I’ve blogged about the role of the Appointed Actuary before – here and here. My own view has been that we need to positively define the role of the Appointed Actuary, and that, at least in life insurance, it should be closer to the first line of defence (ie managing theContinue Reading
On Wednesday this week (22 April), I am part of a panel discussion on ICAAP – comparing and contrasting the experience across the banking, life and general insurance industries. I’m representing life insurance. This post summarises the points from my introduction. I’ll come back and update with any interesting pointsContinue Reading
On Thursday, the FSC and the AFA released the Trowbridge report. John Trowbridge was appointed as chair of a Life Insurance and Advice working group to review the misaligned incentives identified in ASIC’s damning report from last year. The group was asked to make recommendations on how the industry can respondContinue Reading
The Ebola outbreak in West Africa is not over yet. But there have recently been a few cautious articles suggesting that it is getting better, and that perhaps the worst is over. The Economist, probably the mainstream media source I trust the most on this, says, The outbreak continues toContinue Reading
Every quarter (since June 2008), APRA summarises various financial statistics from the life insurance industry in a quarterly report. Every quarter, I read it eagerly, to see if it answers the question that I am often asked, “how will we know if the life insurance cycle has turned?”. The total industryContinue Reading
I’m a bit behind here, but APRA released their quarterly life insurance statistics this month. I’ve done a quick graph of the rolling 12 months profits since APRA first started releasing these statistics. Note that Group Insurance and Disability Income Insurance are different subsets of the total – the subsetContinue Reading
Since I blogged about Ebola a couple of months ago it’s become very mainstream news (so much so that the primary school kids are talking about it now). So here are a couple of great diagrams that caught my eye from this Economist graphical summary of various ways of thinking about Ebola.Continue Reading
Regular readers of this blog might remember a previous post of mine wondering about the role of the Appointed Actuary (AA) in life insurance. Since that post, the Actuaries Institute has formed a taskforce, of which I am a member. We had an insights session this week, in which we outlined ourContinue Reading
Get a bunch of actuaries together (particularly life insurance actuaries) and sooner or later we will start talking about pandemics. Fortunately, our experiences are almost entirely theoretical. We’ve lived through AIDS (for the life insurance actuary, a very slow-moving pandemic, where the challenge was more about underwriting than claims andContinue Reading
The Financial System Inquiry, headed by David Murray (former Chairman of the Future Fund and CEO of Commonwealth Bank) has released its Interim Report (all 460 pages of it). For those who haven’t been following this, this inquiry (which is already known as the Murray inquiry) is the natural successor toContinue Reading