Description: This article discusses the details of what happened in equity repo in 2013.

Description: This article discusses the impact of rising interest rates on annuity writers and life insurers and the risk management challenges it presents. Falling interest rates were addressed as well.

Description: This article argues that using Economic Capital as a metric does not capture all of the risks. The author suggests an alternative that better meets a corporation's overall risk management needs. This is value-based ERM, which is an approach that makes the quantification of enterprise value central to all aspects of the ERM process. It is a combination of two techniques—enterprise risk management and value-based management, and it captures all of the risks in a single metric.

Description: In this article, the author presents a case for using a Risk Return On Capital approach as a way to integrate desirable properties of the Economic Value Added approach and the Return On Risk-Adjusted Capital approach. The EVA approach has a shortcoming in that is does not reflect rating agency capital. The RORAC is computed as the ratio of expected total underwriting return to allocated risk capital, and represents the expected return for both benign and potentially consumptive usage of capital. The RROC approach measures returns after reflecting the mean rental cost of rating agency capital. Returns that are a reward for exposing capital to risk of loss are measured after reflecting the cost of carrying capital to support premium written and loss reserves.

Description: This article highlights the significant steps being taken by the UK actuarial profession to establish a more focused role in risk management.

Description: This article addresses the difficulties of risk modeling in a poor economic environment. The problems include imperfect vendors of data, facing events that have never occurred before, unpredictable consumer behavior, conflicting data sources, and AAA credit doesn't always mean AAA.

Description: This article will examine four approaches under two different methods (eight in total) used to combat the non-additivity of key rates and will compare them under a number of rate environments.

Description: This paper evaluates the current practice of operational risk management in the insurance sector. Operational risk is nothing new in insurance, but, because of regulatory requirements, companies have initiated computation of risk capital for their operational losses. The current effort to manage operational risk is not a naturally evolving phenomenon, and operational risk, in the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision’s Basel II definition, is unlikely to be a significant cause of insurers’ failure. In addition, the current Basel II definition of operational risk is not suitable for the insurance sector. Consequently, the invention of models and tools based on the definition is incomplete and illusionary. My findings are based on the analysis of dozens of interviews with insurance industry professionals. I demonstrate the way operational risk is quantified in practice, show that the result obtained from this computation is of littl e use in managerial decision making and propose a set of policy recommendations illustrating the characteristics of operational risk in insurance. This study can be used as a platform for launching dialogues to initiate fresh thinking about operational risk in insurance beyond the current artificial and narrow boundaries.

Description: The CAS is pleased to present its Research Paper, “Users’ Guide to Economic Scenario Generation in Property-Casualty Insurance”. Although there are cases in the literature about the use of economic scenario generators (ESGs) in the property casualty industry, they are far more commonly used for life insurance companies. Our hope is that this paper will serve as a comprehensive guide to the implementation of ESGs in the non-life space and spark interest in research into new applications of ESGs.

Description: This article will highlight the issue that the sum of key-rate metrics does not add to metrics derived by parallel shift to the entire curve, even at very low shift size. Additionally, in the article I will outline how to define a single rate change to be applied to a key rate (or the entire curve) since the rate changes are generally not level or parallel.