Description: This article discusses the reliance the banking industry placed on sophisticated mathematical models.

Description: Reinsurance reduces the required capital of the primary insurer but increases that of the reinsurer. Capital is costly. All capital costs, including that of the insurer and the reinsurer, are ultimately borne by primary policyholders. Reducing the total capital of insurers and reinsurers brings down the total capital cost and the total primary policy premium. A reinsurance arrangement is considered optimal—if it minimizes the total required capital. This optimal reinsurance is an attracting equilibrium under price competition. Evidence suggests an inverse relationship between the total required capital and the correlation between the losses held by different insurers and reinsurers. Examples are constructed to examine this and other properties of the optimal reinsurance.

Description: Article from Risk Management Newsletter, July 2005, Issue 5 on operational risk in IT projects. Operational risk can sometimes be a broad and elusive concept. A definition is thus necessary. The accepted definition within the financial community is to define operational risk as the risk of direct and indirect losses resulting from inadequate or failed internal processes, systems, people or external events.

Description: Article from Risk Management Newsletter, March 2006, No. 7, discusses the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations (COSO). Actuaries like to think of COSO as a euphemism for accountants taking over the world, especially in view of its sponsorship. The COSO has as its primary goal the improvement of corporate financial reporting, which makes it a stronghold in the emerging practice of Enterprise Risk Management.

Description: The roots of the crisis are understood on a simplified basis, by 3 Ls: a Lack of accountability b Leverage and c Liquidity. Historically, people requiring mortgages sought their mortgages from local institutions that would conduct the evaluation and hold the risk. Loan officers of these institutions were accountable for the outcomes of their decisions – defaults were a direct reflection on their judgment. Leverage was a second key factor. Institutions guaranteed mortgages against default. The third L, liquidity, because a problem. When property values eventually evidenced their inevitable fall, defaults occurred at historically high rates.

Description: Political figures and journalists have tended to blame deregulation and greed for the credit crisis. However, we would like to suggest that these were not the primary cause of the credit crisis. The real cause of the crisis was faulty regulation and arrogance. Flawed regulation in the over-reliance on complicated capital models and arrogance in believing that the complex mathematical formula in risk models overcame the limitations on input availability and enabled companies to capture returns that were greater than the cost of capital, have led Wall Street by creating CDOs and similar instruments to repackage risks and take out the systematic excess risk charges as profits, and have also allowed companies to run “prudently” on leverage ratios that were in hindsight over the limit.

Description: This article highlights some of the results from the Society of Actuaries SOA 2010 update to the 2005 Reflecting Risk in Pricing Survey. The survey focused on how companies are trying to price for and understand the risks inherent in the products they sell in various product lines—life and annuity, health, and property and casualty P&C insurance—and showed results for various countries of location and business focus.

Description: Article from Risk Management Newsletter, July 2005, Issue 5 that highlights a new frontier for actuaries unfolding in the insurance industry called Enterprise Risk Management.

Description: Full version of Risk Management, July 2005, Issue No. 5.

Description: Ken Mungan, founder of Milliman’s Financial Risk Management practice, talks about the latest changes in the industry and the role that risk management will play in shaping the future of the business.