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Professor Karel Van Hulle lectures at the Business and Economics Faculty of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and participates in its Insurance Research Centre

He  also lectures at the Economics Faculty of the Goethe University in Frankfurt, where he is a member of the Executive Board of the International Centre for Insurance Regulation and participates in the Master Study Programme in Actuarial Science and Financial Mathematics at the University of Abomey-Calavi in Benin. He is an academic member of the Insurance and Reinsurance Stakeholder Group of EIOPA and was recently nominated as a member of the Public Interest Oversight Board which oversees the standard setting activities of the International Federation of Accountants.

Professor Van Hulle is a lawyer by training, studying law at the KU Leuven and then undertaking a postgraduate degree in American Business Law at the Marquette University Law School in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. 

After spending eight years with the Belgian Banking Commission, Professor Van Hulle joined the European Commission in 1984 and undertook a number of roles relating to Company Law and Financial Reporting.   In various senior roles, his accomplishments included the introduction and negotiation of the IAS Regulation (2002), requiring all listed EU companies to prepare their consolidated accounts on the basis of IAS/IFRS and the Take-over bids Directive (2004), introducing a harmonised regime for take-over bids in the EU. 

From 2004 until March 2013, he served as Head of Insurance and Pensions in the Internal Market and Services Directorate General.  In that capacity, he represented the European Commission within the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority (EIOPA) and was a member of the Technical Committee of the International Association of Insurance Supervisors (IAIS). His main project was the elaboration and negotiation of a new solvency regime for the insurance and reinsurance sector (Solvency II).

In 1990 he was nominated Distinguished International Lecturer in Accounting by the American Accounting Association and Distinguished Fellow of the IAIS by the International Association of Insurance Supervisors in 2013.

Professor Van Hulle’s contribution to the actuarial community has been to ensure that regulators across Europe adopt approaches that reflect a quantifiable risk-based approach that is consistent with an actuarial assessment of risks.  A friend of the actuarial profession in the widest sense he has ensured that there is a good dialogue between the European Commission and actuaries across Europe which has helped ensure that at its heart regulation reflects the public interest that is part of the IFoA charter.  IFoA members have also benefited from listening to Professor Van Hulle at a number of events and conferences in recent years, which has helped in the understanding of devising a practical system of regulation.  As an Honorary Fellow, the IFoA and the wider European actuarial community expects to benefit from Professor Van Hulle’s continued research and public speaking engagements over the coming years.