The paper firstly examines the way in which U.K. mutuals operate and the forces which are leading mutuals to consider demutualisation. Demutualisation is normally accomplished by a Scheme of Transfer under Section 49 of the Insurance Companies Act 1982. The role of the directors and actuaries is discussed, including the impact of the Institute's latest Guidance Note (GN15).

The protection of policyholders' reasonable expectations, the value of membership rights and the basis of dealing with any orphan surplus are the central problems. The paper examines them in the context of both the open fund and closed fund situation and shows how they may be resolved.

A simple model is used to project the financial position of both an open and closed fund in a demutualised company. The relative advantages and disadvantages of each indicate that different courses of action may be appropriate for mutuals in differing financial positions.

The Institute of Actuaries and the Faculty of Actuaries have embarked on a joint planning exercise with a view to developing a more proactive profession, by focusing the attention and energy of members and ensuring effective use of scarce financial and human resources. ‘Strategy for the 1990s’ sets the overall framework of key objectives, which were agreed by a historic joint meeting of the Councils of the Institute and the Faculty on 4 March 1991.

This article discusses the formulae for the select and ultimate exposed-to-risk in the CMIB's mortality studies, and certain statistical aspects of these investigations. It is shown that there are difficulties in the traditional binomial approach to the distribution of deaths, particularly for select rates, and the use of the Poisson distribution, rather than the binomial, is advocated.

This note continues a regular series on mortality rates in Great Britain , showing the mortality experienced in each age-group in 1989 and comparing this for broad age-groups, on a standardised basis, with mortality in earlier years.

In this paper we present an approach to the graduation of select mortality data and we illustrate this approach by graduating the CMIB's data for Female Permanent Assurances 1979–1982. The difference between our approach and that of the CMIB is that we graduate simultaneously by attained age and duration since selection.

This paper derives second moments of estimates of the parameters in the chain ladder model. Thus, the so-called link ratios, and proportions of ultimate claims for each development year are considered. This enables confidence statements about the chain ladder parameters to be made with statistical rigour. The methods are illustrated using 6 sets of real data taken from the DTI returns.