Actuaries love numbers. Whether it is to price a new product, to put a value on a company to be sold or to quantify risk for a specific exposure – we are the ones who have to supply relevant business information to underpin rational decision making.
And in order to provide that information, we are great at using actuarial models. We perform our profit testing, run our embedded value models and apply our chain ladder. But are we aware of the reliances and limitations of our models? As actuaries, we do know that any result is driven by explicit and implicit assumptions, and any number we give is just one result.
If there was one good thing about the financial crisis, it provided an excellent test for how complete and robust models have been, also in preparation for Solvency II.
 
This course will go back to the basics of actuarial models, explore the shortcomings of popular techniques, and equip participants with a better understanding of how models should be applied in practice.