Reinsurance Reporting vs Actuarial

Professional Actuarial Topics Property/Casualty
1

This sounds a little vague, but our family is likely to experience some changing circumstances and in order to continue to support the family, i may need to make a lateral move in my current employer.

The things is, the positions is not exactly “Actuarial” and more along the lines of “Reporting”

Specifically, it involves providing data/reports to our parent company or reinsurer on CAT exposures or other components of our reinsurance agreements. Things like policies with limits above a profile or in certain catastrophe exposure areas or historic large claims , and this would be across all of our personal and commercial lines.

I think their may be some involvement with active even monitoring in close to real time. So say there’s a EQ/hurricane/wildfire, i would be involved in reporting to leadership and our parent company leadership about losses as they come in.

So, this certainly has the draw of occasionally being very high profile reporting to the highest levels of leadership, but my biggest hesitations are two fold. One, it’s not clear how much of any actual analysis there is to be done or in general how much i’ll be able to drive business decisions, and Two, i don’t know that this helps me advance my career as a pricing actuary ,which i am in my current role of doing indications, performing analysis, making change proposals to senior leadership, then shepherding these proposals through the regulators and IT for correct implementation.

So given what i’ve described, would this help my marketability for future actuarial roles? My biggest concern is this is a one way road, and there’s not really going back to actuarial once you exit.

Till All Are One,

Epistemus

2

It can get you some exposure to another area of the company that you wouldn’t otherwise be involved in.

I think one area of “analysis” you might get into is understanding the costs of insuring such events and being able to better assess whether a given reinsurance treaty is cost effective for the company.

3

This was my role for a number of years. It did not limit my ability to advance my career or drive results. However, my career has gone in a non-traditional direction. That direction was by choice as i never really liked the more traditional pricing role. It may open up reinsurance pricing roles for you in the future depending on what, exactly you’ll be doing.

4

Hi. Such a role could answer questions like:

  1. How much reinsurance should we buy and where should the reinsurance attach?
  2. What is the expected net cost of reinsurance? How should the cost be allocated by profit center, branch, line of business, etc.?
  3. Where should this net cost get reflected? In rates? In internal profitability reports? In bonus calculations?
  4. Should a branch be allowed to internally buy back a lower reinsurance attachment, and at what price?
  5. What assumptions does your external property cat model make, and are they appropriate for your company?
1 Like
5

I think with all the risk analysis involved in reinsurance such a role is a good opportunity for an actuary. If it interests you go for it.

6

May i ask, what kind of path your career has taken? It’s possible a less traditional path could be good for me too.