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Actuarial & Business Consultancy
Personal and Commercial Lines
The insurance industry has changed dramatically in the past few years, with competitive pressures making new demands on companies. Achieving set goals whilst maintaining profitability, competitiveness and financial control requires the best possible understanding of your business and the market you are in. The UK has one of the worlds most competitive insurance industries and our client base includes all the country's leading players. It covers the complete spectrum of insurers including composite, direct response, affinity direct, intermediary-based, Lloyd's syndicates and mutual. This provides us with a great depth of experience and knowledge.
Our consultancy techniques at EMB have a proven track record and are continually being developed to meet new demands. We assist our clients in all aspects of pricing, reserving and financial control and help them to understand what it means for their businesses. Take pricing, for example. It is not enough just to calculate the technical price for a particular risk, important though it is. You also need to know the street price, and what this means to your customers as well as your business.
We have developed a series of price optimisation techniques to help our clients meet their strategic goals in what is a highly competitive environment. They involve models that measure and predict the market trade-off between volume and profitability in any particular segment and, more importantly, a range of techniques that convert this knowledge into business decisions.
Lloyd's and the Reinsurance Market
EMB helps clients come to grips with the challenges of commercial insurance and reinsurance and to exploit the huge opportunities that exist for underwriters. After the bloodbath of the early 90s and the reduced investment returns of the current decade, technical underwriting has become an absolute must.
Flair and instinct will always have a part to play, but underwriters need to understand the value of the risks they are seeing before they can make sensible commercial decisions. We help them to store, retrieve and then analyse their data - sometimes supplementing it with publicly-available information.
Just as important, we enable senior managers to monitor the progress of individual classes and sub-classes of business so that they can address problems in a timely fashion. They can then assess which lines are most profitable and allocate capital accordingly.
As with personal lines, we offer the full range of actuarial services, including reserving, pricing, reinsurance optimisation and dynamic financial analysis. This is a market where the underlying picture can be very different from the one painted by the raw underwriting figures. Understanding what is really going on in a portfolio can save you many millions of dollars.
Financial Modelling
EMB has become, in a short time, one of the world's leading providers of dynamic financial analysis and other financial modelling services to insurers and reinsurers. Our clients are diverse and include many of the largest global insurers and reinsurers, many entities in Lloyd's, specialist insurers and regulators including the Financial Services Authority.
We believe this success stems from the quality of our people, an ability to apply our expertise to our clients' business needs and unrivalled software products.
Regulators increasingly expect insurers to use financial modelling techniques to meet the needs of risk based assessment, especially as Europe moves towards Solvency II. There is, however, an even more compelling reason to model; it represents best practice.
A modelling exercise can amount to a root-and-branch review of the entire business. It produces data and understanding of a company's internal dynamics with far reaching applications that benefit every area of decision making.
By learning in this way how operations would fare in any number of possible scenarios, our clients can anticipate future events and find the most capital efficient way to move forward.
Run-offs, Commutations & Schemes of Arrangement
EMB assists clients in a wide range of activities where actuarial advice is required for run-off entities. These include reserving, commutation support, scheme actuary and adjudicator roles for schemes of arrangement, expert witness, litigation support, Part VII transfers, outwards reinsurance optimisation, risk modelling (including ICAs), inward IBNR allocations, latent claim reviews and mergers and acquisitions.
The whole area of run-off is a rapidly evolving area of insurance with very significant values at stake. EMB are at the forefront, advising clients through this process and assisting them to develop an optimal strategy to exit their legacy line sof insurance. Critically, we ensure this strategy is consistent with the actuarial characteristics of the portfolio of business written, the free assets available and the overall run-off strategy of the entity.
Peter Matthews, now a consulting partner of EMB, is a highly experienced and respected actuary in this field. Our run-off team includes other experienced senior actuaries, each with over a decade of experience in the run-off arena within Lloyd's, the London Market and internationally. This makes us one of the most experienced run-off actuarial teams in the industry.
Management Consultancy
EMB are increasingly asked to move more centre-stage, to advise on strategic issues that demand analysis of markets and corporate capability, as well as of key financial drivers. Clients look to us increasingly to help implement the plans we recommend.
In 2005, we set up a management consultancy team to add those new dimensions to our services. The team reflects the strengths of EMB - its expertise, delivered by people who know the insurance sector well, and who are straightfoward and committed to doing the right thing for the client and effective in delivery. Our management consultancy team can contribute to your business in three key areas:
- strategy definition and review - helping clients to decide the right way forward for their businesses or for individual business areas. We use strategy specialists, drawing on our actuarial skills as needed;
- financial analysis - supporting management information work and cost analysis and control;
- business performance - supporting clients with the planning and management of process change or operational improvement.
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