Risk Management For Insurers

This fully updated user-friendly second edition will quickly help you get to grips with risk management terms and techniques, and how they relate specifically to the insurance industry. It also demonstrates how Solvency II is already shaping the regulatory agenda and its likely impact on the insurance industry.

"Risk being its raw material, insurance has developed various techniques of valuation and risk transfer. Nowadays, these techniques - and first of all reinsurance, the favourite way of transferring risk- are entirely reassessed considering the development of Corporate Finance theory. Therefore, the approach retained here, originally for the actuarial course at Ensae, Paris may surprise some readers and students as it proposes a extended view of risk. We cover not only the mathematical aspects of Risk Management but also other fields relevant for Risk Management from economy or finance. We aim here at making bridges between all these fields through practical application to cat and life risk-management."--

Examines the concept of risk and explains how to evaluate and manage it. Provides risk financing alternatives. Investigates the fundamental assumptions underlying insurance. Describes the insurance contract.

Securitized Insurance Risk is one of the first books to focus exclusively on the convergence of the insurance and financial markets in risk management and the emergence of insurance risk as a non-correlated asset class. Written for insurers and investors alike, this book explores the opportunities available to forward-looking risk and investment managers. Chapters by prominent experts specifically address: the win-win principle behind securitizing insurance risk; current structures, including catastrophe bonds, structured notes, catastrophe options, and swaps; partnering financial market tools with traditional reinsurance programs; holding insurance risk, uncorrelated with stocks and bonds; pricing insurance risk instruments and evaluating basic risk; and regulatory and accounting concerns.

Major challenges for life insurance companies have been posed by an unprecedented wave of mergers and acquisitions in the insurance industry and the emergence of non-traditional competitors such as banks, mutual fund companies and investment advisory firms. This is the first book to analyze the determinants of firm performance in the life insurance industry by identifying the `best practices' employed by leading insurers to succeed in this dynamic business environment. The book draws upon data from insurer financial statements as well as upon an extensive survey of life insurer management practices and strategic choices in distribution systems, information technology, mergers and acquisitions, human resources and financial strategies. Generic strategies such as cost leadership, customer focus, and product differentiation are analyzed as well as strategic practices specific to the insurance industry. Best practices are identified by measuring the economic efficiency of insurers and by comparing firms across the industry. Both cost and revenue efficiency are measured relative to best practice efficient frontiers consisting of the industry's dominant life insurance firms. Economies of scale and the effects of mergers and acquisitions on efficiency are also analyzed. Financial strategies are examined with specific reference to pricing policy, valuation of assets and liabilities, and the current state of firm-level risk management systems. The benchmarks established are the result of extensive fieldwork that identifies key financial risks and methodologies to both measure and manage them at the firm level. The results discussed in the book indicate that firm performance is significantly correlated with management practices and strategic choices. Thus, life insurers can improve profitability by adopting optimal combinations of strategies. The book contains important new material on the effects of strategic choices in product distribution systems, information technology, mergers and acquisitions, human resources, and financial risk management policies. In the area of efficiency, the methodology provides a new approach for identifying peer groups of insurers and measuring the performance of individual insurers relative to their peer group. On the topics of risk and pricing, new insights are offered relative to current methodologies and in regard to areas where improvement is clearly warranted. The book concludes with an analysis of the future opportunities and challenges in the life insurance industry facing managers, and the strategic options available to them to cope with these changes.

The financial crisis of 2008 had little impact on the insurance industry globally, unlike the solvency issues within other financial sectors. This title looks at the major risk concerns within insurance and how the industry as a whole deals with potential threats to its business in the short, medium, and long term. It will demystify how insurers cope with liquidity risk, counterparty risk, tail-event risk (catastrophe), longevity risk, and the impact of climate change.

th This book is published to commemorate the 50 Anniversary of the S.S. Huebner Foundation for Insurance Education. Administered at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, the Huebner Foundation was established in 1941 to strengthen insurance education at the collegiate level by increasing the number of professors specializing in insurance and enriching the literature in the field. The financial support of leading life insurance companies has enabled the Foundation to provide post-graduate education for prospective insurance teachers and scholars. Through its fellowship program, the Foundation supports students in the Ph.D. program in Risk and Insurance at the Wharton School. The success of the Foundation is measured by the accomplishments of its alumni. Former Huebner Fellows play leading roles in every major area of insurance education. Fellows teach insurance to tens of thousands of undergraduate and MBA students each year and have written hundreds of books and thousands of articles on insurance. Fellows hold leadership positions at the American College, the Life Office Management Association, and the Certified Employee Benefit Specialist Program. The Foundation was created in honor of Dr. Solomon S. Huebner, a pioneer in insurance education. Dr. Huebner taught the first organized course on the economics of insurance ever offered at the collegiate level in 1904. An internationally recognized author and teacher, Dr. Huebner had a profound impact on both insurance education and the insurance industry. He served on the faculty of the Wharton School for more than nearly fifty years.