Biographies

Lisa Pines BSc, FIA, FASSA - Managing Director


Lisa founded EMB South Africa in January 2006. She is recognised as an industry leader in the short-term insurance field. She has worked with most of the large South African insurers as well as some specialist companies.

Lisa graduated from the University of the Witwatersrand in 1990, and then went on to qualify as a Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries. After university, she worked at an insurance company for 4 years. She then joined QED Actuaries and Consultants for 10 years, where she was a Director, and set up and developed the short-term insurance consulting division. In 2006, she left to start EMB South Africa. Within a short space of time, EMB South Africa’s clients have grown to include 9 of the top 10 South African insurers.

Lisa is a regular speaker at professional conferences. She has chaired the Actuarial Society of South Africa's short-term insurance committee and Personal Lines Committee. She is one of the original members of the Financial Condition Reporting Working Party, assisting the South African regulator in the revision of solvency requirements. Lisa co-drafted the South African actuarial professional guidance notes on reserving in 2006.

Karl Murphy MA, FIA, FSAI - Non-Executive Director


Karl graduated from Trinity College, Dublin in 1990, with a first class honors degree in Mathematics and Economics. His main areas of study were in statistics and econometrics, and received the Gold Medal for his final exam results.

On graduation, Karl joined the non-life department of consulting actuaries Bacon & Woodrow, before joining EMB in 1993. Karl has considerable experience in many areas of non-life insurance, and clients include insurance companies, Lloyd's syndicates, captives and brokers. His main expertise is in personal lines insurance, and is considered to be one of the UK's leading personal lines pricing experts. Karl has played an important role in the development of EMBLEM, EMB's pricing tool that is now used by 50 insurers around the world. More recently Karl has being introducing the new capital modelling techniques developed by EMB to personal lines clients.

Karl has spoken at conferences throughout the world, including at several American Casualty Actuarial Society seminars, the South African Actuarial Society’s General Insurance Convention, the UK's GIRO conference, and for the Actuarial Society of India. He co-authored a paper entitled "Using Generalized Linear Models to Build Dynamic Pricing Systems" that appeared in the CAS Forum, and has written several articles that have appeared in the insurance press on various topics.

He has served on the Institute of Actuaries' GIRO Committee and Research Steering Committee. Karl qualified as an actuary in 1998, and is a Lloyd's signing actuary. He is also a Fellow of the Society of Actuaries in Ireland and Signing Actuary.


Richard Millns, MA, FIA - Non-Executive Director 

 Richard has an MA in Mathematics from Oxford University and qualified as an actuary in 1998. He joined EMB in 2001 and was made Director in 2006. His career started at Commercial Union (now part of Aviva), where he was involved in reserving of their London Market business, and developed an in-house reserving software package. Having qualified as an actuary he moved to Aon, where his responsibilities included the structuring and pricing of alternative risk transfer programmes, working closely with the brokers. It was at Aon that he developed an interest in stochastic modelling techniques.

Richard is a financial risk modelling specialist who has worked on the majority of EMB’s large group DFA projects. These projects include group capital models, reinsurance and catastrophe exposure analysis projects, and asset models. His role includes the design, implementation and peer review of these models, and client training in modelling techniques. In particular, he has spent much of his time helping clients to implement internal capital models in order to comply with the FSA’s (UK regulator) Individual Capital Adequacy Standards (ICAS) regime, and is heavily involved in helping clients prepare for the Solvency 2 regime in Europe.

Richard has expert knowledge of EMB’s financial modelling software package, EMB Igloo, and has considerable experience in advising clients on how to structure and implement their models in order to get the best from the software and meet business needs.