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Presentations by EMB Consultants

EMB consultants are frequently called upon to present at various industry gatherings. Below is a list of upcoming and past presentations given by our staff. If you would like more information about the presenters or to obtain a copy of a particular presentation, please follow the linked name.

Upcoming Presentations

Telematics Detroit 2010 Conference & Exhibition - June 7-9, 2010 - Detrioit, MI

  • Robin Harbage - "Learn How to Prepare for Usage-Based Insurance Roll-Out"

 

Past Presentations

Property Casualty Insurers Association of America (PCI) Joint Marketing and Underwriting Seminar - April 18-20, 2010 - Orlando, FL

Casualty Actuarial Society (CAS) Ratemaking and Product Management (RPM) Seminar - March 15-17, 2010 - Chicago, IL

Casualty Actuarial Society (CAS) Webinar - January 12, 2010 - online

Casualty Actuarial Society (CAS) Annual Meeting - November 15-18, 2009 - Boston, MA

General Insurance (GIRO) Conference 2009 - October 6-9, 2009 - Edinburgh, UK

National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies (NAMIC) 114th Annual Convention - September 20-23, 2009 - Atlanta, GA

Society for Insurance Research (SIR) Annual Conference - September 21-24, 2009 - Orlando, FL

  • Robin Harbage - "Usage-Based Auto Insurance (How Not to be Big Brother & Retain Happy Customers Forever)"
  • Robin Harbage - "Product Life Cycle Management"

Casualty Actuaries of New England (CANE) - September 21, 2009 - Sturbridge, MA

Casualty Loss Reserving Seminar - September 13-15, 2009 - Chicago, IL

  • Abbe Bensimon - "Enterprise Risk Management: What have you done for me lately?" - This session presents an introduction to Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) by looking at real life situations where ERM has been used.
  • Jeff Kucera - "Homeowners Insurance-Key Reserving Issues" - During this session you will learn about the new challenges faced in reserving for this once predictable line of business.

American Risk and Insurance Association (ARIA) Annual Meeting - August 2-5, 2009 - Providence, RI

World Research Group's Optimizing Predictive Modeling for Workers' Comp 2009 - July 29-31, 2009 - Chicago, IL

NAMIC Financial Focus Seminar - May 17-19,2009 - Houston, TX

Munich Re America's CEO Roundtable - May 5, 2009 - Princeton, NJ

The CAS Spring Meeting - May 3-6, 2009 - New Orleans, LA

  • Alice - "Actuarial Accounting: A Cautionary Report"
  • Robin - Usage Based Insurance

2009 ERM Symposium - April 30, 2009 - Chicago, IL

  • Thomas Hettinger - Moderating General Session "Modeling Lessons Learned" - One result of the current turmoil in the financial markets is that risk management has come under increased scrutiny and criticism-some of it well deserved. This poses a unique challenge and opportunity to risk management professionals. This session is intended to address general lessons that can be learned to improve the modeling and management of risk.

NAIC Public Hearing on Credit-Based Insurance Scores - April 30, 2009 - Washington, DC

  • Jeff Kucera - Presenting on behalf of the American Academy of Actuaries

NAMIC Personal Lines Underwriting & Marketing Seminar - April 23, 2009 - San Antonio, TX

  • Jeff Kucera - "Retention and Conversion Analysis - Why Is It Important and How Do Companies Begin Preparing for Detailed Analysis?"

Casualty Actuaries of New England (CANE) - March 24, 2009 - Sturbridge, MA

  • Emily Stoll - "Intermediate GLMs" - Intermediate GLMs is a practical session focusing on important questions that a modeler must address during the modeling process. The discussion will cover topics such as the appropriate response variable when modeling claims, what to focus on when building and iterating models, methods of model validation, strategies for combining models, and techniques for incorporating real world constraints.

Munich Re America's Executive Conference - March 21, 2009 - Naples, FL

CAS Ratemaking and Product Management Seminar - March 9-11, 2009 - Las Vegas, NV

  • Robin Harbage - "Implementing Usage Based Auto Insurance as a Segmentation Tool"
  • Robin Harbage - Workshop 2: "Product Development Workshop" - Session 1: "Niche Identification and Data Analysis"
  • Duncan Anderson - Concurrent Session: "Conversion and Retention Modeling" panelist
  • Duncan Anderson - Concurrent Session: "Price Optimization for the U.S. Market: Techniques and Implementation Strategies" panelist
  • Dave Otto and Brett Nunes - Concurrent Session: "Maximizing the Business Value of Predictive Modeling"
  • Serhat Guven - Concurrent Session: "Handling High-Dimensional Variables"
  • Geoff Werner - Concurrent Session: "Conversion and Retention Modeling"

2009 All Industry Day Seminars & Trade Fair - March 5, 2009 - San Antonio, TX

Southwest Actuarial Forum meeting - December 2008

2008 CAS Annual Meeting - November 16-19, 2008 - Seattle, WA

  • Tom Hettinger - "Understanding Capital and When You Really Need It - Lessons Learned or Not Learned from Subprime" - What have we learned from the subprime crisis experience, and are there other, similar problems lurking in the industry? - Watch the recorded webcast of this session on the CAS website.
  • Robin Harbage - "How Will Predictive Modeling Change the P/C Industry Over the Next 5-10 Years?" - A discussion of the future of predictive modeling.
  • Jeff Kucera - "Predictive Models, Innovation and Regulation: Markets Constrained" - This session will examine the tensions that arise between the new pricing innovations and regulation. The effect on consumer and insurer welfare and strategies to maximize market welfare will be discussed.

EMB Measuring Customer Value and Price Optimization Seminar - November 6, 2008 - Boston, MA

EMB Measuring Customer Value and Price Optimization Seminar - October 8, 2008 - San Diego, CA

CAS Predictive Modeling Seminar - October 6-7, 2008 - San Diego, CA

Midwest Actuarial Forum (MAF) - September 25, 2008 - Stevens Point, WI

  • Robin Harbage - "UBI - Why It Is the Future Now" - You're hearing more and more about Usage Based Insurance. What does it entail, how powerful is it, and how does your company begin to make use of it?

The Alamo Chapter of the CPCU Society - May 27, 2008

NAMIC Financial Focus Seminar - May 18-20, 2008

  • Tom Hettinger - "Enterprise Risk Management" - ERM is meant to be a no barriers view of the risks faced by a company, yet companies are still presented with process related challenges that inhibit how ERM is implemented. This session will provide insight to improve upon your company's use of the ERM process.

The American Association of Insurance Services - April 20-22, 2008

  • Jeff Kucera - "The Growth and Evolution of Rating Variables" - Jeff will be speaking about industry trends in identifying and developing new rating variables for homeowners and small commercial accounts.

NAMIC Personal Lines Underwriting & Marketing Seminar - April 16-18, 2008

  • Robin Harbage - "Underwriting Scores" - Robin will discuss creating and organizing an underwriting score, including coordinating underwriting scores with a company's algorithm, how to update a score, and additional elements that should be considered for an underwriting score.
  • Robin Harbage - "Optimized Pricing" - This session will cover the opportunities and pitfalls associated with optimized pricing. Attendees will gain a better understanding of what optimized pricing is, why it is so important to insurance companies, and important key elements of optimized pricing.

ERM Symposium - April 14-16, 2008 - Chicago, IL

  • Tom Hettinger - Chairperson of the 2008 ERM Symposium Planning Committee
  • Tom Hettinger and Andrew McLennan - "Operational Risk Management Workshop"
  • Andrzej Czernuszewicz and Peter England - "Parameterization and Calibration of Actuarial Models" (panelist) - ERM has evolved to allow insurers to use economic models of risk and capital to make decisions about tail events. These models require assumptions that are calibrated using limited data history, perhaps with biases, and potentially the wrong underlying distribution. The presenters will look into the impact parameter uncertainty can have on the results of actuarial models and the decisions made with them. The presenters will discuss traditional and evolving techniques used to measure the parameter uncertainty.

CAS Ratemaking Seminar - March 17-18, 2008 - Cambridge, MA

  • Serhat Guven - "Predictive Modeling: What is Out There?" - A wide variety of predictive modeling techniques are in use today; this session provided an overview of predictive modeling and a discussion of the different methods. The session began with a discussion of tree-based modeling, as exemplified by the "Classification And Regression Tree" (CART) algorithm. Additional topics covered included Generalized Additive Models (GAMs), Neural Networks, and MARS (Multiple Additive Regression Splines). Relations of the various techniques with regression and Generalized Linear Models, as well as the methods' advantages and disadvantages, were be pointed out.
  • Duncan Anderson - "Sophisticated Price Optimization Methods" (panelist) - This session explored how sophisticated price optimization methods can be used to determine rates that best match an insurer's strategic profit and growth objectives. It described some of the technical approaches to price optimization, outline some potential pitfalls to avoid, and discussed real examples of how such methods can improve performance in practice.

Measuring Customer Value Seminar - March 6, 2008 - Chicago, IL

EMB is Sponsoring the Marcus Evans Event on ERM in Reinsurance - November 14-16

Property Insurance Report National Conference - November 12-13, 2007

  • Jeff Kucera - "An Updated Look at Modern Pricing" - A continued look at what had developed in homeowners pricing over the past two years, what is just around the corner, and what can be expected in the next two years.

CAS Annual Meeting - November 11-14, 2007

  • Alice Gannon - "Household Averaging" - Historically, operators in personal lines auto have been assigned to vehicles using outdated underwriting standards. The challenge has always been in reflecting other drivers in the household and their potential for using the insured vehicle. Over the past several years, insurers have been using predictive modeling techniques to better incorporate the information about the extra operators on to the vehicle. This presentation will discuss several strategies associated with this challenge within a predictive modeling framework.
  • Alice Gannon - "Pricing Optimization" - Price Optimization is a systematic approach with this challenge within selecting prices that will best support a company's goals. This presentation will be one of a panel of presentations on Price Optimization and will give the perspective of a company actuary implementing price optimization.

Quadrant Conference - November 5-7, 2007

  • Jeff Kucera - "Predictive Modeling Optimization" - As part of a panel we will be discussing the use of competitive information to help set the best rates for a company.

Society of Insurance Research - October 21-25, 2007

CAS Predictive Modeling Seminar - October 12-13, 2007

  • Jeff Kucera - "Different Scoring Uses for Predictive Modeling" - This presentation will focus on the use of predictive modeling for various applications of scoring within a rating plan.
  • Serhat Guven - "Advanced Modeling Techniques"
  • Brett Nunes - "Commercial Auto Predictive Modeling The Same and Completely Different"
  • Dave Otto - "Commercial Lines Predictive Modeling for Workers' Compensation"
  • Dave Otto - "Dimension Reduction"
  • Serhat Guven - "Estimating Personal Auto Loss Costs that Vary by Address/Household Averaging"
  • Geoff Werner - "GLM II"
  • Duncan Anderson - "GLM III"
  • Jeff Kucera - "Homeowners Insurance Scores/Disability Pricing and Dental Fraud Detection: Supervised and Unsupervised Learning"
  • Duncan Anderson - "Pricing Optimization I"
  • Serhat Guven - "Territorial Analysis: Putting Your Company on the Map"
  • Serhat Guven - "Vehicle Symbol Development"

MAF Meeting - September, 2007

  • Jeff Kucera - "Personal Lines Ratemaking - What's Down the Road " - Jeff shared his insight as to what he has seen happening in the past couple of years with respect to ratemaking techniques, data elements, etc. He then went the next step, and discussed where he anticipated the market place is headed.

Farm Bureau Conference - August 5-8, 2007

  • Serhat Guven - "Beyond Rating Indications"
  • Alice Gannon - "Predictive Modeling" - Predictive modeling is not only a valuable tool in the pricing actuary's toolkit but is emerging as an essential multi-functional tool for any company that strives to be world class. How can the pricing actuary help their company make fuller use of this powerful tool? Alice will discuss some of the ways that predictive modeling can help a company achieve its goals as well as some of the internal hurdles the pricing actuary may face in making the case for broader use of PM and how those hurdles can be overcome."

Midwest/West Farm Bureau Underwriting Conference - July 10, 2007

  • Jeff Kucera - "Homeowners Insurance Pricing - What's Around the Corner?" - The session will discuss some recent changes made by companies and what are some additional changes likely to be made in the near future.

CAS Spring Meeting - June 18-19, 2007

  • Jeff Kucera - "Peer Reviews - Are We Doing Everything We Should?" - This session will discuss the need for peer reviews and how they can be used most effectively.
  • Jeff Kucera - "How Big is the Availability Problem? Is There a Fair Solution?" - Jeff will moderate a panel that discusses recent changes made by the Florida Legislature and their impact on Florida Homeowners Insurance, and some of the different opinions of the problem.
  • Geoff Werner - "Retention Modeling - How Do I Start Preparing Today?" - Geoff will moderate a panel this panel regarding retention modeling. The panel will define and discuss the benefits of retention modeling, highlight relevant data issues, and provide a walkthrough of an example retention model.

Casualty Actuarial Society Enterprise Risk Management Symposium - March 28-30, 2007

  • Thomas Hettinger - "Status of ERM Initiatives" - This session explored the current ERM frameworks being adopted, the progress-to-date on bringing reality to the implementation of these frameworks, and the value being attributed to these ERM efforts by members of the board, executives, auditors and other key stakeholders.

MAF Meeting - March 22, 2007

  • Jeff Kucera - "Personal Lines Ratemaking - What's Down the Road" - Jeff shared his insight as to what he has seen happening in the past couple of years with respect to ratemaking techniques, data elements, etc. He then went the next step, and discussed where he anticipated the market place is headed.

Board of Directors of the Society of Actuaries - March 20, 2007

  • Dave Otto - "CRUSAP (Critical Review of the US Actuarial Profession)" - This presentation was on findings and recommendations.

Casualty Actuarial Society Seminar on Ratemaking - March 7-9, 2007 - Atlanta, GA

  • Serhat Guven - "Basic General Linear Modeling" - This session is designed to provide the actuary with an overview of the statistical theory of GLMs and give illustrative examples and intuitive explanations that clarify the theory.
  • Serhat Guven - "Advanced Modeling Techniques" - A wide variety of predictive modeling techniques are in use today; this session will provide an overview of predictive modeling and a discussion of the different methods.
  • Jeff Kucera - "Policyholder Retention & Impacts on Pricing" - A discussion on what actuaries traditionally call a 10% change may have a much different effect on the bottom line. Understand why knowing what items effect renewal ratios also have a great impact on the overall change that you may be implementing.

Casualty Actuaries of Northwest (CANW) Spring Meeting - March 2, 2007

  • Thomas Hettinger - "Enterprise Risk Management" - Use of Enterprise Risk Management model output to allocate capital and evaluate performance.

NAMIC - Commercial Lines Underwriting Seminar - February 28 - March 2, 2007

  • Jeff Kucera and Brett Nunes - "Commercial Lines Multivariate Analysis" - This session will start y providing a management perspective of the opportunities and pitfalls associated with commercial lines multivariate analysis. It will look at some of the unique challenges encountered in commercial lines. Finally, we will discuss how multivariate analysis can be used in the development of elasticity and risk models, which in turn are combined to determine the true impact of different scenarios on profitability and market share.

Special Interest Seminar on Predictive Modeling - October 2006

  • Geoff Werner - "GLM II: Basic Modeling Strategy" - GLM I provided the case for using GLMs and some basic GLM theory. GLM II will be a practical session outlining basic modeling strategy. The discussion will cover topics such as overall modeling strategy, selecting an appropriate error structure and link function, simplifying the GLM (i.e., excluding variables, grouping levels, fitting curves), complicating the GLM (i.e., adding interactions), and validating the final model. The session will discuss diagnostics that help test the selections made.
  • Dave Otto - "Techniques for Dimension Reduction" - Predictive modeling creates a framework where the actuary can comprehensively study large amounts of data from numerous sources. As a profession we would like to understand all of the underlying drivers of losses, however, it is not always possible, or even practical, to include all possible variables in the final rating plan. A thorough analysis can use different techniques to consider all of the different variables and it should provide the user with statistics and outputs to decide about the best structure. This session will discuss different approaches and reasons to reduce the number of variables or combine variables. It will also talk about the pros and cons of each approach, like stepwise regression, as well as the impact of forced dimension reduction (regulatory constraints). Ways to compare different models and the effectiveness of the new structure will also be discussed.
  • Serhat Guven - "Advanced Modeling Techniques" - This session will explore a variety of useful techniques not covered in other sessions. The session will begin with a discussion of tree-based modeling, as exemplified by the "Classification and Regression Tree" (CART) algorithm. While CART can be used as a predictive modeling tool, it can also be used for variable selection, variable binning, exploratory data analysis, data visualization, and model analysis. Additional topics to be covered will include Generalized Additive Models (GAMs), Neural Networks, and MARS (Multiple Additive Regression Splines). Relations of the various techniques with regression and Generalized Linear Models, as well as the methods' advantages and disadvantages, will be pointed out. Finally, a case study comparing the performance of all of the methods on a single dataset will be provided.
  • Thomas Hettinger - "Commercial Lines II - Predictive Modeling for Workers Compensation" - Predictive modeling is proving to be as successful in commercial lines as it has been in personal lines. Many of the challenges that face commercial lines modelers, however, are different and must be addressed properly in order for the results to be reliable.
  • Karl Murphy - "Modeling Policyholder Retention" - Predictive modeling has gained widespread acceptance within the North American insurance industry as a means to estimate loss costs. Unlike other industries that have applied practice to understand customer response, the insurance industry has yet to widely use predictive modeling for this purpose.

CAS Casualty Loss Reserve Seminar - September 2006

  • Karl Murphy and Andrew McLennan - "A Method for Projecting Individual Large Claims" - The paper addresses the issue of estimating the uncertainty in the run off of individual large claims in insurance portfolios, which is often the primary source of uncertainty in the reserving risk component of insurance risk. The paper begins by reviewing current methodologies for estimating the uncertainty in loss reserves. Methods until now have focused on aggregate modeling of gross or net of reinsurance loss reserves, and no direct connection between the distribution of gross and net reserves. The paper develops a non-parametric framework to simulate the distribution of ultimate position of large claims, both reported and large IBNR claims. The method samples the development of individual claims based on the historic development of large claims, incorporating information at an aggregate level surrounding reserving strength. The model also predicts when claims will settle, and the timing of claim payments.

Southwest Actuarial Forum - June 2006

  • Tom Hettinger - "ERM and Rating Agencies" - This presentation discussed the implications of getting Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) started in today's rating agency environment.

EXPLORE Information Advisory Board - March 2006

  • Jeff Kucera - "Modeling Risk Scores for Auto and Home" - This presentation covered the benefits of predictive modeling, and some of the pitfalls. It also suggested several different areas where predictive modeling could be used to improve the rating plan for private passenger auto and homeowners.

CAS Ratemaking Seminar - March 2006

  • Serhat Guven - "An Introduction to GLM Theory" - This presentation was designed to provide the actuary with an overview of the statistical theory of GLMs and give illustrative examples and intuitive explanations that clarify the theory.

Salford Systems Data Mining Conference - March 2006

  • Dave Otto - "Combining Linear and Non-Linear Modeling Techniques: Getting the Best of Two Worlds" - This session discussed how the analyst can play off of the strengths of two different data mining tools, GLM and CART, in particular, in order to maximize the effectiveness of the data mining process. Two separate retention modeling datasets were used as examples of the efficiencies gained.

Property Insurance Report National Conference - November 2005

  • Jeff Kucera - "A Proposal For Modern Pricing" - This presentation focused on homeowners insurance rating. In particular what is wrong with the way we price it today, and what are some possibilities for pricing it more efficiently in the future.

CAS Annual Meeting - November 2005

  • Jeff Kucera - "Predictive Modeling: Pitfalls and Potentials" - A discussion of the benefits to be realized through the use of predictive modeling, and some of the issues faced by companies as they venture into this arena.
  • Serhat Guven - "Predictive Modeling: What is Out There?" - A brief introduction to some of the predictive modeling techniques that exist along with some pros and cons of each.

CAS Predictive Modeling Seminar - September 2005

  • Dave Otto - "Dimension Reduction in Workers Compensation" - This session provided guidance to practitioners attempting a Workers Comp classification plan review with particular focus on how to handle class code in a predictive modeling assignment.
  • Serhat Guven - "Determination of Statistically Optimal Geographical Territory Boundaries" - This presentation focused on using GLM techniques to determine appropriate territory boundaries and relativities.
  • Tom Hettinger - "Vehicle Symbols: Defined and Redefined" - Vehicle symbol groups tend to be heavily correlated with other rating variables; therefore one-way analysis on the variable is very susceptible to distortions. This presentation discussed ratemaking techniques within an appropriate multivariate framework and discussed diagnostics that can be used to determine the best symbol groups possible.
  • Geoff Werner - "Basic Modeling Strategy" - This discussion covered topics such as selecting an appropriate error structure, simplifying the GLM (i.e., excluding variables, grouping levels, fitting curves), and complicating the GLM (i.e., interactions). It also discussed diagnostics that help test the selections made.
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