Description: Health Watch, Issue 79, December 2015, Health Watch

Description: A summary of potential future software-induced changes to the insurance industry, with a particular emphasis on machine vision technologies.

Description: The five words for ERM are transparency, discipline, alignment, adaptability and resilience. This article focuses on transparency, discipline and resilience.

Description: Interest in blockchain is high among insurers and reinsurers. While it’s not universally useful the technology does merit continued closer investigation.

Description: After a summary of FASB decisions in their GAAP Targeted Improvements project, this article describes several issues that will need to be resolved either by the board or in actuarial practice and argues for seeking solutions that provide meaningful results without overly complicating valuation processes.

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.