Actuarial Post - Issue 3 - (Page 6)

6 A dAy in the life of ...GAreth hAslip Editor Ellie Burns met with Aon Benfield’s Gareth Haslip, Actuary and Head of Aon Benfield Analytics’ Risk and Capital Strategy team to discuss a typical day working with Solvency II, and how the daily challenges and uncertainty working with Solvency II shape a dynamic and exciting role. Hi Gareth, welcome to the Actuarial Post. Before we delve into a typical day working with Solvency II could you firstly give our readers an insight into your background? I came to Aon Benfield in November last year; previous to this I was working with Solvency II at Goldman Sachs where I was advising Insurance clients on optimal investment strategies under the Solvency II framework. Before this I was at Benfield doing some work in Solvency II, so I have been in the field for a long time. The new team at Aon Benfield is called Risk and Capital Strategy and the focus is on advising our reinsurance clients on how to optimize their balance sheet under Solvency II, so thinking about both assets and liabilities, and obviously on the liability side what reinsurance strategies will be most effective under the new regime. The day to day focus is helping our clients get ready for Solvency II, JULY 2011 ACTUARIAL POST helping them to understand what strategic changes they need in their business and then if the time is right we can help them make those changes. Obviously, with the delays to Solvency II at the moment it is very much in the planning and getting ready in order to know what the real challenges are rather than necessarily jumping the gun and doing anything too soon. What were you doing before Solvency II, what is your initial background? Originally I was a mathematician and I am also a qualified investment actuary. I have had quite a lot of IT focus in parts of my career, so I have worked at length with software in the actuarial profession. For instance, at Benfield I originally worked in the ReMetrica capital modelling system area and I developed a large proportion of the business logic in ReMetrica to do with things like investment. Your background involved investment and IT, so what initially drew you to Solvency II? Within Benfield, ReMetrica was a leading platform for essentially building models of both assets and liabilities for insurance companies; and in the UK the main focus at that time was the ICA, the Individual Capital Adequacies Standards, so we used ReMetrica to build these models under that framework. When the UK industry started looking towards Solvency II, we started to develop ReMetrica to be a tool to work out what we needed to put in place to meet all of the requirements of the updated regulations. So it has been a natural progression into Solvency II in that we were there before Solvency II and have been there throughout the transition period as it started to

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Actuarial Post - Issue 3

Actuarial Post - Issue 3
Contents
News
A Day in the Life of ...Gareth Haslip Solvency II Expert
Group Structure: The Next Focus
Review of the Amazon Kindle
Luddite
Mentioned in Dispatches
Talent Shortages Offer New Career Opportunities
Recruitment

Actuarial Post - Issue 3