Description: Letter From The President column for the October/November 2012 edition of The Actuary magazine discussing the importance of actuaries staying relevant in today’s and the future’s work force.

Description: This is a compilation or risk management terms garnered from a survey of risk professionals supplemented with analysis of firm-level information on significant risks as reported in 10-K financial statements. Results indicate the existence of significance differences in terminology. The dominating pattern observed is a dichotomy between internal and external perceptions. Also observed is a difference between terms used by actuarial professionals and traditional risk managers.

Description: Article from Risk Management Newsletter, March 2006, No. 7 on Standard & Poor's Enterprise Risk Management evaluation of insurers. In October 2005, Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services announced a new addition to the analysis process that leads to the ratings of insurers: Enterprise Risk Management ERM evaluation criteria.

Description: This article reviews the sixth survey of Emerging Risks, sponsored by the Joint Risk Management Section and completed in fall 2012.

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: Article is a detailed discussion of the Risk Management and Own Risk and Solvency Assessment (RMORSA) Model Act that was recently approved by the NAIC and is being adopted by legislatures across the country.

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: Feature article describing the different types of risk cultures companies can have.

Description: New column centered on enterprise risk management.

Description: Although crisis management remain often seen through a “communication lens”, it has in reality more in common with risk management than usually thought. Both crisis and risk management are anticipatory endeavors, with most of the work being carried out in peace time; both require a deep understanding of the organization’s activities and ecosystem; both have the same overarching objective to enable the organization to survive a brutal change to its usual operating conditions. Developing integration between the two functions would thus go a long way toward a more resilient organization.