News & Views

As well as being of fundamental importance to society at large, climate change is becoming an increasingly hot topic in the finance sector. In this article we look into two areas related to this: the recommendations and supervisory statement from the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, set up by the PRA; and some of the wider considerations around Environmental, Social and Governance investment.

In October three APR staff attended and spoke at the two IFoA ‘Count Me In’ events in Edinburgh and London. These events were aimed at giving prospective actuaries tips on joining the profession, with a particular emphasis on increasing diversity in the profession, something we ourselves are increasingly focusing on.

Following the April 2019 exam sitting, the first under Curriculum 2019, we took a look at the changes and how they affect employers, managers and actuarial students – we have now updated this article with further observations from the September 2019 sitting.

In June 2018 the IASB released an Exposure Draft covering some changes to the IFRS 17 regulations – in our view these amendments are generally positive. We look at each of the key amendments in turn and try to tease out the impact this may have for insurers gearing up for IFRS 17.

With the first legs of the 2019 Champions League quarter finals about to kick off, what were the chances of an all-English tie when the draw was made, or indeed two, or none at all. The maths behind calculating these probabilities is relatively straightforward, but what about simulating the various scenarios in a model?

In this month’s IFRS 17 article Ajay Kotecha looks at the final building block in the set – the time value of money (or effect of discounting), including what the standard says about the methodology to use and some of the complexities around calculation.

APR offers all employees 1% of their work time to support “a good cause such as a voluntary organisation or to a local community project”. Adam Smith describes how he made use of this allowance to support the Teach First Futures scheme.

Over the course of 2018 we posted a number of articles aimed at introducing the key features and concepts of IFRS 17 to help Nearly / Newly Qualified Actuaries get to grips with this new accounting standard. Our next article looking at discounting will be out shortly, but in the meantime we thought it might be helpful to give a brief summary / reminder of the articles published so far.

Having got to grips with the Contractual Service Margin, in our latest IFRS 17 article we look at the Risk Adjustment – another building block which is designed to cover the usual variability of future cash flows around the best estimate over the lifetime of a product.

All of the results from the autumn actuarial exams are now in, and with an overall pass rate of over 75% across all exams sat the results for the Autumn exam season have seen APR’s staff demonstrate their quality once again.