I am not sure what a consulting actuary do… from what i read in their company profile, seems like their only services only to calculate reserve needed in post employment benefit or technical reserve for insurance company. Please enlighten me
what line of business?
i know companies that hire consultants to do pricing, health insurance rate increase, all valuation work, even if they have actuaries in staff
Personally i am interested in P&C, but open to other lob
Cobsulting actuaries do whatever is asked, for a very large fee.
The End
Now. What you do as, say entry-level?
Whatever is asked.
The End.
Here’s a concrete example for you to chew on:
The state of Colorado wanted to know what the insurance cost would be for commercial coverage of for-hire private drivers (like Uber or Lyft).
Can’t ask the insurance industry in general because this is such a new exposure that most won’t have adequate data on the exposure and the one that might will be reluctant to share it where the info is likely to become very public.
So the state hired a consulting actuary to provide an estimate of these costs. Likely means that the consultant would work for this problem is to use various proxies for the exposures and several assumptions. Then work through to range of reasonable assumptions to get a sense of the scope for the range of likely answers to the given problem.
Now, the insurance industry has some starting point to use if they want to start writing that type of business.
Now, private companies might do the same sort of thing if they want to enter a market that they have no real expertise within.
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A couple more examples:
A company doesn’t have an appointed actuary, so they hire someone at a consulting firm to be their appointed actuary and come up with a range of reasonable reserves at year-end and opine on the booked reserves.
Companies have to have their financials audited each year. As part of that, consulting actuaries will take company data and calculate reserve ranges to certify that booked reserves are reasonable. (similar to above, but they aren’t acting as the appointed actuary.) they will also validate that the reserves coming from reserving systems match the reserves actually carried by the company.
A company is entering a new product line that they don’t have experience in. They hire a consulting actuary to gather industry data to help price the product. They may help develop a reserving model for the company to use as well.
Plus pretty much anything a Company can’t or doesn’t have capacity to do on their own.
If the consulting actuary works for a firm that sells reserving or pricing software, they may be hired to implement the software at the company, or write custom enhancements that a company wants.
A lot of what I used to do was a contract where a massive insured pays a bunch of money to have actuaries analyze/debate on their behalf the appropriate rate (particularly WC and GL) with the insurer, since risks of that size tended to be all mostly individually rated.