Wed 20 Sep 2023 - GLM has been the actuarial standard for technical rating models of retail GI business since the 1990s.
But that was 30 years ago – computing power has exploded since then, data science techniques have become available that can significantly outperform GLM, and the data itself is becoming richer and more complex. Isn’t it time for the profession to embrace the 21st century and move on from GLM?
Or would we just be locking ourselves into a machine learning “black box”? Is the loss of transparency and agency over our models too high a price to pay?
Hear from a panel of expert practitioners, who will explore both sides of the argument – and the space in between – to plot the way forward for rating in the 2020s and beyond.
Chair
Chair, IFoA GI Pricing Research Group
Head of Actuarial Data Science at Akur8
Bruno has been working as a pricing actuary and data scientist for the past 10 years, for insurance carriers and AI software companies. He has now been with Akur8 for 2 years as head of its actuarial data science team, whose mission is to help Akur8’s clients accelerate and optimise their pricing process thanks to transparent AI.
Director of Actuarial and Analytics EUR at The Travelers Companies
Freddy Brofman has more than 10 years experience in pricing roles across different companies. He holds a PhD from the University of Kent.
Head of Management Decision Analytics at Barnett Waddingham
Allan leads Barnett Waddingham’s management decision analytics team, employing the latest in data science techniques to help its clients understand the insight within their data and give them the courage to act upon them.
For the last 3 years Allan has worked closely with a UK specialist insurer to transform its actuarial pricing function. This included process review and model validation followed by process transformation, skills transfer, new tools and infrastructure, augmenting GLM models with deep learning and other modern machine learning techniques, and more.
For 2 years in partnership with Microsoft, Allan developed and delivered extensive hands-on courses on advanced analytics in the insurance industry with a focus on general insurance pricing and using R. Audience were global actuarial consultants and the courses received 100% positive recommender scores.
Allan created an end-to-end insights and analytics function for a £1 billion global health insurer, delivering growth through defining a new product set and launching it world-wide in only 18 months. Also, he has worked on substantial operational improvements, including cutting the claims cost line by 2% through better use of data and decisioning.
Allan has had client-side executive leadership roles with P&L, responsible for exploiting data and delivering EBITDA value from analytics at several companies, including Vodafone, Eircom, and Bupa Global.
Chair of the Actuarial Data Science Working Party at IFoA
Predictive Modeler at Allianz Commercial
Karol specialises in actuarial data science with a focus on XAI (eXplainable artificial intelligence) methods and automation. He has experience in portfolio analytics and predictive modelling from AXA XL, Allianz Commercial, and EY.
Karol is actively popularising the use of new algorithms and techniques as a conference speaker (GIRO 2022) and a contributor to The Actuary magazine (‘All clear: How Shapley values make opaque models more transparent’).
In the IFoA’s Actuarial Data Science Working Party he leads the research aimed at establishing which machine learning techniques are valuable for modern actuaries.
He is a part-qualified actuary and holds 2 master’s degrees: one in actuarial science and business analytics with distinction from Cass Business School and one in quantitative methods from Warsaw School of Economics. Apart from the actuarial field, Karol spends time working on algorithmic trading strategies for the cryptocurrency markets.
Chief Actuary at The Floow
A highly respected general insurance industry executive, Andy is a qualified actuary and has built up decades of experience running the pricing for motor products at consultancies as well as insurance companies such as DLG. He has spent the last 10 years as Chief Actuary at The Floow working with actuaries and data scientists to create risk scores and analytics from granular driving behaviour data using a wide range of techniques.
At The Floow Andy is accountable for ensuring that the telematics analysis is tailored to the needs of each client and that the scoring derived from The Floow's low-cost telematic system can be provided with actionable insights to improve pricing and increase customer loyalty and ROI.
Andy also has significant experience of industry issues built up over many years of active participation on ABI Motor Committee, MIB Levy Committee, and various actuarial working parties including one that won the Brian Hey prize for a GIRO paper on the winner's curse as well as the autonomous vehicle and the general insurance pricing groups.
At the weekends, Andy can either generally be found scuba diving with his rebreather off the south coast exploring wrecks and collecting dinner (crabs/lobsters/scallops).
Co Founder and CEO of Quantee
Dawid is Co Founder and CEO of Quantee, an award winning insurtech launched in 2018 which offers SaaS solutions for insurance pricing. Dawid is a qualified actuary and Fellow at the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries in the UK as well as the Polish Society of Actuaries, and has held previous actuarial roles at insurers across the UK, France, Poland, and Germany including Aviva, Royal London, and HannoverRe.
Chief Actuary at Old Mutual Insure
Ron Richman is Chief Actuary at Old Mutual Insure, where he is responsible for oversight of all actuarial activities in the OMI Group. Ron is a Fellow of the IFoA and the Actuarial Society of South Africa. He holds practicing certificates in short term insurance and life insurance from ASSA. Ron also has a Masters of Philosophy in Actuarial Science, with distinction, from the University of Cape Town.
He chairs the Actuarial Society of South Africa’s climate change committee and is the vice chair of the ASTIN board. Ron has a keen professional interest in the application of AI techniques to actuarial work and has published several papers demonstrating how this can be done.
Mikolaj supports clients globally to develop their pricing strategy using the Quantee platform in his role as an actuarial consultant. Mikolaj has previous experience in the UK, holding actuarial roles with Aviva and Grant Thornton, and actuarial and data science experience from Poland.
Consultant at LCP
Isabelle is a qualified actuary with a PhD in data science. She has experience helping insurers improve their pricing and introduce new methods, particularly in the motor pricing space. She is a consultant at LCP and focuses on a wide range of actuarial data science activities within the insurance analytics team.