Notes from the 4th R in Insurance Conference

The 4th R in Insurance conference took place at Cass Business School London on 11 July 2016. This one-day conference focused once more on the wide range of applications of R in insurance, actuarial science and beyond. The conference programme covered topics including reserving, pricing, loss modelling, the use of R in a production environment and much more.

The audience of the conference included both practitioners (c.80%) and academics (c.20%) who are active or interested in the applications of R in Insurance. It was a truly international event with speakers and delegates from Europe, Asia and the Americas. The coffee breaks and conference dinner offered great networking opportunities.

Mario Wüthrich, ETH Zürich

In the first plenary session Mario Wüthrich (RiskLab ETH Zurich) spoke about the (new) challenges in actuarial science. While fundamentals of analysing data have not changed over the years, the data and technology available has, and with that new challenges emerged. Yet, as Mario pointed out, insurance is still often concerned with analysing ‘little’ data, as losses occur rarely. Furthermore, the bigger data sets, often generated by sensors, require careful calibration, monitoring and cleansing. Those new challenges provide opportunities for new research (if data is being made available) and the industry. The R community can provide links between the two. Mario would like to see more and better documentation of R packages, more insurance examples and better handling of big data.

Thereafter, the programme consisted of a combination of contributed presentations and lightning talks, as well as a panel discussion on how analytics is transforming the insurance business. Adrian Cuc (Verisk), Simon Brickman (Beazley), Roland Schmid (Mirai Solutions) and Markus Gesmann (Vario Partners) discussed the efforts made in bridging between data vendors, consultants and insurers, as well as the challenges of developing collaborative business models that respond to market needs.

Dan Murphy, Trinostics

In the closing plenary, Dan Murphy (Trinostics, San Francisco) gave an insight into his experience as an actuary on how to provide persuasive advice for senior management. He uses the three-C’s: context, confidence and clarity. Context is about articulating the problem in a language senior management can understand it. Why does the management need to worry about the problem? If you have a solution, then you have to deliver it with conviction, because, most importantly is has to be actionable. Clarity, of your actionable insight, ensures that those actions can be delegated to the relevant team/employee by the management without you in the room.

The slides of the conference are available on request.

Scientific committee and sponsors

The members of the scientific committee were: Katrien Antonio (KU Leuven, UvA), Christophe Dutang (Université du Maine), Markus Gesmann (Vario Partners), Giorgio Spedicato (UnipolSai ) and Andreas Tsanakas (Cass Business School).

Finally, we are grateful to our sponsors Verisk, Mirai Solutions, Applied AI, RStudio, CYBAEA and Oasis, without whom the event wouldn’t be possible.

R in Insurance 2017

We are delighted to announce next year’s event already. The conference will travel across the Channel to ENSAE, Paris, 8 June 2017. Further details will be published on www.rininsurance.com.