Description: Discussion of solvency problems and the actuary's role in addressing them in the life insurance industry.

Description: ongoing discussion of the proper interest rate to use in discounting liability cash flows to reflect credit risk of the insurer in a fair value accounting system

Description: This paper focuses on the role of holism in enterprise risk management ERM. The performance measure known as market consistent embedded value is discounted for being overly reductionistic. The concept of an economic capital charge or credit is seen here as a potential bridge from the reductionistic to the holistic approach. It shows some promise for achieving holism, but falls short.

Description: The author constructed the efficient frontier of new business sales by modeling the embedded value and economic capital against a universe of possible growth rates of the three lines of business in a typical three-year planning horizon. The ERM function can use the efficient frontier of new business to provide a more rigorous analysis of the impact of growth rates on the firm’s overall capital efficiency and value creation, hence forming a feedback loop with the businesses in the planning process to optimize the growth strategy.

Description: An analysis of the 1999-2011 experience of all Blues plans of betweeen $1.8 and $3.8 billion in annual revenue in 2010 to determine if there is any empirical evidence of an industry underwriting cycle. The analysis shows there is no such evidence.

Description: This paper discusses both the theoretical and the application aspects of stress testing in managing enterprise risks. Effective stress testing maximizes the risk adjusted enterprise profit by controlling major risks financial, strategic, operational and hazard upon identifying risk metrics and modeling the correlations. A case study is included for demonstration purposes.

Description: This paper introduces a minor modification to the Wacek framework that restores market consistency and additivity. The modification shifts the basis of the cost-of-capital risk margin embedded in the fair value loss reserve from an insurer’s own solvency capital requirement with respect to its claim obligations as prescribed by Solvency II to the required market-clearing capital implied by those obligations, which depends not only on the internal characteristics of the unpaid claim portfolio but also on its correlation with the total market portfolio of unpaid claims.

Description: In this Chapter we present a novel way for estimating aggregated EC figures based on Bayesian copula estimation. Contrary to the classic approach of using a single inter-risk- correlation matrix we derive a probability distribution of possible correlation matrices that enables us to tackle the important issue of parameter uncertainty. Presented at 2010 Enterprise Risk Management Symposium, Society of Actuaries, April 12-15, 2010.

Description: Economic capital is an embedded part of the banking risk management and regulatory framework. The insurance industry has relied on rating agency and regulatory formulas that have been criticized as overcapitalizing and not appropriately differentiating risk drivers in the capital formulation. The emergence of C-3 Phase I and C-3 Phase II have introduced an economic approach to capital in the insurance industry. This half-day seminar takes a detailed look at the subject of economic capital. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries 2005, Volume 31, No. 1: 2005 New Orleans Life Spring Meeting, May 22-24, 2005, Session 9 Seminar.

Description: A collection of essays that discuss the principles and ideas underpinning the ORSA initiative and the risk metrics used for decision making.