As a follow-up to my May 2012 Actuarial Review “From the President” column, I am using the CAS Roundtable to invite member input on the future of the CAS. Please read the original column (or this summary post) and provide your feedback below.
As the only actuarial organization in the world exclusively devoted to property/casualty risks, the CAS is—and will continue to be—in a very strong position. I believe that our strengths include:
- A market for our skills that is dynamic and growing.
- An educational process that provides a solid grounding in technical skills and hands-on experience in applying those skills to inform business decisions.
- A strong sense of community.
- Our professional integrity built on our Code of Professional Conduct.
- Our reputation with our principals, who value our technical insights and our business acumen.
Even with these strengths, our principals challenge us to work harder:
- They encourage the CAS to innovate within our education framework, for greater efficiency and effectiveness.
- They caution that, as their businesses become more global, the CAS must extend the borders of our reach.
- They ask why the CAS does not advance more relevant research on issues that are critical to their businesses.
In an increasingly competitive environment, we must challenge ourselves to ask the tough questions:
- How do we advance and differentiate the CAS brand?
- What are our core strengths?
- What do we expect for membership growth, and how will we achieve the desired growth?
- Will new models of operation be required in order for our Society to achieve the market response times?
- How can we embrace innovation and creativity and embed these traits in our culture?
- What role should the CAS play with universities, employers, and regulators in advancing the role of the actuary, while maintaining the cultural tenets that make us what we are?
- How should we deploy our resources, financial and human, for optimal effectiveness?
These are times that can serve as a burning platform from which meaningful change can occur. Whatever form changes take, they can be a source of tremendous opportunity and adventure. I’m confident that together, we are up to the challenge.
So please share with me your thoughts on the future of CAS. Respond to one or more of the questions by leaving a comment below.
One key change for the CAS going forward would be to see more of the concepts or ideas that are published in “Variance” find their way into practice. My impression is that in many shops, the techniques used in practice today would be familiar to actuaries in the work place 30 years ago with the exception that the green columnar pads of paper for worksheets have been replaced by electronic spreadsheets.
Part of the solution is to see papers published with links to R code that give working examples of the concepts presented in the paper. At times, I have attended a seminar and thought the ideas in the papers presented were worth exploring, but how to translate the concepts presented into working examples as the first step to implementing a change in practice was unclear which was a barrier to moving ahead.
Then too, I believe we need to sell the people we work with on the need to accept change in our estimates as long as we can explain why we are changing. For example, I have worked on class plans where at the end the underwriters were unhappy, because the result would cause material dislocation in their book which was puzzling to me. No dislocation meant no change in how we price leading one to wonder what the point of the class plan exercise was.
Mike: Great ideas, great comments. Change for change sake is not the answer; we have to be able to convince ourselves and then our principals that the changes improve decisions.
I agree with you. I posted on October 20, 2011 at 5:26 pm In my opniion, a better organization would be one where the financial, health and enterprise risk actuaries join the CAS leaving the life and pension actuaries in the SOA. We would then have a better division into life and non-life actuarial societies. . The world would be well served by a strong common worldwide non-life actuarial profession. By organizing along life/non-life divisions we could be an example for the rest of the world to follow. Raymond Nichols, FCAS, FCA, MAAA, CPCU, CIDM, ARe, AIC