13 October 2020
The Life Board meets five times a year and our last meeting was held around the virtual table on 23 September with the usual packed agenda and I thought I would share a summary of our discussions. I have recently taken on the Chair of the Life Board from Colin Dutkiewicz, who expertly chaired for the last two years.
Each of the Practice Boards has a member of Council in their midst and our Council member, James Tufts started our meeting by giving us an overview of the IFoA Foundation.
For this meeting we also had a guest appearance from Grahame Stott, Chair of the Management Board, who talked through some ideas for making our Practice Boards more agile. Some of the thoughts behind making IFoA groups more nimble are around reviewing the current governance that can potentially make things move a little slowly. A good example of where things have moved with more agility are in the ICAT workstreams and Colin Dutkiewicz gave us an overview of the activities of the ICAT, including the exciting news that the work being done in one of the workstreams will be used to inform SAGE. Colin also gave a separate update on the working parties that continue to progress with various activities under the Life Research Sub-committee. A note of the current working parties can be found on the Life research working parties page.
The reach of the Life Board is international and we had a great update from Chantal Bond on the work of the Life Asia Sub-committee who have been given renewed focus under Chantal’s leadership and are looking to leverage work from the existing IFRS17 working parties by giving their outputs a particular view to issues faced in the Asian market.
Steven Graham, Technical Policy Manager from the IFoA is a regular visitor to our Life Board meetings and he joined to represent the Life Standard and Consultations Sub-committee and provide an update on the various consultations that we are responding to. This included a recent request from the House of Commons Treasury Committee to submit our views on the economic impact of coronavirus.
We also went through an overview of cross practice activities that have an impact on life insurance and this included a CMI update from CMI Committee member, Cobus Daneel, where we learnt more about the consultation that is taking place on how companies might deal with pandemic in longevity modelling.
The other sub-committee which reports in the Life Board is Life Lifelong Learning and the main topic from this committee was on this year’s Life Conference. As you might expect, there has been a lot of work to organise the online events which will take the place of the usual in person conference. Full information is available on the Life conference page and I would encourage everyone working in the life area to have a look at the sessions on offer and register to join in.
Our meeting ended with a discussion on how we, as the Life Board, might best communicate with everyone who is working in the life area. We agreed that one step towards this would be that we issue a short note, like this, after each Board meeting. We’d be delighted to hear if this is useful or if you have other suggestions for more two-way communications.
The Life Board will meet next on 18 November at what should have been our conference based meeting in Edinburgh. I also look forward to providing a short video update as part of the conference agenda – if you have any questions please get in touch!