Description: This article discusses new developments on the regulatory front. Under the new agreement, insurance company management and boards will be required to issue a statement that reflects their judgment about the firm’s viability, including its capital adequacy. The required opinion will have five elements - identifying risks, measuring risks, a risk feedback loop, a risk tolerance statement, and a risk policy.

Description: Many ERM programs fail to include an active step of actual risk treatment and are therefore rightfully characterized as Entertainment Systems. Real ERM will use risk assessment to drive decisions about risk acceptance and risk mitigation. Entertainment systems use risk assessment to create reports and to hold discussions. No actions are taken often because ERM is not empowered to do anything.

Description: A new reason for the inherent instability of the insurance business can be found in the literature of anthropology. The theory of plural rationalities, also known as Cultural Theory of Risk or simply Cultural Theory, posits that the world is populated by people with four fundamentally different attitudes toward risk. Presented at 2010 Enterprise Risk Management Symposium, Society of Actuaries, April 12-15, 2010.

Description: When companies engage in risk management activities, they can be seen as modifying their distributions of future outcomes. Often, this takes the form of trading off a sure cost for a decrease in some potential risk of loss. Companies may carry out these activities with several goals in mind, such as reduction in earnings volatility or preservation of capital. This paper will demonstrate a method for evaluating possible strategies by dividing the effects on costs and risks into three tranches: earnings, impact and estate. The tranches can be associated with different interests of the various stakeholders. This trifurcation analysis can help to explain the risk-reward trade-offs of different risk treatment alternatives and can aid in risk-related decisionmaking.

Description: There are many ways to perform Risk Management. For an ERM system to be effective its objectives need to match up with what management wants. But most ERM systems do not have an explicit objective. Part of the essay collection "Risk Metrics for Decision Making and ORSA"

Description: A discussion of the pillars required to build the needed paradigm for insurance company risk management. From The Actuary Magazine April 2005

Description: This is the first of a two-part article introducing and elaborating an “Adaptor” strategy for ERM. Such a strategy is intended to fulfil two purposes: first, switching among four styles of risk-coping strategies in order to track qualitative changes in a business’s risk environment; and, second, to support the business in navigating with resilience through all the seasons of a business-economic cycle, i.e., of boom, bust, moderate, uncertain. This latter requires careful study of the nature of resilience, the familiar idea of bounce back, and the less familiar idea of bounce forward. Part I of our article is underpinned therefore by a supplementary document (available from https://riskviews.wordpress.com/adaptor-exceptionalism/), which addresses the issue of structural change in a business or economy. It draws heavily on ideas taken from the discipline of control engineering, as well as some from ecology, social anthropology, and economics. The entire two-part article is thus an exercise in cross-disciplinary Systems Thinking.

Description: This is the second of a two-part article introducing and elaborating an “Adaptor” strategy for ERM. Such a strategy is intended to fulfil two purposes: first, switching among four styles of risk-coping strategies in order to track qualitative changes in a business’s risk environment; and, second, to support the business in navigating with resilience through all the seasons of a business-economic cycle, i.e., of boom, bust, moderate, uncertain. This latter requires careful study of the nature of resilience, the familiar idea of bounce back, and the less familiar idea of bounce forward. Part I of our article is underpinned therefore by a supplementary document (available from https://riskviews.wordpress.com/adaptor-exceptionalism/), which addresses the issue of structural change in a business or economy. It draws heavily on ideas taken from the discipline of control engineering, as well as some from ecology, social anthropology, and economics. The entire two-part article is thus an exercise in cross-disciplinary Systems Thinking.

Description: Presented at May 1985 Spring Meeting. This session discussed the differences in the reporting of product line and source of earnings results between insurers and banks and the practical problems which exist in interpreting gain by source or product-level.

Description: Presented at October 1986 Annual Meeting. This session discussion is about how capital should be measured, cash flow based surplus, what performance measures are reliable, return on equity, book gains, terminal funds, how much surplus is needed, business planning for future capital needs, capital restructuring, how should multiple risks be combined and qualitative issues versus numbers as they relate to future growth.