Such a great show
As a career Associate, I get this kind of treatment every once in a while from Fellows. But that’s rare.
I don’t doubt you experience this, and it sucks. I’m grateful to have not had that experience, and I try to never talk down to others because of their credentials or lack thereof. The ONLY time I am less gracious with non-actuaries is when they start telling me how to do my job, and not in a high level/lack of understanding way, but in a detailed, “I know better than you despite having zero experience in this” kind of way. Which happens more than it should but not so often to make me miserable. Actuarial drop-outs are the worst at this, like they have something to prove. Chip on their shoulder. But most aren’t like that, thankfully.
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The problem with insurance products is that the loss is in expectation, and also at a lag. Premium discount is immediate. With enough luck, the company undercutting might not actually suffer any losses in the foreseeable future.
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Luck is often not the best strategy
let’s crunch the numbers again 
:crunch:
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The worst part was one of them was my boss. When I told them I wouldn’t be taking any more exams, they basically took away all of my work and gave me basically data entry stuff to do. I took the hint and found a new position not too long after that but the person who took over the stuff I was working on just didn’t get it and I had to deal with their questions for a long time. It all worked out for me in the long run and taught me a good lesson.
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I was actually excluded from a company lunch once because I didn’t have enough actuarial exams yet.
Also, after rotating to a new position, my new boss’s first words to me were “I don’t usually work with people at your level, so I don’t know what to do with you. [More senior actuarial student] is up here (indicates height with hand gesture) and you’re down here (lowers hand).”
I haven’t gotten much of this in the past. But one funny story that this reminded me of is one time we had a price for a large account for X, and an MGU/UW called up saying the actuary price maybe X but the real world price is X - 500k or something.
It’s tricky cause you can get “actuary prices” that are the result of some modeling/assumptions/etc to arrive at a certain price, but then the more realistic market price is 0.8X, or 1.2X but that can very often be a genuine difference of assumptions (such as how credible the risk is of large losses similar to ones from 15 years ago on a trended basis at trend rate y% for example).
Conversely you can have the underwriter type pricing which is just silly in which case you either aggressively accept the insurance or self-insure depending on the details
To be fair, when the account is just large enough for large account pricing it’s really anyone’s guess. But, my two cents are that a lot of UWs don’t factor in expense ratios and commissions into the assumptions.
In my area we randomly do some large account pricing throughout the year but our distribution channel doesn’t really focus on it and its not our goal. I am mostly in middle market.
Oh yes I love the broker net premium (net of our commission, of course)
One thing I often liked to do when asked to change a price from $X to $0.8X or lower was to see what sort of assumptions I’d have to make to get to that price.
We’re earning 6% on our portfolio… what if we earned 12%? Oh, that only gets us to $0.88X.
Hmmm, what about 15% ROI and mortality is 90% of our “best guess” experience study supported mortality.
That gets us to 0.82X. Maybe 15% ROI and 80% of our best guess mortality will do it. Then when some bigwig asks if can’t make an exception, I point out that this is what it would take to meet our IRR target. Using our actual best guess assumptions the requested price has a negative IRR.
Having these numbers handy is illustrative in pointing out just how ludicrous the request is.
Oh I completely agree yeah you can come up with some pretty interesting implied assumptions if you reverse engineer the assumptions from the provided premium.
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Also, can come up with a multiple of the current sales assumption required to meet the profit target.
“You (pointing to CEO) want this (profit). You (pointing Sales) want price lowered to this (X% of premium). To get both, you (pointing at Sales) will have to sell Y times as many policies as the current sales assumption. You (pointing at Sales) sign off on that target, and sure, we’ll lower the premium.”
This was the crux of the Macro Pricing note that was on the ILA syllabus many moons ago: give sales/marketing the responsibility for setting the sales level!!! 
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