On International Nurses Day and the 200th birthday of Florence Nightingale (12 May 2020), Kendra Felisky of Marcuson Consulting celebrates the actuarial skills of one of the world’s most famous nurses. Florence Nightingale – A Pioneer of Data Visualisation and Handwashing… oh, and that nursing thing. It’s a situation familiar to all actuaries. You know… Continue reading>
It is great to have held our first Gibraltar SFCR review webinar recently. Huge thanks to our guest speaker Joe Perdoni of the GFSC and Kathryn Morgan for chairing the seminar. Kendra Felisky, FCAS, CERA presented our quantitative analysis and Alex Marcuson shared strategies firms can adopt to enhance their risk processes and reporting. The… Continue reading>
At a recent meeting of the London Market Actuaries’ Group (LMAG) we attended, James Orr, Chief Actuary - General Insurance at the PRA, with his colleagues Cassandra Archer and Elena Papastylianou, delivered a PRA Update presentation on the recent “Dear Chief Actuary” and “Dear CEO” letters*. We think the contents of these letters should be… Continue reading>
Despite recent computational advances, internal/economic capital models remain time-consuming to run and often highly complex. We are currently researching into the use of proxy models in general insurance capital modelling, including a study into current market practice and evaluation of common techniques. We are planning to present our results and findings at actuarial conferences later… Continue reading>
Alex Marcuson presented on the work that his Peril-based reserving working party has been carrying out. This presentation was given at the annual GIRO Conference, this year held during September in Dublin. After providing a recap of some of the material delivered at previous GIRO Conferences, and the challenges that had been identified at that… Continue reading>
Alex Marcuson presented on machine learning at the annual GIRO Conference, this year held during September in Dublin. Speaking together with Alan Chalk, the popular workshop provided an introduction for actuarial newcomers to this field. The workshop provided a practical example of decision tree tools to analyse sample text. Using speeches given by US presidential… Continue reading>
The recent political turmoil in Crimea and the resulting trade sanctions led to reports of significant movements in the Russian Rouble. The news prompted us to review the history of one-year foreign exchange rate movements for the Rouble along with a number of the high-growth economies to see whether they had proved more volatile on… Continue reading>
There is a new paradigm evolving in energy requirements which will has potentially huge structural implications across several industries. This is illustrated in the graph below. We think insurance will be affected in several ways, here are just a few possible consequences: Acceleration in US economic recovery and resulting consequences of interest rate normalisation on… Continue reading>
We thought these two charts prepared using recent data from the UK Office for National Statistics tell an interesting tale: unstable and possibly declining inflation over the last few years coupled with a decline in real average weekly earnings over the period since the financial crisis broke. How best to capture this in pricing, reserving… Continue reading>
The recent high-profile announcement by QBE has prompted us to set down some thoughts on reserving and capital issues raised here. An open question, outside the scope of this article, is whether, it signals the first concrete sign of an approaching wave of soft-market bad news in the sector. Reserves are inherently uncertain The first… Continue reading>