I’ve just come back from the Actuaries Institute’s biennial Financial Services Forum; a forum for actuaries and other professionals in the financial services industry dealing with wealth management, financial planning, life insurance, banking and risk management. I’m hoping to post in more detail about some of the topics that interested me, but there were a few broad themes:
- FOFA – the future of financial advice – even those topics which were superficially about something else seemed to come back to what was going to happen to financial planning, and the superannuation marketplace once the FOFA changes are implemented
- Longevity – what would happen if nearly everybody lived to 120?
- Risk and capital management – so many different ways of thinking about risk management for financial services companies (including my own presentation here), but my favourite session was the very last about leveraging risk management to shape strategy, a presentation from two very experienced practitioners about risk management from a Board perspective.
Overall an excellent conference, a good mix of the deeply technical and strategic presentations that gave me food for thought for quite a while.
The stand out for me was Todd’s opening address! Creativity versus fear!
What would happen if nearly everyone lived to 120? Well, for one thing, Suncorp will have a lot of angry customers. They sell a funeral insurance policy that expires when the life insured survives to 120.