My Actuarial Working Life

While reading " The Savings and Loan Crisis and Its Relationship to Banking " (about the S&L debacle incurred in US in 1980s), a paragraph really caught my attention: " ...Accordingly, when much of the S&L industry faced insolvency in the early 1980s, the FHLBB’s examination force was understaffed, poorly trained for the new environment, and limited in its responsibilities and resources .7 Qualified examiners had been hard to hire and hard to retain (a governmentwide hiring freeze in 1980–81 had compounded these problems)... " (Page 170) Does this sounds familiar to you? If you never heard of anything like "limited resources" from your management or your boss, you must be happily working in your current company and working on long OT is once in a blue moon. Many bosses think that their staffs are " supermen " - they introduce new workloads to the existing staffs, decline to provide sufficient resources and still expect for marvelous ...

When I went through a few chapters of " Catastrophe, Injury, Insurance: The Impact of Catastrophes on Workers Compensation, Life, and Health Insurance " published by Risk Management Solutions (RMS) in 2006, two paragraph about nuclear power stations and tsunami caught my attention - the first paragraph commented the chances of a major radioactivity release from the nuclear power station: Scenarios that fall into these plausible mass casualty events but are improbable include a large-scale accidental release of radioactivity from a nuclear power station. Estimates suggest that such an event could affect several million people and make many hundreds of thousands sick. Operating safety standards for nuclear power stations require that the chances of a major radioactivity release are maintained at below 1 in 10,000. The second paragraph commented large-scale tidal waves: A tsunami or coastal tidal wave affecting a major stretch of coastline on either the ...

The Prime Minister’s Department presented the following government bills for first reading at Dewan Rakyat of Parliament Malaysia on 8 November 2011, which related to the retirement benefits (including pension) for the government servants: Pensions (Amendment) Bill 2011 Statutory and Local Authorities Pensions (Amendment) Bill 2011 Pensions Adjustment (Amendment) Bill 2011 Judges’ Remuneration (Amendment) (No.2) Bill 2011 As revealed in the recent Budget 2012, the retirement age of the government servants will be extended to  60 years old starting next year (2012). Currently, the retirement age is at 58 years old - although they can opt to retire earlier at age 55 or 56. Furthermore, in the event of a retiree passes away during 20 years (previously 12.5 years) after his retirement, his family members will continue to receive the full amount of his pension and other relevant retirement benefits. According to Budget 2012, the government expenditure on pensions and gratuitie...

The Malaysian Deputy Finance Minister Dato' Donald Lim Siang Chai has recently told the press that the government is expected to gradually implement Goods and Services Tax (GST) by end of 2012, and followed by the full implementation in 2013. Hopefully Dato' Donald's comment is the real indication of the implementation date of GST in Malaysia. The government has been discussing GST for quite some years - the Royal Malaysian Customs even set up a GST dedicated website to educate public on GST. Again, the 2012 Budget did not mention on the GST implementation - perhaps this may not be a good time for the Barisan Nasional government as the general election is around the corner. Different from the current single stage sales tax and service tax, GST is a multi-staged consumption tax that covers most supplies and goods. Since the GST implementation is once delayed, those corporates which are not ready yet should take this opportunity to revamp their systems (including their ...

When I read " Everyone wants to assume that the health plans are the bad guy ", I couldn't help keep nodding my head. This interesting statement was written by David Axene (President & Consulting Actuary, Axene Health Partners) in his article " Is California leading states in health care reform? ", posted in  SoA Blog . Many people have an perception that insurance companies are the greedy devils which always look for opportunities to get excessive profits by increasing the health insurance's premium rates - but do they really complain on the increasing medical costs charged by the medical providers (like private hospitals)? They do not understand the premium increase is mainly attributed to the increase in medical costs, or they refuse to understand? "Public" here refers to those public who have bad perception on insurance companies selling health insurance Perhaps this disappointing public behaviour can be explained by the above cha...

In case you are looking for some Excel / Spreadsheet tips on how to make your templates more efficient, perhaps you can get some ideas from the tips I share below. Afraid of bombastic command or VB coding? Don't worry, the tips I share below are very simple and you don't need to be an expert to use the tips. The following tips use examples from the template I used to compile movement of policy (MOP) statistics (i.e. new business, in force business & termination/alteration) . However, you may apply the same ideas for other types of templates as well. Tips (1): Produce results by plan code level, not product group Normally, the MOP statistics are reported in specific product groups, such as "Whole Life", "Endowment", "Temporary" etc. in BNM Form L6-L8 (Conventional Insurance) / FT5-FT7 (Takaful). It is common for us to group our data by the required product groups using data processing applications (e.g. FoxPro, Data Conversion System ...

I started to learn FoxPro when I started my first actuarial career after graduating from the university. My mentor in the actuarial department, Madam L, was also my FoxPro  shifu (i.e. master / teacher / guru). Madam L was the reinsurance administrator in the department - by using FoxPro, she managed to do necessary reinsurance administration work for the entire individual life insurance business (more than 1 million policies) by her own, alone ! By going through her programs and guidances, I picked up necessary skills to use FoxPro and create FoxPro programs for my reporting and experience studies tasks (my manager resigned three month after I joined the department - all his tasks became my tasks!) - until now I am still grateful to the guidance she provided to me previously. When I was promoted to a team leader with junior staffs, similarly I needed to teach them the relevant FoxPro knowledge so that they had necessary skills to do the assigned tasks. At that time, there ...