Description: This article provides an overview of the Own Risk and Solvency Assessment (ORSA) model act, and of enterprise risk management (ERM). Compared to other actuarial disciplines, health actuaries have not historically focused as much on ERM. But health coverages do have risks that can threaten an insurer's solvency, and ORSA (now in force in most states) will force health insurers to beef up their ERM capabilities.

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: This article introduces the Goals-Progress-Strategy (GPS) approach to Strategic Risk Management (SRM).

Description: Summary of the July, 2013 newsletter with an executive overview of each article.

Description: The Strategic Risk Register System SRRS is proposed by the authors as a new approach to modeling and visualizing the interconnectivity of risks in an ERM context. SRRS has been successfully applied in practice, and a case study is deployed to demonstrate the methodology.

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: This is a teaching session on strategic management including defining what it means and how life insurers can utilize it in turbulent times. From Record of Society of Actuaries 1980, Vol. 6, No. 4.

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