Inflation does not come and does not go on its own
It is not that long ago that even ECB-Directors were clearly stating that the heightened inflation rates were only temporary. Even shortly before Christmas 2021 this statement was firmly positioned. It did not hold for long in 2022.

What are the main drivers for the change of opinion? Without being exhaustive the following points can be mentioned:

1.  Central Bank’s quantitative easing actions
2. Increase of energy prices (esp. oil and gas)
3. Increase of Wheat prices
4. Increase of prices of semiconductors

These effects were significantly stressed by:

1. The war in the Ukraine
2. The ESG effects (Carbon certificates and pricing increases due to tax effects over CO2  levies).

Inflation comes with many challenges for businesses in general and insurance business in particular. Due to the long term nature of the business inflation can be very toxic. This is especially true for situation of negative real interest rates, which we have seen for some time now. The situation has changed since the Ukraine war. The FED and the ECB have increased interest rates just recently. Real rates are still negative.

Why should you attend this course?
If one of the following descriptions fits to your situation, the course might be exactly right for you:

1. You are responsible in the second line for (financial) risk management and you want a handle on inflation risk,
2. You have senior management responsibility and you would like to understand your options to mitigate inflation,
3. You are working in general insurance and you would like to understand where your business is vulnerable to inflation,
4. You are responsible for product management in your organisations and you would like to understand the impact of inflation on your product settings,
5. You need to reflect the inflation risk in your ORSA.

What approach do we take?
In order to have a common understanding of inflation we start with the historic background and pick up recent research on hyperinflation. We also look at the consequences of inflation for our customers, especially in the retirement age. In the second part we analyse the various impacts of inflation in workshops and discuss potential mitigating actions.

Organised by the EAA – European Actuarial Academy GmbH.

The following colleagues might benefit most from the course: Managers and specialists responsible for product development, reserving, financial controlling and risk management

Technical Requirements
Please check with your IT department if your firewall and computer settings support web session participation (the programme Zoom is used for this online training). Please also make sure that you are joining the web session with a stable internet connection.

The learning objectives of this course are:

1. Understand the various forms of inflation and its historical impact
2. Understand the drivers for inflation and the indicators to be monitored
3. Practise the vulnerability analysis of the business model
4. Understand the potential risk mitigation actions

The language of the web session will be English.

Dr Gerrit Jan van den Brink
Dr Gerrit Jan van den Brink is working as a senior advisor via his company Risk Sigma GmbH on risk management, ESG, data and Artificial Intelligence topics. Is this role he advises companies and their senior management on implementation and further development of Enterprise Risk Management Frameworks. He acts as trusted advisor to the C-Level of organisations. Gerrit Jan has worked 34 years in the Financial and Energy industry in various roles (CRO, CFO, Operations Director and Auditor) in all three lines of defense. Gerrit Jan is a lecturer at various Universities in Germany and the Netherlands.