Non-Life insurance is facing many challenges ranging from fierce competition in the market or evolution in the distribution channel used by consumers to evolution of the regulatory environment.

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? What’s the impact of the claims history of my policyholder on its expected risk? In which segment are we profitable and in which are we not profitable?
• 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 and our profitability? What’s my position with respect to my competitors in terms of pricing? What are the segments in which I am well positioned and the segments where I am not well positioned?
• Elasticity: what price (evolution) are our existing customers prepared to accept? Does the sensitivity to price evolution depend on the profile of my customer?
• Segmentation: is our segmentation granular enough for our purposes?

The aim of this web session is to present some advanced actuarial/statistical techniques used in non-life pricing, competition analysis and profitability analysis. The web session focuses on some practical problems faced by pricing actuaries and product managers and presents some new techniques used in non-life pricing in order to open new perspectives for product development (competition analysis, profitability analysis,…).

The web session is developed for non-life actuaries or statisticians but also for managers working in product development or risk management departments. Participants should ideally have basic knowledge of non-life pricing.

Attendees are encouraged to have 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.

Technical Requirements
Please check with your IT department if your firewall and computer settings support web session participation (the programme Zoom will be used for this online training). Please also make sure to join the web session with a stable internet connection.

The web session will alternate between methodological concepts, practical examples and case studies in order to ensure a comprehensive understanding of the techniques presented.

The participants will be requested to look at 4 e-learning modules (of around 30 minutes each) presenting the basics of machine learning before the web session. The access to these e-learning modules will be granted up to the end of the web session. These 4 e-learning modules are:

• Introduction to Machine learning
• Supervised learning (parts 1 and 2)
• Unsupervised learning

The case studies will be performed by the participants with the R software. An individual support will be available during the case study sessions thanks to breakout rooms.

Abdouraman Bakari (Reacfin)
Abdouraman is Senior consultant at Reacfin and member of the Non-Life center of Excellence.
Since its arrival at Reacfin, he worked on the improvement and automation of the closing, BE calculation and risk management processes of an insurance company, on Worker’s Compensation pricing missions for three (3) clients (computation economic view of claims, technical pricing and support for commercial pricing) and on the development of internal tools and projects (R/Shiny, multi-type lasso regularization). He completed a PhD in Atomic Physics at Université Catholique de Louvain after a Master in Molecular Physics, a Master in Atomic Physics, a Master in Actuarial Sciences and a Master in Data Sciences.

Adrien Condamin (Reacfin)
Adrien is a Consultant at Reacfin. Adrien has been working at Reacfin since January 2021 after a 6-month internship dedicated to car insurance and wrote a thesis that he presented to the French Institut des Actuaires in January 2021.  He has joined Reacfin’s Climate Risk Practice and has carried out several missions related to climate risks for insurance and banking companies (including materiality assessment, impact of climate risks on mortgage portfolios…) along with supervising an internship on physical climate risks and their impacts on insurance claims and solvency. In 2018 and then in 2019, he also performed an internship a COVEA in France and worked on geographical risk for car and home insurance and developed technical skills on actuarial pricing and programming language. He holds a MSc in Management from Essec Business School and majored in Actuarial Science in partnership with ISUP.

Xavier Maréchal (Reacfin)
Xavier is founder and CEO of Reacfin. Xavier is 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 Master in Engineering (Applied Mathematics), MSc. Actuarial Sciences and MSc. Management. Xavier is a qualified actuary of the Institute of Actuaries in Belgium (IA|BE). Xavier has extensive experience in the actuarial field obtained during his 18 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 health modeling and ALM. After several years of intensive modeling activities in health, non-life and ALM, Xavier works now as reviewer and mentor for consultants. He performed several validation assignments and holds the actuarial function for a health insurance company.

Olivier Soupart (Reacfin)
Olivier is Manager at Reacfin. He holds a MSc. in Engineering and a MSc. in Actuarial Sciences with Cum Laude from the University of Louvain-La-Neuve (UCL). He is Qualified Actuary of the Institute of Actuaries of Belgium (IA|BE) and a certified Base Programmer for SAS. After a first career in banking as a senior IT engineer, he became an actuary and has acquired sound knowledge of IFRS17 and Solvency 2 frameworks (Non-Life, Health SLT). As a Consultant and an in-house Actuary, he worked on various fields such as insurance modelling, non-life reserving, product management and pricing.

Julie Zians (Reacfin)
Julie is a Senior Manager at Reacfin. Julie holds a BSc. Mathematics from the University of Liège (ULg) and a MSc. Actuarial Sciences from the University of Louvain (UCL). She is a qualified actuary of the Institute of Actuaries in Belgium (IA|BE). Julie is a certified Programmer in SAS from the SAS institute and further programs regularly in R or Visual Basic. After a six months internship at Reacfin in 2011, she joined the firm in 2012. She is a member of the Non-Life Center of Excellence and has performed several projects in Non-Life Insurance (pricing and capital modelling) but also in Health Insurance.