Non-Life insurance is facing many challenges ranging from fierce competition on the market or evolution in the distribution channel used by the consumers to evolution of the regulatory environment (Solvency II, IFRS, etc.).

Pricing is the central link between solvency, profitability and market shares (volume). Improving pricing practice encompasses several dimensions:

• Technical: is our pricing adequate to cover the underlying cost of risk of my policyholders and the other costs we are facing? Which are the key variables driving the risk? Are they adequately taken into account in our pricing?
• Competition: at what price will we attract the segments that we target and price out those that we do not want? Is the positioning of our competitors influencing our pricing practice?
• Elasticity: what (new) price are our existing customers prepared to accept?
• Segmentation: is our segmentation granular enough for our purposes?

The aim of this seminar is to present some advanced actuarial/statistical techniques used in non-life pricing. The seminar focuses on some practical problems faced by pricing actuaries and product managers via a business game and presents some new techniques used in non-life pricing in order to open new perspectives for product development. 

Organised by the EAA - European Actuarial Academy GmbH

The seminar is developed for non-life actuaries or statisticians but also for managers working in product development or risk management departments. It is designed as a follow-up workshop to the EAA seminars “Introduction to Non-Life Pricing” held in the years 2013-2015. Participation to this introductory seminar is not a prerequisite but participants should have basic knowledge of non-life pricing. A short introduction will be performed to recall the key messages of the introductory seminar.

Attendees are encouraged to bring a laptop computer with R installed as well as some useful packages (all the information will be provided after subscription). A basic knowledge of the R software is useful.

The seminar will alternate between methodological concepts, practical examples and a business game in order to ensure a comprehensive understanding of some of the techniques presented.

The business game will be organised as follows: the participants will be separated in several fictitious insurance companies operating in the same market. Starting with their current tariff and positioning, each fictitious company will have to review its tariff taking into account its expected profitability (technical tariff), the objectives of the management (positioning), the tariff of the competitors (via a dispersion analysis) and the behavior of its customers (elasticity to price changes).

The business game will be performed with the help of a R-based tool that automates some processes avoiding loss of time of a full implementation in R base and easier aggregation of results to determine the winner of the business game.

SAMUEL MAHY (Reacfin)
Samuel graduated as a Civil Engineer in Applied Mathematics with an additional minor in Economy and holds a Master in Actuarial Sciences, as well. He is a qualified actuary of the Institute of Actuaries in Belgium (IA|BE) and involved in the Reinsurance and Non-Life Workgroup of the IA|BE. He is the Head of the Non-Life Center of Excellence at Reacfin. Samuel has been active 5 years in the reinsurance sector where he was involved in reinsurance pricing model developments. At the same time he was also the main responsible of the UK market portfolio profitability follow-up. Samuel joined Reacfin in June 2010 as a specialist in Non-Life Insurance and Reinsurance and he has acquired a sound knowledge of Solvency 2 frameworks (Non-Life, Health). As a director, he is involved in various missions as in the modelling, implementation and validation of pillar I deliverables (standard approach and (Partial) Internal models), reinsurance optimization, model documentation, non-life pricing model development for several lines of business, etc.. 

XAVIER MARÉCHAL (Reacfin)
Xavier is founder and Managing partner of Reacfin. As the Head of the Innovation & Quality department, he also leads the Centers of Excellence at Reacfin. Xavier is also one of the co-authors of “Actuarial Modeling of Claim Counts: Risk Classification, Credibility and Bonus-Malus Systems” (Wiley, 2007). Xavier has obtained different academic degrees as Civil Engineer in Applied Mathematics and MSc. Actuarial Sciences and MSc. Management. Xavier is a qualified actuary of the Institute of Actuaries in Belgium (IA|BE) and Member of the Non-Life workgroup of the IA|BE. Xavier has extensive experience in the actuarial field obtained during his 10 years as a principal consultant for many national and multinational insurance companies. He has gained a complementary experience in various fields going from Non-Life ratemaking and provisioning to life modeling and ALM. After several years of intensive modeling activities in life, non-life and ALM, Xavier works now as reviewer and mentor for consultants. He performed several validation assignments and holds the actuarial function for two health insurance companies.