Pensions to GI

I have recently switched from Pensions consulting to GI and I have to say that the decision is probably one of the best of my life. Don't get me wrong, I'm not an actuaries actuary or anything and I do realise its all relative but GI is far more interesting that pensions IMO. Just a bit more relevant to real world and business which is what I wanted to do when I left uni i.e work in finance, not in a little bubble.
Any other disillusioned pensions consultants?

 

Funny that you say you work in Finance now. I work in GI and we're desperately trying to get it into everybody's head that we're NOT Finance (i.e. we don't want to be blamed for the stupidities by the accountancy department).

 

I like workin gin GI because I get to work with other types of professionals such as statisticians and other kinds of analysts.

It keeps us actuarial employees working with them on our toes.

 

How about explaining to the underwriters that a pricing model is just a tool to measure objective factors, that the price will be affected by market conditions as well and that therefore a pricing model will NOT put them out of a job... now there's a challenge...

 

The underwriters I work with are very smart people. They come up with some very clever ideas - but they would be cross if I told their secrets.

 

How statsy is GI?

I've been in pensions consulting for two years now. While I love the ad hoc problems and challenges associated with advising clients with different circumstances, I am a bit disappointed with the lack of statistics and modelling in the job role. I've never needed to use any statistical inference or data fitting at all, not even with respect to mortality data. The odd pension-weighted data summary or bar chart is about as involved as it gets.

I have always suspected that GI may present more opportunities in this field. But is this so?

Just curious...

 

Absolutely Yes.

Most of my day is taking up with statistical analysis.
I work in Pricing GI, imagine reserving might be a little different but probably still very statistical.

Things I do:

One-way analysis
Generalised linear modelling (2-way analysis)
Elasticty Testing
Optimisation modelling - various.
Graduation work
etc...

 

Time will tell

The other 'plus' to being in GI is that you're more likely to be around to see if your Pricing/Reserving calculations proved to be reasonable....

 

What area of GI do you work in avanbuiten (e.g. commercial vs personal, consultancy vs company, reinsurance vs insurance etc..)?

I moved from pensions to a GI commercial reinsurance company reserving role. I'm very glad I've moved but wouldn't say I do a huge amount more stats

 

I work in personal lines.

We are constantly looking at better ways to price our products and regularly review our rates. Also, you can come up with completely radical ideas to pricing problems and if they're good the managers will sometimes go with them.

The teams I've worked in aren't classic actuarial. In fact a lot of us actuarial people are working more like statisticians, especially those of us in the technical roles. Yet we still do actuarial stuff as well and are regarded as actuarial people.

So to answer your question:

Personal, Company, Insurance.

 

There is also a downside to that. I am sure you can guess what it is.

 

True! But at least you'll be there to take the credit when things do go well...and not be in the firing line for someone else's mistakes...

 

I think that confirms what I'd heard - that personal lines pricing is the most stats based part of GI.

I'd be interested to hear how much stats people from other areas of GI use, e.g. in:

Personal lines, reserving
Commercial pricing (insurance vs reinsurance?)
Risk control
Consultancy work

Anyone?

 

OK, I'm in GI. Started out doing reserving, now doing DFA and capital modelling. We use:
* stochastic frequency modelling
* stochasting severity modelling
* correlation matrices
* copulas
* GLM
* asset return modelling
* liability matching
*... you know, the whole lot for DFA
* discussions around which distributions to use, which sampling techniques, VAR, TVAR,...

so in my case, yes it's more statsy

 

Thanks Steven

do you work in personal/commercial insurance/reinsurance?

Anyone from commercial pricing?

 

FatSam, quick question for you, how long did u work in pensions before moving to GI, also how did you find the transition?

 

I worked in pensions for about 5 years. I think as a consequence, having that much experience made it more difficult for me to move. From what I gathered though by talking to various people was that the best time is at 1.5-3.5 years experience (depending on exams of course)

I would say that the transition isnt too bad, after all actuaries are a fairly intelligent bunch. I think that the hardest thing is getting to grips with terminology so that you can focus on concepts and problems rather than having to stop and think what each of the words mean all the time e.g GMP's - the concept isn't difficult but when people were talking about valuing GMP's I used to have to stop and think about what they were!

Definitely have found it far more interesting than pensions though meaning that I was quicker in picking up the work cause I was happier doing it.

 

How about Fuzzy Sets, Karnaugh Maps, Neural Networks etc?