Author Archives: Brian Fannin

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About Brian Fannin

Brian Fannin is a research actuary at CAS. He is also the founder of PirateGrunt LLC, a boutique consulting firm based in Durham, North Carolina specializing in predictive modeling in the property casualty markets. Fannin has been an Associate of the CAS since 2002 and a Certified Specialist in Predictive Analytics (CSPA) through The CAS Institute since 2017.

Open Communities and Lucrative Networks

Posted on January 14, 2021 by Brian Fannin

I’ve been a Deadhead for over thirty years. One of the things that made the band so easy to get into was the fact that their concert recordings – thousands of them – were freely traded among fans. I had boxes filled with cassettes that allowed me to experience over a quarter century of performances. … Read more »

Posted in Research.

It’s Time to Take Visualization Seriously

Posted on August 10, 2020 by Brian Fannin

In 2019, I gave five talks about data visualization. This was great fun, but as I looked back, I felt compelled to confront a difficult question: what are we as actuaries still not getting about this? Haven’t actuaries embraced data visualization? We understand that it’s important. We understand that it’s an essential element of communication. … Read more »

Posted in General.

COVID-19 and the P&C Insurance Industry

Posted on March 27, 2020 by Brian Fannin

Property casualty insurance is an interesting beast. Whereas life, health and pension are defined by what they cover, P&C – as a label – scarcely does justice to its scope. At a moment like this, it seems more fitting to apply the more apt, if nebulous, term “general insurance” to consider how actuarial practice will … Read more »

Posted in Communications, Research.

Collaborating in the Cloud

Posted on January 24, 2020 by Brian Fannin

Last August, the CAS made a significant organizational investment. We created an account on GitHub, one of the leading cloud-based platforms, which implements the version control utility, git. Everyone who read that last sentence will have one of three reactions: 1) I love git, it’s about time the CAS did this! 2) I’ve heard of … Read more »

Posted in Research.

Exploring the Complex Relationship Between Math and Music

Posted on April 30, 2019 by Brian Fannin

Music is expressive, it is simultaneously immediate and timeless, diverse yet universal. Music can lift us to a higher form of communication. (Think of humans and aliens learning to communicate at the end of “Close Encounters.”) And – like most human experience – music is also very mathematical. A caveat- there is a danger in … Read more »

Posted in Communications.

Speaking at Society Symposium was Super

Posted on October 24, 2018 by Brian Fannin

Last month I spoke at the Society of Actuaries 2018 Analytics Symposium in Minneapolis. The experience was a delight. Because it was an SOA conference, I had expected that at times I would feel confused or missing critical background, but there were very few instances of this. Several presentations may have meant more to me … Read more »

Posted in Communications.

Let’s All Visit Jupyter

Posted on May 11, 2018 by Brian Fannin

The actuarial workflow typically looks like this: you complete an analysis in a spreadsheet, then you paste the chart into a word-processing document. If you want to make a change to the math, or the data, that copy-and-paste step must be repeated. It’s easy for the two (or more!) documents to fall out of sync, … Read more »

Posted in General.