2021 CAS Virtual Trunk Show

Dec 8

10:00 – 11:15 AM ET

Mining for Gold: Text Analytics in Insurance

Insurers collect vast quantities of unstructured text data through normal business operations. Claim notes, loss control reports, and customer feedback are a few common examples. Language is messy and text data, in its unstructured form, is of limited use. Natural Language Processing is a quickly-growing subfield of Artificial Intelligence which aims to read, decipher, and understand language in order to gain valuable insights from text data. Actuaries can look to this field for a range of techniques, from simple to highly complex, which unlock this previously underutilized data source. Features derived through text mining add value to predictive models and other analytical efforts. Claims and underwriting are two applications where actuaries and data scientists can support decision making with text analytics
Learning Objectives:

1. Describe techniques for processing text data.
2. Generate useful text features for predictive modeling and decision support.
3. Identify promising use cases for text analytics.

Speakers:

Yelena Kropivnitskaya
Yelena Kropivnitskaya is a strategic-minded and results-driven Data scientist with a track record of successfully launching projects and publications. Experienced in catastrophe and machine learning modelling with over nine years of research experience. Successful at utilization of innovative machine learning-powered algorithms for traditional and non-traditional insurance applications. Currently leading Data Analytics team of actuaries and data scientists at Wawanesa Insurance.

Liam McGrath
Liam is a Data Scientist in Willis Towers Watson's Insurance Consulting and Technology (ICT) practice. His focus is helping insurers build predictive modeling and artificial intelligence solutions for pricing, underwriting and claim functions. Liam has presented in various insurance forums on topics including natural language processing and model interpretability.

11:30 AM - 12:45 PM ET

Snorkeling the ASOP’s

During this session, members of the Committee on Professionalism Education will highlight and summarize key provisions of several Actuarial Standards of Practice relevant to all casualty actuaries, including ASOP’s 41, 23, 56, and 38.

Learning Objectives:

1. Apply the Actuarial Standards of Practice (ASOP’s) to actuarial work.
2. Recognize actuarial gray areas and respond in a manner that upholds the reputation of the actuarial profession.
3. Utilize resources available to help actuaries abide by the standards.

Speakers:

Peter Royek
Peter is a member of the CAS Committee on Professionalism Education.

John Gleba
Mr. Gleba has been a member of the Professionalism Education Committee for almost 20 years and is a frequent speaker on professionalism topics.

1:45 - 3:00 PM ET

Cyber Market – Where Do We Go from Here?

The Cyber insurance market had enjoyed unhindered growth and profitability for much of the last decade. In the last 18-24 months we have seen a material shift in threat actor activity resulting in increasing losses, concerns around the rating environment and the ability to assess the true exposure in cyber risk; the result is a rapidly hardening market. The panel dives into some of these challenges the cyber market is battling and also what we can expect to come in the near future.

Learning Objectives:

1. Learn about the evolution of cyber insurance underwriting
2. Take on the challenges facing Cyber risk insurance
3. Differentiate Cyber from other lines of business

Speakers:

Norman Niami
P&C actuary with more than 30 years of actuarial experience, is Vice President, Actuary at APCIA. Niami worked at Zurich Insurance’s London offices most recently as a pricing actuary in the Global Underwriting of Commercial Insurance. His Zurich role included actuarial responsibility for the global Cyber portfolio. Prior to his Zurich role, he was the Deputy Chief Insurance Actuary at the UK’s Government Actuary’s department. Niami started his actuarial role at the California State Compensation Insurance Fund and then joined NCCI. Prior to moving to the UK, he was Senior Vice president and Actuary at Willis.

Samuel Tashima
Sam Tashima is a Director and Actuary at Aon, where he leads highly innovative projects in the specialization of Cyber Quantification, Intellectual Property, and Complex Casualty Risk Analytics. Having spent 10+ years in the industry, he has built a reputation with clients and Aon leaders as a collaborator and problem solver.

Wanchin Chou
Wanchin Chou (FCAS, MAAA, CPCU, CSPA, CCRMP) is the chief insurance actuary at CT DOI since 2016.  He is responsible for the Property & Casualty as well as Life & Health financial regulation.  He has 30 years of insurance experience in the US as well as Worldwide.  He currently serves as the Chair for the CAT Risk SG and a few NAIC (National Association of Insurance Commissioner) committees as a member and he is also a member for the AAA Cyber Risk Task Force.

Prior to CT DOI, Wanchin worked 13 years for Liberty International as a VP and chief analytics officer in 2015 where he provided actuarial services in pricing and reserving as well as developing modeling capabilities.

Eduard Alpin
Eduard Alpin currently serves as chief actuary at Resilience Insurance, a cyber insurance program manager that combines insurance and cybersecurity services into one offering that helps clients both prevent cyberattacks from happening and mitigate losses if they do. Prior to joining Resilience, Eduard served as director of cyber solutions at Verisk, managing their cyber insurance underwriting, rating, data and analytics solutions.

Frank Grossman
Frank Grossman, FSA, FCIA, MAAA is an independent consultant with over 30 years of experience in Canada and the US, and is currently based in Toronto. His particular focus is operational risk, including pricing and model risk. Frank is a member of the AAA Cyber Risk Task Force.

3:15 - 4:30 PM ET

Climate Change and Risk Management

A changing climate creates a risk to, and opportunity for, actuaries specializing in measuring risk of natural hazards. The use of traditional insurance ratemaking techniques, which typically consider risk over a time horizon of one year, may limit the effectiveness of actuaries in contributing to the growing field of climate change research. By extending the time horizon under study, and broadening the scope of their analysis, actuaries may be able be provide significant value in assessing the financial implications of this risk. This session will present a case study that quantifies the current countrywide exposure to flooding, how it could be impacted by climate change, how this could affect the financial health of residential householders, whether it could impair their ability to meet their mortgage obligations, and what resulting effects might impact other parties. We hope to persuade attendees that actuaries can make significant contributions to climate change research.

Learning Objectives:

1. Quantify the financial implications of catastrophic risk and contribute to the field of climate change research.
2. Explain the scope of interactions between climate change, flood risk, flood insurance participation, and mortgage risk.
3. Estimate the impact of climate change on flood risk using catastrophe models.

Speakers:

David Evans
Dave is a Consulting Actuary in the Milliman, San Francisco Office whose career has focused on cat exposed property and predictive modeling. At Milliman, Dave has assisted insurers, MGAs, reinsurers, regulators, and other entities with various flood related analyses. Dave also developed Milliman’s countrywide flood rating plan to support private flood carriers in closing the protection gap. Dave is an FCAS and holds a B.S. in Statistics from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo.

Cody Webb
Cody Webb is a Fellow of the Casualty Actuarial Society, Chartered Property Casualty Underwriter, and a Principal and Consulting Actuary with Milliman San Francisco. His experience includes extensive research on policy issues impacting the insurance industry, particularly relating to catastrophic risk. In his role as a consulting actuary, Cody’s role includes assessing and pricing catastrophe risk for primary insurance companies. Cody has also written several articles and white papers on catastrophe risk, and is a regular speaker at CAS meetings and seminars.

Brandon Katz
Brandon specializes in engineering natural catastrophe risk models for a wide range of clients including those from the insurance/financial industries and government. He is currently involved in developing and deploying probabilistic models and risk maps with a focus on quantifying the impact of future climate change scenarios.