Governance and Risk Management in United Kingdom Insurance Companies. Discussion held at the Institute of Actuaries

Extract

Mr M. R. Kipling, F.I.A.: This paper is entitled Governance and Risk Management in United Kingdom Insurance Companies. It is a very timely paper in light of the recent publication of the Turner review which, among other things, covers the governance of UK financial institutions.

Mr S. P. Deighton, F.I.A. (introducing the paper): The paper is the first formal output from the Research and Thought Leadership subcommittee of the Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) Practice Executive Committee (PEC). It may seem odd, therefore, that it contains no original research. There is not an equation in sight, and there is only one token diagram. This is because the most important of its key themes is that there is much more to ERM than complex models and fancy mathematics.

There are a number of areas associated with ERM. One of them is understanding the wider governance framework within which an insurance company must operate, and hence the introduction to that subject at the beginning of the paper. The second is how to run the very detailed identification and mitigation of the myriad of small risks across a wide group which is at the other end of the spectrum to the multi-million pound derivative transactions that manage equity risk. Our paper sees this as indistinguishable from the internal control framework that a company needs in order to comply on the governance front.