Description: This article discusses new developments on the regulatory front. Under the new agreement, insurance company management and boards will be required to issue a statement that reflects their judgment about the firm’s viability, including its capital adequacy. The required opinion will have five elements - identifying risks, measuring risks, a risk feedback loop, a risk tolerance statement, and a risk policy.

Description: In this article the author discusses the many hats an actuary wears and how risk management comes to play in each one. The roles discussed: 1. Pricing actuary. 2. Catastrophe modeling actuary. 3. Ceding reinsurance actuary. 4. Corporate actuary. 5. Loss reserving actuary. 6. Predictive modeling actuary. 7. Marketing actuary. 8. Underwriting actuary. 9. Investment actuary.

Description: This article is about the annual call for ERM-related research papers that present the very latest in ERM thinking and move forward principles-based approaches. The call discussed in this article was issued in October 2005 and attracted nearly 30 entrants, from which there was one winner and eight more that were selected for presentation at the 2006 ERM symposium. They were listed in the article and can be found, along with the 20 other entrants on the ERM Symposium Web site at: www.ermsymposium.org.

Description: The focus of this article is that while Economic Capital can be a valuable component of the ERM process for insurance companies, an over-emphasis on EC, to the point of neglect of other steps in the ERM process, can reduce the effectiveness of an ERM program.

Description: This article provides background and key results of the Risk Premium Project of the Committee on Theory of Risk [DOTOR] of the Casualty Actuarial Society [CAS]. The project is intended to gather research on risk issues and encourage further development.

Description: Reinsurance has been available for VA Guarantees for over 20 years. During that time, the reinsurance market for VA Guarantees has undergone frequent and sometimes violent transformations. Where does the market stand today? What forms and structures of reinsurance are available? Which VA Guarantee designs and features are easier to reinsure? Is reinsurance offered on both newly issued policies as well as in force/legacy books, and which vintages are difficult to reinsure? In an age of sophisticated hedging programs, what role does a reinsurer play in helping a VA writer manage this highly volatile risk? In this session, we will hear from a reinsurer that is actively writing new VA Guarantee reinsurance treaties in the U.S. and around the world, and from a VA writer that has successfully partnered with a reinsurer to enhance its VA product offering

Description: This article introduces a non-traditional type of economic scenario generator that relies on dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models are complex macroeconomics models and have been increasingly popular in central banks for analyzing monetary policies.

Description: This article from A Year in the Life of the Strategic CRO series explains how to enhance the risk appetite to better support business planning discussions.

Description: This article, Spreadsheet Controls Add Risk Resilience, spotlights why spreadsheets have stood the test of time and how they help contribute to an actuary’s success. It also discusses common causes of data integrity issues relative to spreadsheets. And, offers insight into controls that can be utilized to helps actuaries solve these issues and ensure the accuracy and consistency of the data on which they base their analysis.