Category 1 of 12 – What is risk management
The profession’s Risk Management Board is developing a ‘Risk Management Hub’ for its risk management community in order to centralise high quality risk management knowledge in one place.
This first section of the Risk Management Hub is an introduction.
You will be able to find everything you need to gain an initial grounding in the discipline, and to be able to answer the question: “What is Risk Management?”. Below you’ll find a curated collection of materials designed to help you gain:
- A view of the scale of ERM
- An understanding of how it is implemented in practice
- How it needs to develop to be of interest to actuaries
- How actuaries can contribute to the usefulness of the discipline.
Does ERM make for better business? Does it justify the spend?
Enterprise Risk Management or ERM has been around for about fifteen years. Over that time, it emerges as a management discipline, as these papers demonstrate. Yet the final paper, albeit dates, highlights a lack of rigour that might worry the more theoretical.
The two articles bring in human aspects of risk management. The first summarises important human factors, the second (John Kay is always worth reading) describes how previous risk modelling approaches may have missed the point about risk.
All of which is ably consolidated in Douglas Hubbard’s The Failure of Risk Management. Douglas is very kind about actuaries in risk management. He is also scientific in his puncturing of many common risk management tools and techniques.
Please do email risk@actuaries.com with your views on the material chosen, or suggest better material.
Papers
- Institute and Faculty of Actuaries; Institution of Civil Engineers. Handling uncertainty – the key to truly effective Enterprise Risk Management. 2011
- G. Dickinson (2001). Enterprise Risk Management: its origins and conceptual foundation. The Geneva Papers on Risk and Insurance 26(3), 360-366. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0440.00121
- M. Acharyya and J. Johnson (2006). Investigating the development of Enterprise Risk Management in the insurance industry: an empirical study of four major European insurers. 2006.
(Available via ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/255605033_Investigating_the_Development_of_Enterprise_Risk_Management_in_the_Insurance_Industry_An_Empirical_Study_of_Four_Major_European_Insurers] - M.H. Tripp et al. (2008). Enterprise Risk Management from the general insurance perspective. British Actuarial Journal (2008) 14(3), 433-541. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1357321700001781
- P. Bromiley et al. (2015). Enterprise Risk Management: review, critique, and research directions. Long Range Planning 48(4), 265-276. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lrp.2014.07.005
Articles
- G. Fulcher and M.F.J Edwards (2013). Risk: Behaviour under control? The Actuary (2013) October, 26-28.
- Interview with John Kay [N. Silver (2013). The mild-mannered prophet of doom. The Actuary (2013) April, 19-22.]
Books
The Failure of Risk Management: why it’s broken and how to fix it, by Douglas Hubbard, 2nd edition, 2020.
(Access eBook after member login to IFoA eLibrary via OpenAthens)
IFoA Library also holds 1st edition, 2009: (Access eBook after member login to IFoA eLibrary via OpenAthens).
External Bodies
- Chartered Enterprise Risk Actuary
- The Institute of Risk Management (or IRM)
- The Association of Insurance and Risk Managers (or AIRMIC)
- Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission (or COSO)
External Material
COSO Enterprise Risk Management – Integrating with Strategy and Performance
Filter or search events
Events calendar
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Insurers’ hidden risk from reinsurance recaptures; the perspective of UK annuity writers
29 June 2022There is a lack of publicly available information covering the practices insurers employ to manage their exposure to reinsurance recapture risk. A working party was set-up to shed light on the different approaches insurers use to mitigate this complicated to manage risk. This report is intended to form part of a publicly available information repository that market practitioners can refer to and reflect on as best practice evolves and develops.
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Climate Solvency The Actuaries Carbon Collaboration: Applying Actuarial Concepts to Carbon Emissions
6 July 2022The Actuaries’ Carbon Collaboration (ACC) is a group of actuaries and other professionals working towards a coherent understanding of the issues around greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by considering them in an actuarial context.
Emissions into and absorption from the atmosphere can be modelled in the same way that we model variable cash flows, including the impacts of uncertain quantities and timing. The ACC’s work investigates both the insights that this analogy provides and its limitations.
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Sessional Meeting: Data and Modelling Considerations for mental health in life insurance
11 July 2022This talk presents the work of the Data and Modelling workstream of the IFoA Mental Health Working Party. We explore data and modelling considerations in the risk assessment and underwriting of mental health conditions. We will also consider how newer risk factors and improved data availability might open up opportunities for additional underwriting and product designs.
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Pensions Dashboards
12 July 2022As the industry prepares for Pensions Dashboards, we have lined up a specialist panel who is at the heart of the ongoing work in this area. Hear the latest developments, future proposals and have the opportunity to put forward your questions to our speakers.
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Applying AI – From Concept to Practice
19 July 2022Artificial Intelligence is heralded as a game-changer to the ways industries use data, with the insurance industry especially looking to embrace these new technologies. This brings many questions – not least around data privacy, ethics, potential biases and so on – with regulators increasingly interested in developments.
Moreover, whilst the stunning progress of specific technologies such as Watson and Alphazero made headlines some years ago, current commercial applications of AI remain far from mature.
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This webinar will cover:
• Some background on the risks of misselling in an ESG context, including the DWS case
• Achieving positive impact is a strong antidote to the risks of greenwashing or ESG misselling, however this risks having a tension with fiduciary responsibilities
• This tension can be resolved with a concept called Universal Ownership
• Under Universal ownership, investors have an appetite to make a loss in order to achieve positive impact, and yet still have no compromise on their fiduciary responsibilities
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This session will focus on the transformation roadmap of the healthcare sector in KSA and the role of actuarial capabilities in enhancing its evolution to the desired end stage as per the objectives of the Vision 2030. The discussion will focus how the system has evolved so far and shed light on the expected future changes. Through examining the transformation, we will highlight how the sector is and can use actuarial expertise to not only assist with this transformation but also use basic actuarial principles to identify the key risks and their respective mitigation strategies.
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Sessional Meeting: Covid-19 and the Effectiveness of ERM Frameworks
Online15 August 2022The purpose of this research paper is to explore enterprise risk management lessons which can be learnt from the Covid-19 pandemic in preparation for potential future pandemics as well as other “gray rhino” or “black swan” events. This paper is not intended to be an all-encompassing solution to the issues presented by Covid-19; rather, the content has been provided to help drive discussions regarding how risk management processes may need to evolve in line with the dynamic nature of the underlying risks that they sometimes need to capture.
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The IFoA's Infrastructure Working Party, led by Chris Lewin, will present its new introductory guide to infrastructure investment, which will be published on the IFoA web-site prior to the webinar. Those readers whose institutions have already taken the plunge into infrastructure will know that it is a highly complex and diverse field of activity. This guide does not explore all the matters which investors take into account, but it does discuss many of the more important points, including the risks and past returns, benchmarking, and ESG and SDG considerations. Attendees will be invi
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Health – Our Greatest Asset
2 November 2022Health contributes to happiness at the personal, family, community and societal level. Health, importantly underpins all our economic security. This talk will explore the drivers of our health, the measurement of health and the steps we can take to improve health – most of which lie outside the NHS.