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: 2011 SOA Enterprise Risk Management Symposium, Chicago. This is the abstract of the referenced paper.

Description: Actuarial activity in Azerbaijan commenced in 2008 with the enactment of the insurance law. The Actuarial Association of Azerbaijan was created in that year. The insurance law prescribes an official roster of actuaries who qualify after passing an exam. There is also the position of “appointed actuary” who reports directly to the board of directors of the insurance company. However, due to the relatively fast development of the insurance market, there is an urgent need of qualified actuaries. Actuaries Without Borders and the International Actuarial Association have thus helped in the capacity building process. This article describes the workshop that was held in Baku, in December 2019.

Description: The article provides an update on the 2019 ERM Symposium with regard to date, location and content (General Sessions and Concurrent Sessions).

Description: Since 2008 the Joint Risk Management Section, sponsored in partnership by the Canadian Institute of Actuaries (CIA), Society of Actuaries (SOA) and Casualty Actuarial Society (CAS), has annually conducted a Survey of Emerging Risks. As the researcher for this project, I have asked open-ended questions thought to be useful to risk managers. Andy Grove noted the importance of viewing problems from an outsider’s perspective. After a strategy he implemented had struggled, he hypothesized how the strategy would change if he was fired. This paper summarizes activities that are perceived as adding value by risk managers. Each company is unique based on the skill set of the risk team and needs of the firm, many of which are strategic and can be fulfilled through well thought out scenario testing. These can be split into eight themes.

Description: The Chinese insurance market is grappling with product innovation, business growth and regulatory oversight as it tries to keep pace with a sharp growth in demand across product segments. In this context, the authors have highlighted insurance trends in China, based on available research and literature, with a particular focus on topics that will drive the enterprise risk management (ERM) function of insurance companies. ERM provides an opportunity for insurers to identify and mitigate potential insurance risks by enhancing their policies and risk management activities. This report explores the insurance trends in detail, drawing on findings from interviews of practitioners in the Chinese market, to provide context for the drivers of ERM transformation.

Description: Political figures and journalists have tended to blame deregulation and greed for the credit crisis. However, we would like to suggest that these were not the primary cause of the credit crisis. The real cause of the crisis was faulty regulation and arrogance. Flawed regulation in the over-reliance on complicated capital models and arrogance in believing that the complex mathematical formula in risk models overcame the limitations on input availability and enabled companies to capture returns that were greater than the cost of capital, have led Wall Street by creating CDOs and similar instruments to repackage risks and take out the systematic excess risk charges as profits, and have also allowed companies to run “prudently” on leverage ratios that were in hindsight over the limit.

Description: The problem facing risk distributors is that product pricing is sticky, whereas the market price of risk can be quite volatile. This disconnection can become particularly severe during market downturns. The problem facing risk insurers is maintaining market share in benign market conditions when the market price of risk is low. Strategies that are dynamic with respect to time are difficult in practice, since they require more capital in volatile markets.

Description: This paper defines business risk as uncertainty that threatens the viability of the insurance organization including product features such as mortality or persistency, internal organization features such as expenses or staff retentionand external influences such as regulatory or legal actions. This paper provides an approach for measuring the financial impact of adverse variation of these factors on the organization.

Description: From the Record 1977 Vol. 3, No. 1, this presentation is from a concurrent session at the Society of Actuaries 1977 Regional Meeting, held in Atlanta March 31-April 1. The presenters at this session discuss the sources of funds for stock life insurance companies, including debt, capital, policyholders, and coinsurance, and the prioritization of the use of funds. “Enterprise risk exposure and management” and policyholder vs. shareholder dividend philosophy are additional topics.