In this session, Andrew Gaches, Stuart McDonald and Dan Ryan of the COVID-19 Actuaries Response Group will discuss actuarial work in the light of the COVID-19 pandemic, with a particular focus on assumption setting. What will be the medium term impacts of the pandemic and our response to it? What use can currently be made of techniques like experience analysis, that have historically served actuaries well, if recent data is exceptional and the future does not look like the past? This session is aimed at senior actuaries and will be of particular interest to those involved in setting, reviewing, approving or auditing actuarial assumptions.
Chair
Stuart McDonald
Stuart is Head of Demographic Assumptions and Methodology for Lloyds Banking Group, where his multi-disciplinary team are responsible for assumptions about policyholder health and behaviour. These are used for pricing, risk management and valuation of around £170 billion of pension and annuity policies.
Stuart joined Lloyds in 2014 and built the longevity team which supported Scottish Widows’ launch into the Bulk Annuity market. Previously he held a variety of commercial and technical roles in insurance and reinsurance.
Stuart is a Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries and a Chartered Enterprise Risk Actuary. He plays an active role within the actuarial profession, currently serving on the Executive Committee of the Continuous Mortality Investigation. Early in 2020 he founded and co-chairs the COVID-19 Actuaries Response Group.
Speakers
Andrew Gaches FIA
Andrew leads Hymans Robertson’s Longevity Services to insurance and financial services clients and has many years’ experience advising major players in the longevity market.
His expertise was central to the establishment of Club Vita and he now focuses on guiding clients through the process of recognising, quantifying and managing the longevity risk they face, both in the context of pricing products and regulatory requirements under Solvency II. Andrew is a regular speaker at conferences, has written articles and authored papers on longevity, and is a long-standing member of industry working parties and committees.
Dan Ryan
Dan is an epidemiologist and digital demographer with 25 years experience in the insurance industry. He led global multi-disciplinary research teams at Swiss Re and Willis Towers Watson in diverse areas including forward-looking risk models, behavioural science and the rapid development of digital ecosystems that will transform how insurance is distributed and how risk is assessed, managed and mitigated.
Dan is an internationally recognised expert on demographic trends, emerging insurance risks and digital innovation. He pioneered the concept of disease-based models of mortality using electronic health records and was a key contributor to the development of the Pandemic Emergency Facility with the Institute of Medicine, WHO and World Bank.
Dan has an MA in Medical Sciences from Cambridge University and an MBA from Heriot-Watt University. He is currently engaged in a DHealth at the University of Bath that is examining the role of medication adherence in improving the management of hypertension in stroke