Description: Most reasonable risk mitigation strategies provide benefit in some circumstances, but come at a cost that adversely affects results in other scenarios. A research paper by the authors considers the view of multiple stakeholders to answer this question, resulting in a process they call Trifurcation.

Description: The author notes that “insurance companies have been in the business of risk management for hundreds of years. The latest trend towards risk management in banks is both new to insurance companies and very old hat—new because it applies new techniques at least new to the last half century and old hat because many risk management techniques are so old hat to insurance companies that they are almost unconsciously performing them.”

Description: The international risk management community is now being served by two professional organizations, the Global Association of Risk Professionals GARP and the Professional Risk Managers' Association PRIMIA. The article describes both professional organizations.

Description: People naturally observe risk in the form of the range of experienced gains and losses which is usually represented in statistical terms by standard deviation. In most cases, there are not enough observed values to reliably discern the true amount of losses that are possible in extreme situations. Statistical techniques that have long been applied to insurance company risks are being used to extrapolate from observed risk to extreme tails of the distribution of gains and losses. These processes are essentially an extrapolation from the “known” risk of volatility near the mean to “unknown” risk of extreme losses. “Fat tails” is a term often applied to risks where the likely losses in rare situations significantly exceeds the predictions of a Gaussian (“thin tailed”) distribution. This paper will look at the relationship between the observed risk and the extreme risk in statistical insurance r isk models and discuss how we might create a discussion among model users about the appropriateness of that relationship for specific types of risks.

Description: If your organization’s objectives involve taking on other people’s risks, you need some pretty complicated goals for your risk taking: diversification, risk selection, control cycle, consideration and provisioning.

Description: This session from the 1992 Valuation Actuary Symposium focuses on Risk-Based Capital issues and the important points concerning A.M. Best's view of leverage and capital adequacy in the review process.

Description: This paper discusses the implications of the use of the fund of unreleased capital gains on common stocks as required surplus. By 'Unreleased Capital Gains' the author is talking about a situation where realized and unrealized capital gains are annually placed in a fund and a percent of that fund is released into income and/or surplus annually. Actuarial Research Clearing House ARCH 1988, Vol. 3

Description: Full version of Risks and Rewards Newsletter, February 2001, Issue No. 36.

Description: In it’s insurance capital model, Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services has established criteria to adopt the NAIC’s stochastic approach to variable annuity risk. This approach, which replaces existing static charges, better reflects the products’ risk.

Description: Financial regulators, rating agencies and many commentators have blamed weak Risk Culture for many of the large losses and financial company failures of the past decade. But their exposition regarding a strong Risk Culture only goes as far as describing a few of the risk management practices of an organization and falls far short of describing the beliefs and motivations that are at the heart of any culture. This discussion will present thinking about how the fundamental beliefs of Neo Classical Economics clash with the recommended risk practices and how the beliefs that underpin Enterprise Risk Management are fundamentally consistent with the recommended risk management practices but differ significantly from Neo Classical Economics beliefs.