Description: This brief article details my observations as a senior consultant for a leading actuarial consultancy across the Middle East and South Asia regarding ORSA. It highlights key challenges, potential solutions and describes the dichotomy of management and consultant paradigm.

Description: The article is based on a study of causes of insolvency and decisions made by management, regulators, and policyholders over the life cycle of the insolvency.

Description: Describes a process for identifying relevant industry experience to credibility-weight with relevant company experience to set modeling assumptions and margins.

Description: Describes a process for identifying relevant industry experience to credibility-weight with relevant company experience to set modeling assumptions and margins.

Description: The costly, time-consuming and complicated process of enterprise risk management (ERM) can be improved in many companies and made less tedious for managers by using reasonable data and templates obtained from peer group entities. The models used to calculate economic capital (EC) often underestimate its value because they do not consider decision-maker perception about risk. We assume here that managers, as the decision-makers, have appropriate business understanding and they can provide substantial information about risk characteristics regarding all business processes. Therefore we are focused, in this paper, on collecting data from managers across the different businesses to derive the appropriate knowledge about risky events, the importance of particular types of risk, the relationship between the risk outcomes and the level of risk control in a particular industry. We conclude that the collected data has a high potential for use as a benc hmarking reference and analysis for improving ERM models for individual businesses.

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: A discussion of risk-relevant resources available at the Society of Actuaries Risk Management Task Force Web site