Description: This article from major US payers describes palliative care as a scaleable means of improving quality and reducing costs during serious and complex illness.

Description: Panel discussion of varying views on: substandard underwriting with prudent pricing, qualified vs. nonqualified plans and the need for IRS clarifications, rate stabilization and aggressive pricing, noncancellable products and product features.

Description: Based on interviews with C-level executives, this report offers insights on the role and actions of the global insurance industry in addressing climate change

Description: The paper discusses the arguments supporting the need for risk culture to transition into ERM culture to be embedded across financial organizations. Creating and maintaining strong ERM culture is paramount to a lasting and meaningful ERM program. It is essential for organizations to understand what ERM culture is, how it gets established and in what way affects the process of ERM implementation. Often, the implications of financial enterprises not focusing on the significance of ERM culture manifested in severely compromised ability to generate sustainable value and market competitive advantage. This paper calls for rethinking the role of ERM culture in the context of managing risks.

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: The latest installment in a series that applies Buddhist principles to actuarial practice. This particular installment focuses on the author's recent experience in recovering from serious injury, the lessons from Buddhism learned during that process, and the parallels of healing to the challenges actuaries face when businesses or processes are "broken".