Latest Posts
ICAAP – Lessons Learned
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
The Trowbridge report – a shakeup for life insurance
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
Parental leave – some good developments
I’ve written a few times about how progressing women in the workplace also involves more change than just the workplace. Annabel Crabb puts it best: In focusing so hard on encouraging women to lean in, we’ve neglected to convince men of their entitlement to lean out once in a while.Continue Reading
International Women’s Day
On International Women’s Day, I’ve been too busy enjoying the various panels at All About Women to write anything particularly deep or meaningful. So here are a few links. First, just as last year, The Economist has published a glass ceiling index. Sadly, Australia has dropped down this year below the OECDContinue Reading
Actuarial Hackathon
This is a guest post from my colleague, Zhan Wang, who was one of the organisers of our actuarial hackathon for our actuarial team. It was inspired by a number of the responses to this post, that asked how a team of actuaries could help the community. On Friday 13thContinue Reading
Ebola – Actuarial insights
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
Life insurance profitability – how is it going?
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
What did I read in 2014?
I’ve written up my annual page about what I read in 2014 here. In this post, I’m just mentioning the books that I enjoyed the most. First, The Wife Drought, by Annabel Crabb. I reviewed that one here, and you can see I really enjoyed it. It’s my pick for the year. Second, The SixthContinue Reading
Progressing Women in Leadership – what works?
In the past two days I have read two insightful pieces of research into how to create an organisation where women can progress. Chief Executive Women commissioned a study with Bain & Co which used the concept of net promoter score (advocates minus detractors to a specific question) to tease out what aspects ofContinue Reading
Life insurance quarterly statistics – quick hit
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