SOA. Please visit the SOA Volunteer Opportunities Database. The database includes all open volunteer opportunities at the SOA. In addition to this, we are also looking for ideas on GI continuing education offerings and writers/ideas for articles in upcoming issues of General Insurance Insights. Let me know if you would like to contribute.
Anthony Cappelletti, FSA, FCIA, FCAS, is a staff fellow for the SOA. He can be contacted at acappelletti@soa.org.