Description: This article provides an overview of the evolution and rationale for Own Risk Solvency Assessment (ORSA), as well as practical implications for insurers as they begin to design an ORSA process.

Description: Comments on Robert North’s paper, a real case study of disclosing MVL in a public employee retirement system.

Description: Increasing uncertainties and volatility in financial as well as real goods markets increasingly reveal that controlling systems based on deterministic and pseudo-exact values are insufficiently eligible to manage the business activities. This raises the question how management systems can be modified to generate the adequate management impulses in volatile periods. Risk management deals from identifying, evaluating and aggregating chances and risks, which again determine the potential fluctuation range of relevant performance indicators. Everyday corporate life shows that risk management is considered important; but the corresponding processes to identify, evaluate and report chances and risks are seldom part of established decision criteria. This “paradox” lets assume that risks are managed in various differing and unsystematic ways. The combination of traditional controlling methods and risk management is not primarily a methodological challenge. The behavior of the whole organization, practiced over a long-year period, has to be transferred into a new corporate culture of transparent dealing with chances and risks. This paper describes the necessary change management process, which has to come along with necessary methodological modifications.

Description: The authors introduce an alternative to Tail Contribution Analysis TCA for analyzing business segments and strategies called Economic Profit Analysis EPA. They 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, they illustrate the benefit of using EPA in overcoming the problems of TCA and thereby providing concise reliable information for business decision making.

Description: A risk map is an effective and dynamic tool in helping companies develop a broader view of their risks.

Description: A proposal to draft model legislation focused on getting adequate funding for public pension plans.

Description: From a session at the Spring regional meeting of the Society of Actuaries held in Atlanta, Georgia, May 24-25, 1999 Panelists discussed a comprehensive risk management approach to quantify the risk exposure from various sources.

Description: Building on the Part 1 article, Introduction to the Representative Scenarios Method, this article describes testing the methodology with respect to four product types, fixed indexed annuities with GLIBs, level term life insurance, universal life with secondary guarantees, and variable annuities with GLWBs. This Part 2 article describes testing results, refinements to the RSM methodology, and next steps.

Description: From a session at the Spring meeting of the Society of Actuaries held in San Antonio, Texas, June 14-15, 2004 Speakers discuss the approaches to quantifying investment risk, including the credit risk subcomponent and mismatch risk sub-component in the three different types of risk-based capital RBC framework commonly used, such as regulatory, rating agency and company-specific economic-based formulas.

Description: This is the second article in a two-part series examining the potential value to companies of implementing a company profitability and risk dashboard.