Chapter 0.4: Reserving Flashcards
Reasons for assessing a General Insurer’s liabilities?
[9]
- Estimate the insurer’s reserves for published accounts, supervisory
solvency or internal management purposes - Check reasonableness of reserves
- Provide information to management on business performance by area
- Estimate claims costs for premium rating
- Value an insurer for sale or purchase
- Negotiate a commutation for the buyer or seller
- Transfer a book of business
- Ascertain tax liabilities
- Test the adequacy of case estimates
Factors that influence the choice of reserving methodology?
[7]
- Class of business (timing of the run-off of the liabilities)
- Types of claim that have been incurred or expected to occur
- Extent and quality of the available data
- Age of the business
- Key factors that determine development of claims
- Historical trends and patterns
- Purpose of the reserving exercise
Why would reserves be discounted and what does it allow it for?
- May be a regulatory requirement
- Allows for investment income
Factors that discount rate is based on?
[4]
- Regulator may prescribe rate
- Risk free rate
- Currency of A&L
- Nature of A&L
Data that may be required for claims reserving?
[8]
- Dates of reporting and occurrence
- Paid claims (gross and net of recoveries)
- Case estimates (which may or may not be straightforward to make)
- Premiums
- Number of claims
- Other measures of exposure (eg turnover, payroll)
- Expenses (both direct and indirect)
- Claims recoveries
Areas of consideration for claims triangles?
[4]
- Materiality of result
- Homogeneity of data
- Treatment of large losses or catastrophes
- Treatment of latent claims
What methods can be used to estimate the outstanding claims reserve?
[3]
- Case estimates
- Statistical methods
- Exposure-based reserving
Factors that may affect stability of claims development patterns?
[10]
- Distortions in the data
- Market wide initiatives
- Claims reviews
- Seasonality
- Changes in commencement of writing policies
- Changes in average policy length
- Changes in reserving policy
- Changes in terms and conditions
- Changes in claims handling processes
- Developments in the business, economic and legal environment
Distortions that may impact reserving results?
- Errors in the data
- Lack of data
- Inflation
- Large claims
- Latent claims
- Catastrophes
- Changes in procedures
- Changes in the mix of business
Factors of uncertainty that will influence the run-off of claims reserves?
(sources of process error)
[7]
- Occurrence and severity of claims
- Notification delays on individual claims
- Legal changes that affect the size of awards
- Levels of claims inflation
- Court rulings on liability or quantum of individual claims not foreseen by claims
handlers and/or not in the historic data - Changes in the mix of claim types
- Changes in claims handling
Terms used to identify the sources of uncertainty?
[4]
- Parameter uncertainty: estimation error
- Process uncertainty: inherent random noise in the process
- Model error: choice/specification of model
- Systemic error: data selection error
Uses of stochastic claims reserving?
[6]
- Assess reserve adequacy
-Compare different estimates and datasets - Monitor performance
- Allocate capital
- Provide information to investors
- Facilitate discussions with regulators
Methods that can be used to test a model?
[3]
- Examining plots/triangles of residuals
- Use F-tests to establish which parameters to include
- Fit model to past data
List 7 common diagnostics for claims reserves
- Changes in loss ratios
- Paid to incurred and/or case estimates to incurred ratios
- Average outstanding case estimate
- Ratio of IBNR to case estimates
- Survival ratios (how long reserve or IBNR estimate will last if current claim
development continues at a given rate) - Claim frequency and average cost per claim
- Reinsurance to gross ratios
List 4 reasons that two actuaries may have different results
- Data used was different (eg one had additional information or better quality
information) - Methodology used was different
- Additional information was available from underwriting and claims handling
staff - There may be genuine differences of opinion