Description: While intended to assist health plan actuaries responsible for stress testing and ORSA filings, this session will also be informative for actuaries interested in communicating the impact of potential catastrophic events for health plans to their management and board. It will begin with a discussion of event thresholds for stress tests and their impact on capital and financial statements. Presenters will take a detailed look at several catastrophic event case studies (historical and hypothetical) in the following areas: healthcare specific (e.g. pandemic, specialty Rx), financial institution/credit market, operational/business, strategic and multi-event scenarios.</

Description: A presentation at the Actuarial Research Conference in August 2006 in Montreal. This paper discusses the Basel VaR Value at Risk test of a bank&#39;s VaR model. It proposes an alternative, Quality Control of Risk Measures QCRM Hypothesis test. The alternative is more likely to reject an incorrect VaR model.

Description: The academy generator is widely applied in actuarial practice. Initially confined to regulatory reserving, companies are increasingly using the AAA/SOA generator over an ever widening range of applications testing the limits of the academy generator's intended function. The session will give a brief overview of the academy generator and the asset classes it can be used to model. It will also analyze the statistical properties of the academy scenarios and discuss the scenarios relative to standard validation criterion. Some of the challenges that actuaries face in using this framework will be reviewed and options for addressing these challenges will be offered.

Description: Model Risk Management continues to be an evolving area for insurers to be considering. This has grown from both internal and external forces and may require a different format to previous model risk frameworks held by insurers. Furthermore, there are a number of trends emerging that we believe will drive an increased focus on insurer’s model risk management frameworks such as technology automation, ever increasing data sources, and the use of predictive models. Risk management and the development of models is an area where insurance companies have performed well in the past. It is expected that frameworks currently exist within companies; the governance, documentation, validation and control of model risk are likely to be well established practices. The challenge that insurers must consider is how well these have been adopted throughout the company for all models used to make business decisions and if the same level of rigor has consistently been applied. Regulation in a high-velocity actuarial environment will to be a challenge that actuaries must spearhead and must be proactive in guiding rule making to ensure continued innovation while putting data security and risk management first.

Description: The objective of this report is to provide benchmarking information that will help companies address the needs of internal stakeholders in cost-effectively conducting and implementing an ORSA process. In order to obtain this benchmarking information, a cross-disciplinary survey was conducted to find out what insurance companies understand and expect from an ORSA, the effort required to complete an ORSA, and the benefits from doing so. This survey was undertaken on a global basis, with participants that included life, property and casualty (P&amp;C), often referred to as &quot;non-life&quot; or &quot;general&quot; insurers in territories such as Europe, and health insurance companies in North America (the United States and Canada), Europe, and Asia.

Description: Forming a view on what the tail looks like for various risk factors involves both technical know-how and considerable judgment. The presenters focus on what needs to be addressed when setting financial market risk and insurance risk assumptions, in particular when assessing the question of diversification and the treatment of tail dependencies between risks and lines of business: