Life - Karen BrollyKaren Brolly provided an update from the Life Board.

The most recent Life Board was held on 18 November 2020 which coincided with the online Life Conference events. We should have been together in Edinburgh as part of the conference but as it was a rather wet and windy day in Scotland,  I’m sure that some were glad that they hadn’t had to make a landing at Edinburgh airport earlier in the day.

As we gathered, the feeling around the virtual table was that there was a lot going on in many of our day jobs as everyone approached the end of a very different year, so we worked through our agenda as efficiently as we could as there was a lot to get through!

One of our important themes is communication and this was discussed early in the agenda as we welcomed Dan Georgescu, editor of The Actuary to our meeting. It was great to hear from Dan first hand and we considered the hot topics that would merit an article in future editions of our profession’s magazine.

We continued our discussion on hot topics as we covered the task of agreeing what the objectives and areas of focus should be for the Life Board in the year ahead. Look out for more details on this coming soon. 

We then turned to an update from Colin on the ICAT workstreams where we noted that one life workstream in particular had been very active and produced lots of useful material on assumption setting.

There is a lot of activity being coordinated by Steven Graham, Technical Policy Manager and his colleagues and we discussed our approach to the various consultation responses that are ongoing at the moment including the HMT SII review.

As a regular agenda item, we discussed cross practice activities and a particular area that was highlighted at this meeting was the Sustainability Board. To cover this we were joined by David Ford who is a member of the Sustainability Board who provides liaison with the Life Board. As with all of the practice boards, the Life Board has be tasked with creating an engagement plan on Climate Change which can be implemented in 2021. Again this will be an area that we will share more on soon.

With all our important topics covered, we concluded our meeting. We will reconvene for our next meeting on 16 February and as ever we welcome any thoughts or comments from all our members.