Presentations to the market

Demystifying Basic Statistical Concepts Used In The Insurance Industry

This course gives an overview of basic statistical concepts widely used in the insurance industry in the areas of pricing, reserving and capital modelling.

Key topics covered:

  • Components of a probability model
  • Frequency and severity of claims
  • The expected claims cost
  • Percentiles and Value-at-Risk (VaR)
  • The coefficient of variation (CV)
  • Understanding the return period (1-in-X years) within the context of frequency of events and the annual cost of claims
  • Setting risk capital to a certain level of risk tolerance

Target Audience: Insurance professionals with 3-5 years of experience in the industry.

A basic understanding of pricing and reserving is required before attending this course.

Foundation courses

Introduction to Insurance

This course gives an overview of the product of insurance and the insurance market.

Key topics covered:

  • What is insurance?
  • How does the insurance market work?
  • Lloyd's vs. Non-Lloyd's companies
  • Whose job is it?
  • Claims reserving
  • Reinsurance
  • Insurance regulation

Target Audience: This course provides a good introduction for those new to the market and for insurance professionals working in support functions who are often intrigued about how key areas of the business relate to each other.

No prior knowledge is required before attending this course.

Introduction to Reinsurance

This course provides a solid foundation on how reinsurance works, common types of reinsurance, how premium and claims are shared between insurers and reinsurers and common terms and conditions found in a reinsurance agreement. The course is very practical in nature and illustrates concepts with realistic examples throughout.

Key topics covered:

  • What is reinsurance?
  • Date of loss trigger – the date that triggers coverage
  • Matching premium and losses
  • Ultimate Net Loss - What is covered?
  • Common contract terms and conditions for pro-rata and excess of loss treaties

Target Audience: Insurance professionals who are new to reinsurance.

No prior knowledge of reinsurance is required before attending this course.

Introduction to Probabilities for Insurance Professionals

Every insurance professional should have a basic working knowledge of probabilities and statistics. This course introduces the concepts of random variables and probabilities within the context of insurance pricing, reserving and risk capital providing a foundation to all other courses available in The P&C Insurance Digest®.

Key topics covered:

  • Understanding probabilities
  • Random variables
  • The expected value
  • The law of large numbers
  • Percentiles and Value-at-Risk
  • Conditional probabilities

Target Audience: This is a beginners’ course suitable for insurance professionals of all levels.

No prior knowledge is required before attending this course.

Intermediate courses

Fundamentals of Insurance Pricing

This course is a timeless foundation to one of the main tasks of an underwriter: pricing and risk classification. We cover key aspects of insurance pricing including a step by step guide to designing consistent pricing models.

The course covers key topics such as

  • Statistical foundation: the expected cost of claims and risk
  • Claims cost to premium: pricing to a target loss ratio
  • Key premiums and implied loss ratios: technical price, benchmark price, minimum price and actual price
  • Pricing and risk classification
  • A blue print for designing consistent pricing models even in the absence of data
  • Pricing full value policies vs. layered policies using exposure curves and ILFs
  • Key pricing metrics: expected loss ratios, rate changes and rate adequacy for renewal and new business
  • The Risk Adjusted Rate Change (RARC) framework at Lloyd’s
  •  Introduction to experience rating

Target Audience: Underwriters of all levels of experience using or involved in the development of pricing models as well as entry level actuarial students.

An understanding of Insurance is needed prior to attending this course. Please have a look at our Foundation course: Introduction to Insurance 

Reinsurance Pricing in Practice

This course has been designed with treaty underwriters and brokers in mind, but it is also a great introduction to any actuary new to reinsurance pricing. Whether using models developed by in-house actuaries or developing your own models, you will gain a detailed understanding of standard methods used in practice to price reinsurance treaties.

The course is delivered based on the standard reinsurance pricing process workflow, from submission, to data, to models, to premium, to profitability assessment.

All methods are illustrated using a realistic reinsurance submission.

The key topics covered include:

  • Overview of the pricing process
  • Data requirements: understanding the basis of the data
  • Pricing quota share treaties: evaluating the expected gross loss ratio
  • Pricing excess of loss treaties: experience, exposure and mixed methods
  • Selecting the loss cost: statistical credibility
  • Evaluating terms and conditions: reinstatements, aggregate deductibles, swing premiums, profit commissions and other common contract terms
  • Pricing to a combined ratio vs. a return on capital

Target Audience: Underwriting and actuaries wanting to have a deeper understanding of the techniques used to price reinsurance and how key pricing parameters are selected.

A basic knowledge of reinsurance is required, prior to attending this course. Please have a look at our Foundation course: Introduction to Reinsurance 

Basic Statistics for Insurance Professionals

This course has been designed for insurance and reinsurance professionals who want to understand basic statistics and applications to insurance and reinsurance modelling in general.

Using realistic data, we cover the following topics:

  • Random variables and probability distributions
  • Basic statistical concepts: mean, median, mode, variance and standard deviation
  • Histograms, percentiles plots and other graphic representations of the data
  • Concept of volatility and skewness
  • Data vs. models: empirical vs. modelled results
  • Common families of probability models used in practice: Poisson, Negative Binomial, Normal, Lognormal, Exponential, Gamma and Lognormal
  • Using data to fit basic models
  • Using models in practice

Target Audience: underwriters with 3-5 years of experience and a good understanding of insurance pricing.

A good understanding of Insurance pricing is required prior to attending this course. Please have a look at our Foundation course: Introduction to Probabilities for Insurance Professionals 

Quantitative Techniques for Underwriting Management

This course is for underwriters who are looking to join the dots between pricing, reporting, reserving and capital modelling in the context of managing a portfolio of policies.

This course focuses on interpretation rather than implementation of standard techniques and concepts used by actuaries in the development of pricing models, management reporting including rate changes and rate adequacy, loss reserving, planning and forecasting together with a brief overview of capital modelling and solvency II.

Key topics covered:

  • The statistical framework
  • Fundamentals of Insurance Pricing – Creating efficient pricing processes
  • Key premiums and loss ratios: technical premium, benchmark premium, minimum premium and actual premium
  • Management reporting as a by-product of an efficient pricing process: rate changes, rate adequacy, expected loss ratios, including new business in key pricing indicators
  • Introduction to claims reserving and its relationship to pricing and capital requirements
  • Experience rating, planning and forecasting
  • Solvency regulation and risk capital

Target Audience: Senior class underwriters and underwriting managers with at least 5 years of underwriting experience.

Basic Actuarial Concepts for Non-Actuaries

Nowadays actuaries are involved in all areas of insurance operations. Actuaries interact with underwriters, claims professionals, finance/accounting professionals, IT developers, legal and compliance and often present to senior management and board members.

Using basic terminology and practical examples, this course covers all key areas within an insurance company where actuaries are involved and often interact with other areas of the business. From basic statistics, pricing, reporting, reserving and solvency regulation and capital modelling the course provides a good overview of all operational areas within an insurance company.

Topics covered include:

  • Understanding key aspects of insurance operations
  • The statistical framework in insurance
  • Basics of insurance pricing: components of a rate
  • Key premiums and loss ratio
  • Standard components of a pricing model
  • Standard pricing metrics: expected loss ratio, rate change and rate adequacy
  • The claims reserving process
  • Basic methods of claims reserving
  • Use of reinsurance to transfer risk
  • Business planning
  • Solvency regulation and capital requirements

Target Audience: The course is suitable for all insurance professionals with at least 3 years of experience.

An understanding of Insurance is required prior to attending this course. Please have a look at our Foundation course: Introduction to Insurance

Advanced courses

Loss distributions, ILFs and Exposure Curves

This Course is aimed at Actuaries and Actuarial students and is by far our most popular and practical course we run.  This course will equip delegates with a better understanding of how to fit loss models to data with limitations and how to use those results.

With real life data we cover the following topics:

  • Loss distributions and loss models
  • Common families of probability distributions used in practice
  • Data requirements and adjustments
  • Preliminary analysis (histograms, mean excess functions)
  • How to identify an appropriate family for a given data set
  • Estimation methods (empirical and parametric)
  • Fitting loss distributions to real data
    • Using truncated and censred data
    • Allwing for deductibles and policy limits
  • Effectiveness of fit tests (formal and informal)
  • Mathematics and practical aspects of increased limit factors
  • Mathematical and practical aspects of exposure curves or first loss scales
  • Practical applications

Target Audience: This course is aimed at Actuaries and Actuarial students.

This is a highly interactive course and a good working knowledge of probability models and Microsoft Excel is required to follow the worked examples.