Description: Summarizing the session "How to Keep Your Spreadsheets Out of the Headlines", on preventing spreadsheet error, from the 2015 SOA Annual Meeting. Presenters were Alex Cires, Sandra To, and Mary Pat Campbell.

Description: Increasing uncertainties and volatility in financial as well as real goods markets increasingly reveal that controlling systems based on deterministic and pseudo-exact values are insufficiently eligible to manage the business activities. This raises the question how management systems can be modified to generate the adequate management impulses in volatile periods. Risk management deals from identifying, evaluating and aggregating chances and risks, which again determine the potential fluctuation range of relevant performance indicators. Everyday corporate life shows that risk management is considered important; but the corresponding processes to identify, evaluate and report chances and risks are seldom part of established decision criteria. This “paradox” lets assume that risks are managed in various differing and unsystematic ways. The combination of traditional controlling methods and risk management is not primarily a methodological challenge. The behavior of the whole organization, practiced over a long-year period, has to be transferred into a new corporate culture of transparent dealing with chances and risks. This paper describes the necessary change management process, which has to come along with necessary methodological modifications.

Description: This session from the 1993 Valuation Actuary Symposium explores issues associated with Life and Annuity Valuation including the status of Guideline XXX and practical compliance issues.

Description: The latest installment in a series that applies Buddhist principles to actuarial practice. This particular installment focuses on the author's recent experience in recovering from serious injury, the lessons from Buddhism learned during that process, and the parallels of healing to the challenges actuaries face when businesses or processes are "broken".

Description: Actuarial systems access and change controls are hot topics these days as modeling continues to increase in complexity and as new modeling regulations may begin to crest over the horizon. Many companies are currently in the process of either formalizing their actuarial system access and change control protocols, or are reevaluating and strengthening their existing control processes in response to identified deficiencies or in conjunction with new actuarial system implementations. With these undertakings in mind, this article discusses a number of valuable components commonly incorporated in formal systems access and change control protocols. Also discussed are leading practices identified in the SOA publication “Actuarial Modeling Controls: A Survey of Actuarial Modeling Controls in the Context of a Model-Based Valuation Framework (December 2012)”, and from the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries.

Description: July 2018 issue of The Stepping Stone by Leadership & Development Section. practical information for actuaries, trends that impact section, section activities

Description: Simple mathematical equations often outperform very complex ones in predictive analytics (PA) situations. This session will cover "why" and "how" to guard against overfitting and other potential pitfalls that might not be intuitive.

Description: How to deal with worst practices in spreadsheets and still have verifiable results.

Description: Shapiro 1990 documented some of the criteria used by actuaries when selecting the assumptions for actuarial valuations. He noted, however, that many of these criteria are often were in conflict with one another. This paper uses expected utility theory to model this process of choosing actuarial assumption when faced with potentially conflicting criteria. The three criteria considered are prudence, best estimate and conservativeness.

Description: A discussion of funding arrangements that can reduce the costs of providing medical coverage through lower reserves or state tax savings, instead of through cutting benefits.