2 November 2021
Karen Brolly, Life Practice Board Chair, provides an update.
We always have lots to discuss at our Life Board meetings and since we are currently meeting virtually, we have opted to hold our meetings over two shorter sessions, rather than one long meeting. The Life Board’s most recent meetings, to start the new session were held on 14 and 19 October.
There are details on the Life Board membership on our webpage, and we started our meeting by noting the following recent changes in our membership:
- We are very grateful to those stepping down from the Board after valued service – Paul Fulcher and Kevin Arnott
- And delighted to welcome new members – Elaine Murphy and Mudi Ugono. With Sunil Sharma also joining as our Council member and James Tufts taking up a member seat on the Board now that his Council term has ended
- Another piece of great news is that Phil Simpson is now serving as Deputy Chair and will provide (amongst other things!) continuity when I step down next year
We then looked back over the 20/21 session and we noted the following highlights from our activities:
- We established a post-meeting blog for the Life Board meetings to help keep members informed on our activities.
- We had an active programme of webinars for the Life community, including a series of events to form the Life Conference in November 2020 and a Chief Actuaries Forum.
- We invited many of our working parties to share their research with us at Board meetings and worked closely with the Life Research Sub-committee to establish new working parties and bring those that had completed their work to a close
- We worked closely with our contacts on the Sustainability Board to establish our engagement plan and initiate the Life Climate Risk Working Party.
- We responded to many consultations from the PRA and HMT and had meetings with the FCA and PRA, as well as providing input to important consumer research papers such as the Poverty Premium report.
- While much of our work has a UK focus, we also continue to support members in other countries, with specific mention to the Life Asia Sub-committee, led by Chantal Bond.
Naturally, our work is a continuation of many current topics and we also discussed our objectives for the year ahead and these can be viewed here.
We are always delighted to welcome visitors to our Board meetings as they share information on Life Practice area activities from around the Profession. During our October meetings, we heard from Gordon Woods and Andrew Cairns, representing the Actuarial Research Centre (ARC) group who are looking at the Modelling, Measurement and Management of Longevity and Morbidity Risk and their important research can be found on the ARC webpage. We were also joined by Anthony Coughlan and Derek Wright, members of the Financial Reporting Group (FRG), to help to ensure that the Life Board is joined up with their activities.
I hope this helps to provide a summary of our activities, but please do get in touch with any of our Board members if you would like to know more.
Our next meetings will be held in early December and we are looking forward to welcoming Louise Pryor who will be joining us for part of our meeting.
Click here to find out more about the Life Board and its activities