Description: When using models a company can develop blind spots to risks. This article explains how to recognize the weaknesses in the models by recognizing the markets response to the innovation within the insurance product. Part of the essay collection "Risk Metrics for Decision Making and ORSA"

Description: A comprehensive analysis of the current economic crisis and risk management that considers the social and political behavior of people.

Description: This article discusses pointing out flaws in Incentive Compensation program using short term financial metrics like Total Shareholder Return may miss non-short term financial risk and non-financial risks.

Description: The actuary’s key role in the ORSA process should be to quantify the uncertainty surrounding the future financial results of the firm. By providing relevant standardized reports that clarify the uncertainty in terms easily understood by all stakeholders, the actuary will provide an essential element in the ORSA process. The dictum, "You can't manage what you can't measure." demonstrates the need to quantify risk, not just describe it qualitatively. While the ability to provide firm estimates of aggregate risk for complex organizations may not exist currently, doing so should be a target for the profession. The end result will be to enhance the financial security of the insurance industry at a time when all financial institutions are facing stakeholders skeptical about their financial condition. Part of the essay collection "Risk Metrics for Decision Making and ORSA"

Description: This paper illustrates a current approach to capital allocation, referred to herein as Tail Contribution Analysis TCA, using it to evaluate the impact of changes in an insurer’s operations by allocating capital to individual lines of business. It then highlights a common problem in the implementation of the procedure arising from reserve volatility and briefly notes the failure of the methodology to account for a firm’s changing levels of risk under various strategies. Finally, it introduces an alternative method for analyzing business segments and strategies called Economic Profit Analysis EPA. We will discuss EPA’s key feature, “volatility replication,” an intuitively appealing process of building investor expectations and capital market information into the risk-and-return measurements used to evaluate strategic decisions. Finally, we will illustrate the benefit of using EPA in overcoming the problems of TCA and thereby providing concise reliable information for business decision making.

Description: This paper introduces a rich stochastic modeling framework for understanding risks in multiple-decrement contracts. The example in the paper is a 20-year Term insurance contract. Not only are mortality and lapsation considered stochastic, but the parameters governing them are. For example, mortality risk is composed of four risk elements, including error generated in the underwriting process, volatility around the best estimate, catastrophic events that impact mortality, and the trend in mortality improvement or deterioration. When stochastically modeled, the relative contribution and risk profile of each risk element can be evaluated. Generating stochastic mortality results provides a distribution of results that an organization faces and the severity and incidence of the tail events.

Description: Here are a few topics to be discussed in this article: Risk is opportunity; Strategic and business risks are not captured in models; Incentive compensation should not be paid too soon; Enterprise risk management is board responsibility, ERM is compliance.

Description: Describes ways to avoid the next financial crisis by following the example of those who got it right and discerning what you could be doing to prevent your firm from experiencing excessive losses in future crises.

Description: "Management must manage. An incentive compensation formula will not be sufficient."

Description: This paper advocates asset/liability management for pension plans. It identifies the economic factors that influence the economic value of liabilities and discusses the typical asset portfolio that results.