Description: Models are imperfect approximations of reality. Once a bubble has been recognized, that’s the time for mechanisms of caution and prudence to kick in, even in the face of exuberance – especially in the face of exuberance. Liquidity and trust is plentiful until it’s not – it can evaporate with blazing speed and only returns slowly. Risk is contagious, which means every single employee and citizen has a vested interest in taking on the role of chief risk officer.

Description: This article summarizes an emerging risk research project completed by the Joint Risk Management Section. The major categories of risks in the survey were 1. Economic, 2. Environmental, 3. Geopolitical, 4. societal and 5. Technological.

Description: This session from the 2003 SOA Orlando Meeting covers the growing area of enterprise risk management ERM. It provides an overview of an ERM framework as well as issues and challenges of implementation. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Volume 29, No. 3.

Description: This article provides background and key results of the Risk Premium Project of the Committee on Theory of Risk [DOTOR] of the Casualty Actuarial Society [CAS]. The project is intended to gather research on risk issues and encourage further development.

Description: This is report summarizes the results of a Joint Risk Management Section sponsored study on negative interest rates and the insurance industry.

Description: The IFRS 17 implementation deadline is near and companies have decisions to make. While many decisions pertain to specific IFRS 17 requirements, others are more strategic in nature. This session will explore key considerations and decisions faced by stakeholders as they finalize their implementation work and determine ongoing best practices in light of this new standard.

Description: The new ways of calculating capital requirements are relatively untested. We may be witnessing the results of such a test today. As of this writing, the global economy is almost surely entering a serious recession. One of the reasons for this appears to be inadequate capital provisioning. The failure of capital regimes to protect financial entities and, by extension, their customers has had unfortunate effects on the markets and economies of the world.

Description: Financial crises are nothing new. What is unique and sobering is the far greater speed with which the current situation has evolved from a weakening of the U.S. housing market into a full-blown, global economic meltdown. Also new this time is how quickly the fallout spread beyond the financial sector into all areas of the economy. Advanced communications and information technologies are creating an era of greater risk with more serious and far-reaching consequences when compared with even the recent past.

Description: Much of enterprise risk management has its roots in portfolio management and corporate finance. The concepts of trading off risk and return and benefits of diversification are well understood and articulated in both the actuarial and economics fields, so I don’t believe there are significant knowledge gaps preventing actuaries from contributing to the field. In fact, actuaries may have an advantage in many situations where a large part of a firm’s overall risk arises from pension activities or other more typical actuarial risks.

Description: The Society of Actuaries announces the release of a new report that will provide a resource for the insurance industry to learn about image recognition technology. Authored by Kailan Shang, the report explores the current status of image recognition technology, models for image recognition, and various possible applications of image recognition to insurance.