Category: IACA / CONSULTING - actuview - the international streaming platform for actuaries

The European Actuary No. 43 | Making Sense of Mediation in Insurance

Thu, 28 Aug 2025 15:09:23 +0000

Arnoud Chneiweiss explains the French mediation scheme and advocates for clarity and simplicity in insurance contracts for the benefit of consumers.

Find the full TEA issue here.

eRA 2024 Opening Presentation by RGA

Mon, 12 May 2025 09:48:31 +0000

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Shape of Things to Come-Demographic Decline, Economic Stagnation, and Geopolitical Instability

Wed, 26 Feb 2025 13:44:18 +0000

Birthrates have collapsed across much of the world. Most developed countries, including the United Status, face a future of population aging and slowing economic growth. Workforces will shrink, fiscal burdens will rise, and public debt will mount. Zero-sum isolationism and protective trade barriers may spread. While populations in some parts of the merging world are still growing (e.g. Sub-Saharan Africa), others (e.g. China, Russia, Iran) are experiencing unprecedented demographic decline. All of this could be destabilizing. Our presenters examine how demographic trends are reshaping the economic and geopolitical landscape of the 21st Century. They will also explore possible strategies for staving off demographic and economic decline, from enacting pro-natal policies to increasing migration and extending work lives.

Invitation to the 2nd Joint Colloquium (JoCo) of the IAA Sections

Thu, 06 Feb 2025 14:44:25 +0000

In May 2025, the IAA Sections will host its 1st event in South America, "JoCo São Paulo 2025" at the invitation of the Instituto Brasileiro de Atuária (IBA).JoCo2025 will gather IAA Section members and actuaries from Brazil and from across the world around a unique theme of "Actuaries in Sustainability", to discuss the latest research and actuarial challenges arising from new fields of professional and academic activity as well as from traditional actuarial work, and including work and interpretations of the concept of "sustainability".What is the actuarial interpretation of “sustainable”? The concept interacts deeply with the actuarial profession, and it can be understood differently in different contexts: about the financial sustainability of risk sharing mechanisms, or regarding economic growth and the resilience of the financial sector, or in terms of the uncertainty arising out of environmental and climate concerns, or in the context of global efforts to ensure the well-being of all. Under these broad interpretations, sustainability interacts with the practice areas of actuaries of risk assessment, pricing and product development, reserving, regulatory compliance, strategic planning, stakeholder engagement, data analytics, ethical considerations, and the need for interdisciplinary collaboration and continuous learning. Learn more on the event page: https://events.actuaries.org/event/JoCo2025/home

Invitation to the 2nd Joint Colloquium (JoCo) of the IAA Sections (Portugese)

Thu, 06 Feb 2025 14:40:39 +0000

In May 2025, the IAA Sections will host its 1st event in South America, "JoCo São Paulo 2025" at the invitation of the Instituto Brasileiro de Atuária (IBA).

JoCo2025 will gather IAA Section members and actuaries from Brazil and from across the world around a unique theme of "Actuaries in Sustainability", to discuss the latest research and actuarial challenges arising from new fields of professional and academic activity as well as from traditional actuarial work, and including work and interpretations of the concept of "sustainability".

What is the actuarial interpretation of “sustainable”? The concept interacts deeply with the actuarial profession, and it can be understood differently in different contexts: about the financial sustainability of risk sharing mechanisms, or regarding economic growth and the resilience of the financial sector, or in terms of the uncertainty arising out of environmental and climate concerns, or in the context of global efforts to ensure the well-being of all. Under these broad interpretations, sustainability interacts with the practice areas of actuaries of risk assessment, pricing and product development, reserving, regulatory compliance, strategic planning, stakeholder engagement, data analytics, ethical considerations, and the need for interdisciplinary collaboration and continuous learning.

Learn more on the event page: https://events.actuaries.org/event/JoCo2025/home

ISO27001

Thu, 04 Jul 2024 09:17:55 +0000

Webinar on information security

AFIR-ERM, ASTIN & IACA Joint Webinar: Cyber Insurance-linked Securities

Wed, 13 Mar 2024 12:11:56 +0000

A jointly organized webinar by AFIR-ERM, ASTIN & IACA

In this webinar we investigate the feasibility of cyber risk transfer through insurance -linked securities (ILS). On the investor side, we elicit the preferred characteristics of cyber ILS and the corresponding return expectations. We then estimate the cost of equity of insurers and compare it to the Rate on Line expected by investors to match demand and supply in the cyber ILS market. Our results show that cyber ILS will work for both cedents and investors if the cyber risk is sufficiently well understood. Thus, challenges related to cyber risk modelling need to be overcome before a meaningful cyber ILS market may emerge.

Experience-Based Insights & Trends in Asset Management

Tue, 12 Dec 2023 16:23:36 +0000

The goal of this online web session is awareness of theory versus investment experiences. The course discusses ‘obvious’ shortcomings, like the fact that we trust models more than human experience, we rely on the figures from the past instead of the future, we think in % instead of €, we weigh loss more than profit, and we use High School math to arrive at an efficient portfolio.

Insights and experiences covered are, for example:

The evolution of ALM
Unexpected events
Pitfalls in assumptions and reporting
Coherent economic eras
Risk perception
Implementation glitches

Managing Expectations

Fri, 01 Dec 2023 11:04:12 +0000

Are you interested in increasing the likelihood of feeling satisfied and successful? This webinar will delve into one of the most important soft-skills an actuary can develop: how to manage expectations

Leadership Interview Series: Melissa Chacko - Part 3

Wed, 15 Nov 2023 11:18:50 +0000

Melissa Chacko is Deputy Chief Actuary at New York City Office of the Actuary. Her career has spanned positions in international consulting, health, and retirement. Hear her discuss her career journey and being a female in leadership.

Leadership Interview Series: Melissa Chacko - Part 2

Wed, 15 Nov 2023 10:43:53 +0000

Leadership Interview Series: Melissa Chacko - Part 1

Wed, 15 Nov 2023 10:35:29 +0000

Explainable Machine Learning for Actuaries

Thu, 28 Sep 2023 16:31:12 +0000

Machine learning techniques are now more and more popular in the insurance industry and have a lot of applications such as, pricing, reserving, claims management and underwriting among others. Whereas the advanced techniques usually have a better predictive power than statistical models e.g. Generalized Linear Models, their main drawback is that they are black-box and their results are difficult to understand/interpret which doesn’t always provide sufficient comfort to take business decisions.

In this webinar, we introduce some model interpretability tools and describe how they can be used to boost insights from data in insurance applications, thanks to adequate features selection, features engineering and results interpretation. These interpretability tools make the use of machine learning techniques much more relevant in insurance as it allows to improve the predictive power while understanding the drivers of the results; which is fundamental to take relevant business decisions.

Seven years on – Is there green in green consulting?

Mon, 18 Sep 2023 09:57:32 +0000

In 2016 Rade Musulin wrote an article for the IACA Newsletter predicting that there would be a bright future for actuaries in climate risk consulting. He is a Principal at Finity Consulting in Australia specializing in climate and natural perils. In this webinar he will discuss the demand for actuarial services in climate and #sustainability, and what consultants who seek to work in this space need to do to be successful. Read the article (pages 17- 18) here: https://bit.ly/3qqk5Gc

Leadership Interview Series: Charles Cowling - Part 3

Thu, 07 Sep 2023 10:13:09 +0000

Charles Cowling is the Chief Actuary at Mercer UK, and the current President-Elect of the IAA. Listen in to understand more about the IAA and from Charles's experiences in participating with actuaries around the globe.

Leadership Interview Series: Charles Cowling - Part 2

Thu, 07 Sep 2023 09:56:59 +0000

Leadership Interview Series: Charles Cowling - Part 1

Thu, 07 Sep 2023 09:45:45 +0000

Random Forest Model with Prediction Error Decomposition Function

Tue, 01 Aug 2023 13:27:35 +0000

The random forest is one of the most widely used machine learning techniques. Its prediction accuracy is very high and its hyper-parameters are easier to tune compared to other models such as gradient boosting machine (GBM) and neural network (NN). Also, the basic idea of aggregating multiple randomized decision trees is straightforward and the number of tools that ensure its interpretability (e.g., feature importance, partial dependence plot, etc.) has been increasing in recent years. With these strengths, we believe the random forest would be a powerful model for actuaries. Moreover, research on statistical properties of the random forest has also made great progress, which could contribute significantly to the estimation of the error distribution and risk management tools.

In this paper, we firstly review how the random forest works in regression problems and then introduce a method for estimating prediction errors using it, focusing on its statistical properties and how to make well devised use of the in-bag and out-of-bag of the bootstrap sampling in the forest growth process. Here, we state that the random forest can give error distributions in addition to point estimates, which is a great advantage compared to other machine learning models like GBM or NN. We also propose a random forest specific method of decomposing the prediction error into process error, parameter error, and other error for the prediction target and confirm it is reasonable from the perspective of computational complexity. We show that the random forest enables us to evaluate the process error individually for each target, which is difficult with GLM. Lastly, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method through numerical experiments on artificial data and real datasets, and discuss its applications.

Find the Q&A here: Q&A on 'New Actuarial Approaches by Using Data'

On The Modelling Of Heavy-Tailed Data Using Generative Adversarial Networks

Mon, 31 Jul 2023 15:17:17 +0000

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) were invented in 2014 and have tremendous and remarkable results in computer vision, time series, data augmentation, missing data imputation, anomaly detection, domain adaptation and semi-supervised learning. They are known to be better than other generative models due to their universal distributional learning capabilities. GANs offer competing approaches to common heavy-tailed distributions as they do not make strong distributional assumptions and can generate new plausible samples in a single step. However, it is not clear what kind of distributions they can represent. In particular, it is not clear whether and how GANs are suited to serve as heavy-tailed distribution learners in tabular data sets and this still remains an open question. In this work, we provide an in-depth overview of the use of GANs in modelling extreme events. We show that GANs can be used to enhance the data resolution of high-impact but low likelihood events and improve model robustness. We compare the popular Conditional Wasserstein GAN with a Gradient Penalty and recently proposed Extreme Value GANs i.e. ExGAN, Student’s t GAN and Pareto GAN, for modelling non-life insurance claims. Our approach is unique as it has not been previously applied for tabular data sets nor has it been previously applied for learning the distribution of heavy-tailed data sets. This realistic extreme event generation is useful in stress and scenario testing, especially in Own Risk and Solvency Assessment (ORSA). ORSA is an important tool which relies on testing an insurer’s projected future solvency on a wide range of extreme but authentic and realistic scenarios such that the insurer can manage to cope with those scenarios.

Find the Q&A here: Q&A on' Machine Learning and its Opportunities'

Measuring and Visualizing Two-way Interaction Effects

Mon, 31 Jul 2023 15:58:11 +0000

Machine learning models are recognized as having high predictive power for data in which interaction effects are likely to be strong, but such models tend to be black boxes that are difficult to interpret and lack explanatory power in prediction. Therefore, an urgent issue is to develop methods to help interpretation by visualizing and measuring the interaction effects captured by machine learning models, and interpretable machine learning techniques that are expected to be used for this purpose have been developed. However, the two existing visualization methods, partial dependence and accumulated local effects, are inadequate because they fail to capture the main effects well, let alone the interaction effects, even for relatively simple models. In this paper, we propose alternative methods for understanding interaction effects as well as indicators for evaluating these methods. For this purpose, we define interaction effect terms and identify their various properties. Using the proposed indicators, we also characterize existing and alternative methods for simple cases. These analyses and examinations show what is lacking in specific techniques for visualizing and measuring interaction effects. We also recognize strongly that it is necessary to discuss interaction effects from basic principles.

Find the Q&A here: Q&A on' Machine Learning and its Opportunities'

Q&A on 'Insurance and Regulation in Emerging Markets'

Mon, 31 Jul 2023 14:03:16 +0000

Q&A on the presentations:

Risk-Free Credit Insurance Premium Financing using Mobile Money (M-PESA) & APIs

Mon, 31 Jul 2023 13:55:05 +0000

There is an increasing adoption of Risk Based Pricing for Motor Insurance in African markets, with Kenya amongst the leading African countries to adopt this. This has resulted in differentiated pricing and a general increase in premium rates for comprehensive motor insurance.
The issuance of motor insurance certificates has been automated in the Kenyan market, with insurance certificates sent in real time to a mobile phone number via WhatsApp/email address upon payment of premiums. Insurance providers have been integrated to a centralized industry database via APIs for ease of validation of insurance certificates.
There is a huge appetite for credit within the market and people would rather pay premiums in instalments rather than a steep one-off premium. Current Insurance Premium Financing (IPF) options in the market involves paperwork with a turnaround time of 24-48 hours.
Given the widespread use of mobile money payments in the Kenyan market, I have developed a real time IPF product that enables customers to access financing for premium payment in real time. The solution is fully digital end to end, with customers, insurance companies and lenders integrated through a platform via APIs.
Customers are required to make a partial payment to a lender, which comprises of a mandatory third party insurance component, upfront lender’s fees and 6 weeks’ worth of comprehensive cover. Upon receipt of the partial payment, the lender remits the full premium to the insurer and comprehensive insurance cover is issued in real time. The customer can choose to repay the IPF loan within a period of 1 to 5 months. In the event the customer defaults on the loan repayment, the insurance cover is either cancelled or downgraded to third party, and the unutilized premium (comprising of Unearned Premium Reserves) used to offset the outstanding loan amount. Any residual balance is reimbursed to the customer. This makes the lending credit risk-free to the lender.
The solution is available on USSD/APP/WEB and takes less than 2 minutes access financing and obtain comprehensive insurance premium.
Find the Q&A here: Q&A on 'Insurance and Regulation in Emerging Markets'

Financial Regulation in Emerging Markets

Mon, 31 Jul 2023 13:30:16 +0000

The two presenters, Michael Cohen and David White, have over 50 years experience between them of consulting to International Financial Institutions, such as the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, as well as other multilateral donors in a broad range of areas. In particular, they have collaborated in strengthening regulatory agencies in insurance, pensions and capital markets and have developed tools to allow regulators who have limited or no access to actuaries and other financial professional to develop systems which approach international standards, while assisting these countries to develop well regulated financial institutions appropriate to their level of economic development. Topics to be covered include risk profiling methodology; looking beyond a risk register matrix scoring to put values on the identified risks including assessing inherent and residual risks as well as providing a better understanding for regulators of their risk appetite by assessing the actual amount of risks requiring mitigation; using system dynamics and Monte Carlo analysis in relation to policyholder and investor protection funds in emerging markets. They will also touch on financial inclusion, pension reform and some more esoteric aspects of consulting to international financial institutions and other donors in developing countries. The presenters have extensive experience throughout the Asia-Pacific region, as well as in Africa, Europe and the Caribbean and have accomplished a wide variety of consulting assignments. The presentation will cover the breadth of their collective experience and will allow participants insight into an area of actuarial and financial consulting which might be unfamiliar to many participants in the Congress. Participants will get to appreciate the challenges of this kind of consulting, which combines both actuarial and financial knowledge as well as developmental economics and cultural sensitivity.

Find the Q&A here: Q&A on 'Insurance and Regulation in Emerging Markets'

Navigating Climate Risk Management: Developing Innovative Solutions for Banks and other Lenders

Wed, 26 Jul 2023 17:15:15 +0000

As per the IPCC's 6th Assessment, climate changes are expected to intensify in all regions worldwide in the upcoming decade. Regulatory scrutiny and disclosure requirements are growing, and financial institutions, including banks and lenders, are facing greater pressure to manage these risks effectively. To meet this challenge, actuaries can play a critical role in developing new solutions that help institutions navigate this rapidly evolving landscape.

Our presentation provides an overview of the climate risk management strategies adopted by banks and other lenders, along with the challenges they may face in the future. Firstly, we will discuss the various techniques employed by lenders to avoid, minimize, mitigate, and transfer climate-related risks within their lending portfolios. Secondly, we will examine the evolving dynamics of managing physical and transition risks using separate instruments. Finally, we will highlight some of the potential limitations of current methods used by banks and lenders in quantifying and comprehending these risks, asset-liability matching and accessing affordable risk transfer options.

As standards, frameworks, regulations, and disclosures related to climate change continue to evolve, banks and other lenders must find new ways to effectively manage related risks. Our focus is on how actuaries can play a pivotal role in untangling the complexity of these risks. Our goal is to highlight the new opportunities for actuaries to expand their traditional roles and provide comprehensive assistance to lenders as they strive to create innovative solutions.

Secondly, we reflect on climate risk management from a portfolio perspective expanding current techniques and frameworks in relation to existing and upcoming regulations, with a specific focus on portfolio mitigation against climate risks. Due to the complexity of climate risks, their interaction with adaptation and transition, and the resulting second order impacts, actuaries can no longer consider risks independently and rely merely on extrapolation, but a more dynamic approach is required. Moreover, as global regulations and disclosures are changing and evolving in light of climate risk, financial institutions will need to consider and prepare for these changes.

Finally, we apply these considerations to a case study.

Find the Q&A here: Q&A on 'The Mangement and Cost of Climate Change'

Q&A on 'Pension Issues in a Changing World'

Tue, 25 Jul 2023 14:10:30 +0000

Q&A on the presentations: