17 March 2020
Your GI practice area research & thought leadership committee (“GIRTL”) is exploring three research projects, all with the theme of reaching outside of our immediate professional body. These initiatives ‑ Super Trends, Learning from Other Professions, and Public Data ‑ cover three angles of collaboration and knowledge interchange, that have the aim of enriching the offerings by the members of the practice area. Read on to learn more and keep in touch!
Super Trends
Medium term trends could affect a general insurance company in many ways. Climate change may come quickly to your mind, as may terrorism and cyber crimes. Other trends may also be impactful, such as technological, social, legal, economical, demographical and political ones. For some, we could partner with non actuarial experts to arrive at insights useful for the practice area. For others, we could scan outputs of these experts to mould into digests for use by the members in their work. Timeliness and relevance would be important for this work to be helpful.
Which three Super Trends would you say might be the most impactful for the clients of the members of the GI practice area?
Learning From Other Professions
If we are looking for the relevant expertise to collaborate with in Super Trends, here we are actively looking to learn from other professions who face similar challenges. Examples of these challenges are plenty. Architects and structural engineers face challenges to give 1 in 1,000 year assurance of various infrastructures. Weather forecasts are grappling with probabilistic forecasts. Statistical engineers are identifying glitches in processes through signals. Inventory planners are estimating quantities of thousands of lines of products to be produced in the next year. This project may involve laying aside our own challenges temporarily to understand deeply what the challenges of a profession are and how they engage with them. Or it may lead us to search for questions and professions that we could translate their solutions more readily.
Which three professions would you say might the GI Practice Area learn the most from through the processes sketched out above?
Public Data
The general insurance industry is a very data hungry one. The risks that our organisations cover are dynamic, diverse and could be very heterogeneous: to be able to price, reserve and manage accumulations would naturally demand extensive data sources. In the first instance, it would be useful to the practice area to summarise publicly available data sources, commenting on their relevance and credibility to the industry. The global nature of many of our members opens this project up to collaboration with other actuarial professional bodies.
Which three public organisations would you say we should start this piece of work on?
These initiatives are a response to a consultation exercise over September and October 2019 ‑ but they need your continuous support throughout! We are always happy to hear ideas ‑ however seemingly small or big, mainstream or peripheral. Questions and comments are also welcome. Additionally, you have seen each of the initiatives has a particular question to help you generate ideas for them. While you could wait until formal volunteer vacancy advertisements on the IFoA website, you might already want to explore how you could help.
There is no time limit, by when you could get in touch - contact us via the GIRTL email address: girtl@actuaries.org.uk. We look forward to hearing from you!