Description: What does “accountable” mean? You will see how the accountability culture can transform spectators into protagonists following the Four Steps to Accountability.

Description: Describes actuarial approaches used to quantify the benefit to employers of implementing financial wellness programs for their employees.

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".

Description: Evan Borisenko looks at previous challenging environments for the life insurance industry, such as the a period of severe stagnation in the 1930s, the increased inflation in the 1980s and a catastrophe like the Spanish influenza after the World War I. Evan explains that "while each event described above challenged the life insurance industry in a unique way, each event stimulated an equally unique solution." The article concludes that we "fight to repeat history" in a way that we as actuaries should be able to propose unique solutions with when faced with crisis in the future.

Description: Individuals face many risks during different phases of their financial life cycle. These risks in turn have major financial implications on their wealth creation, wealth preservation and wealth distribution aspirations. Traditionally risk taking is viewed negatively in relation to the personal financial-planning domain. In fact, most of the studies linking risk management to personal financial-planning focus primarily on investment and insurance related risks. In contrast, enterprise risk management (ERM) takes a portfolio view of risks right from the personal level to the organization level. The existing literature on ERM is seen as an essential feature of corporate world and there is not much literature available that explicitly addresses the issue of aligning ERM framework to the whole spectrum of personal financial planning. In this backdrop, it seems logical to develop an in-depth study on aligning an ERM framework to a personal-financial planning domain. Accordingly, this conceptual paper, avoiding mathematical jargon, extensively examines the extent to which ERM can be aligned to the personal-financial planning domain. The Study concludes by suggesting how individuals should identify, aggregate, evaluate and address risks across the whole spectrum of personal financial planning domain

Description: This article summarizes some of the operational considerations necessary to optimize the usefulness and impact of a predictive model, such as cross-functional support and involvement in model build, adequate training and reporting, and strategic model build.

Description: The author recounts his experience of switching employers and moving from Pakistan to Saudi Arabia. He offers advice for others contemplating moving to a new country.

Description: Many top-performing businesses aren’t just risk aware, but rather risk intelligent. Such a posture helps prepare companies for a major event and can demonstrate to a regulator or auditor that an appropriately strong control framework is in place. Better still, companies gain real strategic value from a “risk adjusted” understanding not only of their threats and vulnerabilities, but also the upside opportunities associated with various risks. It starts with having both qualitative and quantitative information to identify, assess and manage risks. Strategic risk management, at its core, is about creating value by increasing transparency and accountability, and quality of information. More than a mere compliance exercise, effective risk management enables more informed strategic decision making, increased accountability and transparency, a greater likelihood of organizational success, and – ultimately – competitive advantage, as borne out by many studies that correlate risk management and financial results.

Description: Shannon Brownlee shares her perspectives on the current health care crisis, including: inconsistent treatment patterns across providers and geographic regions, providers lacking evidence-based guidelines, the need for better independent clinical research to establish those guidelines, and the limits to consumerism's potential to fix the crisis.

Description: This article provides a detailed description of the unbalanced subsidy provisions in the Affordable Care Act with easy to follow numerical illustrations. An understanding of the illustrative calculations is necessary to understand the subsidy implications. The article highlights some surprising and likely unintended results that will be interest to issuers, employers, consumers, regulators and policymakers. Actuaries can add expertise to their clients and to the public discussion with a proper understanding of the subsidy calculations and the resulting implications.