Description: Many top-performing businesses aren’t just risk aware, but rather risk intelligent. Such a posture helps prepare companies for a major event and can demonstrate to a regulator or auditor that an appropriately strong control framework is in place. Better still, companies gain real strategic value from a “risk adjusted” understanding not only of their threats and vulnerabilities, but also the upside opportunities associated with various risks. It starts with having both qualitative and quantitative information to identify, assess and manage risks. Strategic risk management, at its core, is about creating value by increasing transparency and accountability, and quality of information. More than a mere compliance exercise, effective risk management enables more informed strategic decision making, increased accountability and transparency, a greater likelihood of organizational success, and – ultimately – competitive advantage, as borne out by many studies that correlate risk management and financial results.

Description: The SOA president emphasizes the importance of actuaries maintaining their level of professionalism by always striving to inform and prepare the decision maker with all the possibilities, not just the quick answers or the minimum level of disclosure.

Description: A review of the book 'Indexation of Pensions and Other Benefits' by Robert J. Myers, which deals with the indexing of Social Security and government employee pension plans in the U.S., Canada, and other countries, as well as private pension plans, for which the author advocates the voluntary adoption of automatic indexing.

Description: Several requirements are common to all professionals - this article discusses how actuaries doing with regards to the pension dilemma caused by inflation.

Description: On October 30, 2015, the SOA Assumption Development and Governance Group, an informal discussion group consisting of nearly 200 interested actuaries with topics pertaining to actuarial assumption development and governance, organized an industry discussion call on end-to-end assumption documentation practices. The purpose of this call was to generate a large list of ideas for best-practice assumption documentation. More than thirty companies were represented in the call, including direct insurers, reinsurers and consulting firms. This article is the work product of the discussion written by Laurie Li and Alex Zaidlin.

Description: An actuary talks about his career, his firm's ventures into partnerships between actuaries and health care professionals, and his role in the role in the largest actuarial malpractice settlement in history.

Description: Third installment in a series of articles applying Buddhist principles to the challenges that actuaries face in applying their craft. The themes are adapted from the book "Awake at Work", by Michael Carroll. This particular installment covers the concept of "li" to the compliance aspects of an actuary's work, moving beyond minimum or literal compliance to a work product that provides multiple uses and meets a much higher standard

Description: Remarks on the pricing of joint LTC policies illustrate the need for an actuary's responsibility to the law, and to best practices, to take precendence over serving sales, marketing and underwriting objectives.

Description: Describes a process for identifying relevant industry experience to credibility-weight with relevant company experience to set modeling assumptions and margins.