Description: The author discusses the similarity between Life and Casualty work via the area of Risk Management

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: This article highlights some of OSFI’s expectations regarding the ORSA process, and provides general feedback and observations from OSFI’s reading of 2014 ORSA reports (including KMR) and discussions with insurers.

Description: This article explores reasons for plan sponsors to consider lump-sum payouts. The author suggests for plan sponsors looking to reduce risk, the factors outlined in the article suggest that sponsors may benefit from considering risk-transfer opportunities much sooner than they may have anticipated.

Description: The mismatch between how interest rate impacts the value of assets and liabilities could have material negative impact to companies’ earnings and surplus. To quantify and mitigate the impact of such mismatches, companies have used matching a combination of duration and convexity. I will review these measurement techniques and their limitations.

Description: This paper demonstrates the use of Quantile Regression in the development and understanding of conditional value at risk (VaR) models for enterprise risk management.

Description: This paper demonstrates that extreme value theory (EVT) can be used as a tool to model policyholder behavior in the extreme tail. This paper applies EVT to the study of variable annuity dynamic lapse behavior in the extreme tail. It illustrates a process whereby a company can fully model policyholder behavior, including the extreme tail, with existing data. No judgment about the extremal behavior is necessary.

Description: ICP 16 and its requirement for an Own Risk and Solvency Assessment (ORSA) will offer opportunities for the actuarial profession to provide uniquely well-educated and professional assistance to this process.

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: This article provides a very high level overview of accelerated underwriting programs and their history in the US marketplace. It then discusses setting up an actuarial control cycle for such products and some items related to risk management that are helpful in this setting. Pros and cons of retrospective studies, random holdouts, targeted holdouts and post issue analysis are discussed. A mathematical example of how to estimate the mortality impact of such programs from early emerging experience is provided.