Non-life

“People who live in glass houses should take out insurance.” – Unknown Author

Our view of the UK non-life or general insurance interim actuarial resources market is that it lacks the maturity, quality and depth of its equivalent on the life insurance side.  This is partly driven by a limited pool of contractors and a large number of non-life insurers, a combination of which does not lead to good cost control nor a strong incentive always to improve individual performance.

This has been borne out in conversations with a wide number of non-life clients, where feedback is commonly that while there are some high quality non-life contractors out there, they are of limited supply and very careful quality control is required to ensure good value is obtained.

While APR has been a leading supplier of interim actuarial resource in the Life insurance sector for many years, we have recently grown significantly in the non-Life sector by leveraging the benefits of our unique operating model to an increasing number of (re)insurers via secondment of our own permanent actuarial employees. Key advantages of our staff model are:

• Known and demonstrable quality: we are highly selective, and we provide excellent training & development, throughout employment.
• Our model allows us to provide flexible options in a market with a limited supply of quality contractors.
• Clients can trust us to provide the right people for the task, based on their positive experience.

We also remain keen to work with, and expand, our pool of non-life contractors.  We actively seek out contractors who empathise with the above views and are eager to work with a company that values their quality and individual skill-sets, and can help to differentiate them across our non-life client base.

What does APR offer?

“Accidents, try to change them – it’s impossible.  The accidental reveals man.” – JB Priestly

APR’s staff have provided services to non-life insurers in areas including:

Pricing

• Implementation of London market pricing solutions via our strategic partnership with a leading Insurtech software provider.
• Re-engineering, documenting and enhancing crucial pricing models.

Reserving

• BAU support to non-life reserving teams across a range of different business lines.
• Research on hot topics in reserving, eg social inflation.
• Construction of PPO reserving models.
• Testing support to migrations of actuarial reserving software.
• Specifying requirements and developing models for IFRS17.

Capital

• Development and assumption setting for Internal Models.
• Internal Model documentation & major change submissions.
• Solvency II Pillar 3 support.

Risk

• Core actuarial second-line work, including Validation, SSTs, ORSA, deep dives.

Process Improvement

• Automation and streamlining of finance processes, commonly in Excel VBA and Access.
• Transformation of heavily manual processes (e.g. production of SBFs) into an automated routine.

A number of our staff have wide exposure to other key software used commonly in the non-life industry including SAS, R and @Risk, in addition to holding strong core skills in areas such as Excel, VBA, Access and SQL.  We are also investing significantly in training our staff in areas such as data analytics  and data visualization, which we expect to be of particular interest to non-life insurers.

For certain other areas of non-life practice such as pricing, capital modelling and development of Igloo, Emblem and Remetrica models, we are able to resource such projects mainly via our pool of non-life contractors.

Why use APR?

Most of the reasons why clients choose to work with APR are equally valid in the Non-life sector as on the life side; these include the quality of our people, as demonstrated by our client testimonials, our understanding of their skill-sets and client requirements and our clear proposition focused specifically on interim actuarial solutions.

One Chief Actuary of a non-life company recently summed up the quality of our staff:

“I just wanted to provide some feedback on John. In short he has been fantastic. We have all been very impressed by his ability to understand details quickly, his professionalism, diligence and great work output.  He is making tremendous progress and really helping us improve our process and documentation.  Thank you for recommending him and we are very pleased with the results.”

Similar sentiments were expressed by another Head of Actuarial Pricing:

“Marc is doing an excellent job – he gets on well with the team and his work is very high quality. He is clearly a very bright guy who is quick at picking up our requirements and producing smart solutions. He was exactly what we needed on this particular project so I’m very pleased we took him on.”