Risk Portfolio Management

In 1952, Harry Markowitz wrote the article “Portfolio Selection” which became the seed for the theory called Modern Portfolio Theory. Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT) promises a path to follow to achieve the maximum return for a given level of risk for an investment portfolio.

It is not clear who first thought to apply the MPT ideas to a portfolio of risks in an insurer. In 1974, Gustav Hamilton of Sweden’s Statsforetag proposed the “risk management circle” to describe the interaction of all elements in the risk management process, including assessment, control, financing and communication. In 1979, Randell Brubaker wrote about “Profit Maximization for a multi line Property/Liability Company.” Since then, the idea of risk and reward optimization has become to many the actual definition of ERM.

Standard & Poor’s calls the process “Strategic Risk Management”.

“Strategic Risk Management is the Standard & Poor’s term for the part of ERM that focuses on both the risks and returns of the entire firm. Although other aspects of ERM mainly focus on limiting downside, SRM is the process that will produce the upside, which is where the real value added of ERM lies.“

The Risk Portfolio Management process is nothing more or less than looking at the expected reward and loss potential for each major profit making activity of an insurer and applying the Modern Portfolio Management ideas of portfolio optimization to that risk and reward information.

At the strategic level, insurers will leverage the risk and reward knowledge that comes from their years of experience in the insurance markets as well as from their enterprise risk management (ERM) systems to find the risks where their company’s ability to execute can produce better average risk-adjusted returns. They then seek to optimize the risk/reward mix of the entire portfolio of insurance and investment risks that they hold. There are two aspects of this optimization process. First is the identification of the opportunities of the insurer in terms of expected return for the amount of risk. The second aspect is the interdependence of the risks. A risk with low interdependency with other risks may produce a better portfolio result than another risk with a higher stand alone return on risk but higher interdependence.

Proposals to grow or shrink parts of the business and choices to offset or transfer different major portions of the total risk positions can be viewed in terms of risk-adjusted return. This can be done as part of a capital budgeting/strategic resource allocation exercise and can be incorporated into regular decision-making. Some firms bring this approach into consideration only for major ad hoc decisions on acquisitions or divestitures and some use it all the time.

There are several common activities that may support the macro- level risk exploitation.

Economic Capital
Economic capital (EC) flows from the Provisioning principle. EC is often calculated with a comprehensive risk model consistently for all of the actual risks of the company. Adjustments are made for the imperfect correlation of the risks. Identification of the highest-concentration risks as well as the risks with lower correlation to the highest-concentration risks is risk information that can be exploited. Insurers may find that they have an advantage when adding risks to those areas with lower correlation to their largest risks if they have the expertise to manage those risks as well as they manage their largest risks.

Risk-adjusted product pricing
Another part of the process to manage risk portfolio risk reward involves the Consideration principle. Product pricing is “risk-adjusted” using one of several methods. One such method is to look at expected profits as a percentage of EC resulting in an expected return-to-risk capital ratio. Another method reflects the cost of capital associated with the economic capital of the product as well as volatility of expected income. The cost of capital is determined as the difference between the price to obtain capital and the rate of investment earnings on capital held by the insurer. Product profit projections then will show the pure profit as well as the return for risk of the product. Risk-adjusted value added is another way of approaching risk-adjusted pricing.

Capital budgeting
The capital needed to fulfill proposed business plans is projected based on the economic capital associated with the plans. Acceptance of strategic plans includes consideration of these capital needs and the returns associated with the capital that will be used. Risk exploitation as described above is one of the ways to optimize the use of capital over the planning period. The allocation of risk capital is a key step in this process.

Risk-adjusted performance measurement (RAPM)
Financial results of business plans are measured on a risk-adjusted basis. This includes recognition of the cost of holding the economic capital that is necessary to support each business as reflected in risk-adjusted pricing as well as the risk premiums and loss reserves for multi-period risks such as credit losses or casualty coverages. This should tie directly to the expectations of risk- adjusted profits that are used for product pricing and capital budgeting. Product pricing and capital budgeting form the expectations of performance. Risk-adjusted performance measurement means actually creating a system that reports on the degree to which those expectations are or are not met.

For non-life insurers, Risk Portfolio Management involves making strategic trade-offs between insurance, credit (on reinsurance ceded) and all aspects of investment risk based on a long-term view of risk-adjusted return for all of their choices.

Insurers that do not practice Portfolio Risk Management usually fail to do so because they do not have a common measurement basis across all of their risks. The recent move of many insurers to develop economic capital models provides a powerful tool that can be used as the common risk measure for this process. Economic capital is most often the metric used to define risk in the risk/reward equation of insurers.

Some insurers choose not to develop an EC model and instead rely upon rating agency or regulatory capital formulas. The regulatory and rating agency capital formulas are by their nature broad market estimates of the risk capital of the insurer. These formulae will over-state the capital needs for some of the insurer’s activity and understate the needs for others. The insurer has the specific data about their own risks and can do a better job of assessing their risks than any outsider could ever do. In some cases, insurers took high amounts of catastrophe exposure or embedded guarantee and option risks, which were not penalized in the generic capital formulas. In the end, some insurers found that they had taken much more risk than their actual loss tolerance or capacity.

Risk Portfolio management provides insurers with the framework to take full advantage of the power of diversification in their risk selection. They will look at their insurance and investment choices based on the impact, after diversification, on their total risk/reward profile. These insurers will also react to the cycles in risk premium that exist for all of their different insurance risks and for all of their investment risks in the context of their total portfolio.

Sales of most insurance company products result in an increase in the amount of capital needed by the business due to low or negative initial profits and the need to support the new business with Economic Capital. After the year of issue, most insurance company products will show annual releases of capital both due to the earnings of the product as well as the release of supporting capital that is no longer needed due to terminations of prior coverages. The net capital needs of a business arise when growth (new sales less terminations) is high and/or profits are low and capital is released when growth is low and/or profits are high.

The definition of the capital needs for a product is the same as the definition of distributable earnings for an entire business: projected earnings less the increase in Economic Capital. The capital budgeting process will then focus on obtaining the right mix of short and long term returns for the capital that is needed for each set of business plans.

Both new and existing products can be subjected to this capital budgeting discipline. A forecast of capital usage by a new product can be developed and used as a factor in deciding which of several new products to develop. In considering new and existing products, capital budgeting may involve examining historic and projected financial returns.

Pitfalls of Risk Portfolio Management

In theory, optimization processes can be shown to produce the best results for practitioners. And for periods of time when fluctuations of experience are moderate and fall comfortably within the model parameters, continual fine tuning and higher reliance on the modeled optimization recommendations produce ever growing rewards for the expert practitioner. However, model errors and uncertainties are magnified when management relies upon the risk model to lever up the business. And at some point, the user of complex risk models will see that levering up their business seems to be a safe and profitable way to operate. When volatility shifts into a less predictable and/or higher level, the highly levered company can find it self quickly in major trouble.

Even without major deviations of experience, the Risk Portfolio Management principles can lead to major business disruptions. When an insurer makes a major change in its risk profile through an acquisition or divestiture of a large part of their business, the capital allocation of all other activities may shift drastically. Strict adherence to theory can whipsaw businesses as the insurer makes large changes in business.

Insurers need to be careful to use the risk model information to inform strategic decisions without overreliance and abdication of management judgment. Management should also push usage of risk and reward thinking throughout the organization. The one assumption that seems to cause the most trouble is correlation. The saying goes that “in a crisis, all correlations go to one”. If the justification for a major strategic decision is that correlations are far from one, management should take note of the above saying and prepare accordingly. In addition management should study the variability of correlations over time. They will find that correlations are often highly unreliable and this should have a major impact on the way that they are used in the Risk Portfolio Management process.

Risk Portfolio Management is one of the Seven ERM Principles for Insurers

Future Uncertainty

Often called emerging risks. Going back to Knight’s definitions of Risk and Uncertainty, there is very little risk contained in these potential situations.  Emerging risks are often pure uncertainty.  Humans are good at finding patterns.  Emerging risks are breaks in patterns.

What to Do about Emerging Risks…

Emerging risks are defined by AM Best as “new or evolving risks that are difficult to manage because their identification, likelihood of occurrence, potential impacts, timing of occurrence or impact, or correlation with other risks, are highly uncertain.” An example from the past is asbestos; other current examples could be problems deriving from nanotechnology, genetically modified food, climate change, etc. Lloyd’s, a major sufferer from the former emerging risk of asbestos, takes emerging risks very seriously. They think of emerging risks as “an issue that is perceived to be potentially significant but which may not be fully understood or allowed for in insurance terms and conditions, pricing, reserving or capital setting”.

What do the rating agencies expect?

AM Best says that insurers need “sound risk management practices relative to its risk profile and considering the risks inherent in the liabilities it writes, the assets it acquires and the market(s) in which it operates, and takes into consideration new and emerging risks.” In 2013, Best has added a question asking insurers to identify emerging risks to the ERM section of the SRQ. Emerging Risks Management has been one of the five major pillars of the Standard & Poor’s Insurance ERM ratings criteria since 2006.

How do you identify emerging risks?

A recent report from the World Economic Forum, The Global Risks 2012 report is based on a survey of 469 experts from industry, government, academia and civil society that examines 50 global risks. Those experts identified 8 of those 50 risks as having the most significance over the next 10 years:

•   Chronic fiscal imbalances
•   Cyber attacks
•   Extreme volatility in energy and agriculture prices
•   Food shortage crises
•   Major systemic financial failure
•   Rising greenhouse gas emissions
•   Severe income disparity
•   Water supply crises

This survey method for identifying or prioritizing risks is called the Delphi method and can be used by any insurer. Another popular method is called environmental scanning which includes simply reading and paying attention for unusual information about situations that could evolve into future major risks.

What can go wrong?

Many companies do not have any process to consider emerging risks.  At those firms, managers usually dismiss many possible emerging risks as impossible.  It may be the company culture to scoff at the sci fi thinking of the emerging risks process.  The process Taleb describes of finding ex post explanation for emerging Black Swan risks is often the undoing of careful plans to manage emerging risk.  In addition, lack of imagination causes some managers to conclude that the past worst case is the outer limit for future losses.

What can you do about emerging risks?

The objectives for emerging risks management are just the same as for other more well-known risks: to reduce the frequency and severity of future losses. The uncertain nature of emerging risks makes that much more difficult to do cost effectively. Insurers can use scenario testing to examine potential impact of emerging risks and to see what actions taken in advance of their emergence might lessen exposures to losses. This scenario testing can also help to identify what actions might lessen the impact of an unexpected loss event that comes from a very rapidly emerging risk. Finally, insurers seek to identify and track leading indicators of impending new risk emergence.

Reinsurance is one of the most effective ways to protect against emerging risks, second only to careful drafting of insurance contract terms and conditions

Many of the largest insurers and reinsurers have developed very robust practices to identify and to prepare for emerging risks.  Other companies can learn from the insurers who practice emerging risk management and adapt the same processes to their emerging risks.

Normal risk control processes focus on everyday risk management, including the management of identifiable risks and/or risks where uncertainty and unpredictability are mitigated by historical data that allow insurers to estimate loss distribution with reasonable confidence. Emerging risk management processes take over for risks that do not currently exist but that might emerge at some point due to changes in the environment. Emerging risks may appear abruptly or slowly and gradually, are difficult to identify, and may for some time represent an ill formed idea more than factual circumstances. They often result from changes in the political, legal, market, or physical environment, but the link between cause and effect is fully known in advance. An example from the past is asbestos; other examples could be problems deriving from nanotechnology, genetically modified food, climate change, etc. 
For these risks, normal risk identification and monitoring will not work because the likelihood is usually completely unknown. Nevertheless, past experience shows that when they materialize, they have a significant impact on the insurers and therefore cannot be excluded from a solid risk management 
program. So insurers have implemented unique specific strategies and approaches to cope with them properly.

Identifying emerging risks

Emerging risks have not yet materialized or are not yet clearly defined and can appear abruptly or very slowly. Therefore, having some sort of early warning system in place, methodically identified either through internal or external sources, is very important. To minimize the uncertainty surrounding these risks, insurers will consistently gather all existing relevant information to amass preliminary evidence of emerging risks, which would allow the insurer to reduce or limit growth of exposure as the evidence becomes more and more certain.  However, Insurers practicing this discipline will need to be aware of the cost of false alarms.

Assessing their significance

Assess the relevance (i.e. potential losses) of the emerging risks linked to a company’s commitment— which classes of business and existing policies would be affected by the materialization of the risk—and continue with the assessment of the potential financial impact, taking into account potential correlation with other risks already present in the firm. For an insurer, the degree of concentration and correlation of the risks that they have taken on from their customers are two important parameters to be considered; the risk in question could be subject to very low frequency/high intensity manifestations, but if exposure to that particular risk is limited, then the impact on the company may not be as important. On the other hand, unexpected risk correlations should not be underestimated; small individual exposures can coalesce into an extreme risk if underlying risks are highly interdependent. When developing extreme scenarios, some degree of imagination to think of unthinkable interdependencies could be beneficial.

A further practice of insurers is to sometimes work backwards from concentrations to risks. Insurers might envision risks that could apply to their concentrations and then track for signs of risk emergence in those areas. Some insurers set risk limits for insurance concentrations that are very similar to investment portfolio credit limits, with maximum concentrations in specific industries in geographic or political regions. In addition, just as investment limits might restrict an insurer’s debt or equity position as a percentage of a company’s total outstanding securities, some insurers limit the percentage of coverage they might offer in any of the sectors described above.

Define appropriate responses

Responses to emerging risks might be part of the normal risk control process, i.e., risk mitigation or transfer, either through reinsurance (or retrocession) in case of insurance risks, through the financial markets for financial risks, or through general limit reduction or hedging. When these options are not available or the insurer decides not to use them, it must be prepared to shoulder significant losses, which can strain a company’s liquidity.  Planning access to liquidity is a basic part of emerging risk management.  Asset-selling priorities, credit facilities with banks, and notes programs are possible ways of managing a liquidity crisis.

Apart from liquidity crisis management, other issues exist for which a contingency plan should be identified in advance. The company should be able to quickly estimate and identify total losses and the payments due. It should also have a clear plan for settling the claims in due time so as to avoid reputation issues. Availability of reinsurance is also an important consideration: if a reinsurer were exposed to the same risks, it would be a sound practice for the primary insurer to evaluate the risk that the reinsurer might delay payments.

Advance Warning Process

For the risks that have identified as most significant and where the insurer has developed coherent contingency plans, the next step is to create and install an advanced warning process.  To do that, the insurer identifies key risk indicators that provide an indication of increasing likelihood of a particular emerging risk.

Learn

Finally, sound practices for managing emerging risks include establishing procedures for learning from past events. The company will identify problems that appeared during the last extreme event and identify improvements to be added to the risk controls.  In addition, expect to get better at each step of the emerging risk process with time and experience.

But emerging risk management costs money.  And the costs that are most difficult to defend are the emerging risks that never emerge.  A good emerging risk process will have many more misses than hits.  Real emerged risks are rare.  A company that is really taking emerging risks seriously will be taking actions on occasion that cost money to perform and possibly include a reduction in the risks accepted and the attendant profits.  Management needs to have a tolerance for these costs.  But not too much tolerance.

 

This is one of the seven ERM Principles for Insurers

Getting Paid for Risk Taking

Consideration for accepting a risk needs to be at a level that will sustain the business and produce a return that is satisfactory to investors.

Investors usually want additional return for extra risk.  This is one of the most misunderstood ideas in investing.

“In an efficient market, investors realize above-average returns only by taking above-average risks.  Risky stocks have high returns, on average, and safe stocks do not.”

Baker, M. Bradley, B. Wurgler, J.  Benchmarks as Limits to Arbitrage: Understanding the Low-Volatility Anomaly

But their study found that stocks in the top quintile of trailing volatility had real return of -90% vs. a real return of 1000% for the stocks in the bottom quintile.

But the thinking is wrong.  Excess risk does not produce excess return.  The cause and effect are wrong in the conventional wisdom.  The original statement of this principle may have been

“in all undertakings in which there are risks of great losses, there must also be hopes of great gains.”
Alfred Marshall 1890 Principles of Economics

Marshal has it right.  There are only “hopes” of great gains.  These is no invisible hand that forces higher risks to return higher gains.  Some of the higher risk investment choices are simply bad choices.

Insurers opportunity to make “great gains” out of “risks of great losses” is when they are determining what consideration, or price, that they will require to accept a risk.  Most insurers operate in competitive markets that are not completely efficient.  Individual insurers do not usually set the price in the market, but there is a range of prices at which insurance is purchased in any time period.  Certainly the process that an insurer uses to determine the price that makes a risk acceptable to accept is a primary determinant in the profits of the insurer.  If that price contains a sufficient load for the extreme risks that might threaten the existence of the insurer, then over time, the insurer has the ability to hold and maintain sufficient resources to survive some large loss situations.

One common goal conflict that leads to problems with pricing is the conflict between sales and profits.  In insurance as in many businesses, it is quite easy to increase sales by lowering prices.  In most businesses, it is very difficult to keep up that strategy for very long as the realization of lower profits or losses from inadequate prices is quickly realized.  In insurance, the the premiums are paid in advance, sometimes many years in advance of when the insurer must provide the promised insurance benefits.  If provisioning is tilted towards the point of view that supports the consideration, the pricing deficiencies will not be apparent for years.  So insurance is particularly susceptible to the tension between volume of business and margins for risk and profits,
and since sales is a more fundamental need than profits, the margins often suffer.
As just mentioned, insurers simply do not know for certain what the actual cost of providing an insurance benefit will be.  Not with the degree of certainty that businesses in other sectors can know their cost of goods sold.  The appropriateness of pricing will often be validated in the market.  Follow-the-leader pricing can lead a herd of insurers over the cliff.  The whole sector can get pricing wrong for a time.  Until, sometimes years later, the benefits are collected and their true cost is know.

“A decade of short sighted price slashing led to industry losses of nearly $3 billion last year.”  Wall Street Journal June 24, 2002

Pricing can also go wrong on an individual case level.  The “Winners Curse”  sends business to the insurer who most underimagines riskiness of a particular risk.

There are two steps to reflecting risk in pricing.  The first step is to capture the expected loss properly.  Most of the discussion above relates to this step and the major part of pricing risk comes from the possibility of missing that step as has already been discussed.  But the second step is to appropriately reflect all aspects of the risk that the actual losses will be different from expected.  There are many ways that such deviations can manifest.

The following is a partial listing of the risks that might be examined:

• Type A Risk—Short-Term Volatility of cash flows in 1 year

• Type B Risk—Short -Term Tail Risk of cash flows in 1 year
• Type C Risk—Uncertainty Risk (also known as parameter risk)
• Type D Risk—Inexperience Risk relative to full multiple market cycles
• Type E Risk—Correlation to a top 10
• Type F Risk—Market value volatility in 1 year
• Type G Risk—Execution Risk regarding difficulty of controlling operational
losses
• Type H Risk—Long-Term Volatility of cash flows over 5 or more years
• Type J Risk—Long-Term Tail Risk of cash flows over 5 years or more
• Type K Risk—Pricing Risk (cycle risk)
• Type L Risk—Market Liquidity Risk
• Type M Risk—Instability Risk regarding the degree that the risk parameters are
stable

See “Risk and Light” or “The Law of Risk and Light“

There are also many different ways that risk loads are specifically applied to insurance pricing.  Three examples are:

• Capital Allocation – Capital is allocated to a product (based upon the provisioning) and the pricing then needs to reflect the cost of holding the capital.  The cost of holding capital may be calculated as the difference between the risk free rate (after tax) and the hurdle rate for the insurer.  Some firms alternately use the difference between the investment return on the assets backing surplus (after tax) and the hurdle rate.  This process assures that the pricing will support achieving the hurdle rate on the capital that the insurer needs to hold for the risks of the business.  It does not reflect any margin for the volatility in earnings that the risks assumed might create, nor does it necessarily include any recognition of parameter risk or general uncertainty.
• Provision for Adverse Deviation – Each assumption is adjusted to provide for worse experience than the mean or median loss.  The amount of stress may be at a predetermined confidence interval (Such as 65%, 80% or 90%).  Higher confidence intervals would be used for assumptions with higher degree of parameter risk.  Similarly, some companies use a multiple (or fraction) of the standard deviation of the loss distribution as the provision.  More commonly, the degree of adversity is set based upon historical provisions or upon judgement of the person setting the price.  Provision for Adverse Deviation usually does not reflect anything specific for extra risk of insolvency.
• Risk Adjusted Profit Target – Using either or both of the above techniques, a profit target is determined and then that target is translated into a percentage of premium of assets to make for a simple risk charge when constructing a price indication.

The consequences of failing to recognize as aspect of risk in pricing will likely be that the firm will accumulate larger than expected concentrations of business with higher amounts of that risk aspect.  See “Risk and Light” or “The Law of Risk and Light“.

To get Consideration right you need to (1)regularly get a second opinion on price adequacy either from the market or from a reliable experienced person; (2) constantly update your view of your risks in the light of emerging experience and market feedback; and (3) recognize that high sales is a possible market signal of underpricing.

This is one of the seven ERM Principles for Insurers

Underwriting of risks is a key part of risk management for insurers

Underwriting is the process of reviewing and selecting risks that an insurer might accept, under what terms, and assigning those an expected cost and level of riskiness.

• Some underwriting processes are driven by statistics.  A few insurers who developed a highly statistical approach to underwriting personal auto coverages have experienced high degree of success.  With a careful mining of the data from their own claims experience, these insurers have been able to carefully subdivide rating classes into many finer classes with reliable claims expectations at different levels.  This allows them to concentrate their business on the better risks in each of the larger classes of their competitors while the competitors end up with a concentration of below average drivers in each larger class.  This statistical underwriting process is becoming a required tool to survive in personal auto and is being copied in other insurance lines.
• Many underwriting processes are highly reliant on judgment of an experienced underwriter.  Especially commercial business or other types of coverage where there is very little close commonality between one case and another.  Many insurers consider underwriting expertise to be their key corporate competency.
• Usually the underwriting process concludes with a decision on whether to make an offer to accept a risk under certain terms and at a determined price

How underwriting can go wrong:

• Insurers are often asked to “give away the pen” and allow third parties to underwrite risks on their paper. Sometimes a very sad ending to this.
• Statistical underwriting can spin out of control due to antiselection if not overseen by experienced people.  The bubble of US home mortgage securities can be seen as an extreme example of statistical underwriting gone bad.  Statistics from prior periods suggested that sub prime mortgages would default at a certain low rate.  Over time, the US mortgage market went from one with a high degree of underwriting of applicants by skilled and experienced reviewers to a process dictated by scores on credit reports and eventually the collection of data to perform underwriting stopped entirely with the no doc loans.  The theory was that the interest rate charged for the mortgages could be adjusted upwards to the point where extra interest collected could pay for the excess default claims from low credit borrowers.
• Volume incentives can work against the primary goals of underwriting.
• Insurance can be easily undone by underwriting decisions that are good risks, but much too large for the pool of other risks held by the insurer.

To get Underwriting right you need to:

• Have a clear idea of the risks that you are willing to accept, your risk preferences.  And be clear that you are going to be saying NO to risks that are outside of those preferences.
• Not let the pen get entirely out of the hand of an experienced underwriter that is trustable to make decisions in the interest of the firm, either to a computer or to a third party.
• Oversight of underwriting decisions needs to be an expectation at all levels.  The primary objective of this oversight should be to continually perfect the underwriting process and knowledge base.
• Underwriters need to be fully aware of the results of their prior decisions by regular communication with claims and reserving people.

This is one of the seven ERM Principles for Insurers

Delusions about Success and Failure

In his book, The Halo Effect: … and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers, author Phil Rosenzweig discusses the following 8 delusions about success:

1. Halo Effect: Tendency to look at a company’s overall performance and make attributions about its culture, leadership, values, and more.

2. Correlation and Causality: Two things may be correlated, but we may not know which one causes which.

3. Single Explanations: Many studies show that a particular factor leads to improved performance. But since many of these factors are highly correlated, the effect of each one is usually less than suggested.

4. Connecting the Winning Dots: If we pick a number of successful companies and search for what they have in common, we’ll never isolate the reasons for their success, because we have no way of comparing them with less successful companies.

5. Rigorous Research: If the data aren’t of good quality, the data size and research methodology don’t matter.

6. Lasting Success: Almost all high-performing companies regress over time. The promise of a blueprint for lasting success is attractive but unrealistic.

7. Absolute Performance: Company performance is relative, not absolute. A company can improve and fall further behind its rivals at the same time.

8. The Wrong End of the Stick: It may be true that successful companies often pursued highly focused strategies, but highly focused strategies do not necessarily lead to success.

9. Organizational Physics: Company performance doesn’t obey immutable laws of nature and can’t be predicted with the accuracy of science – despite our desire for certainty and order.

By Julian Voss-Andreae (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

A good risk manager will notice that all 8 of these delusions have a flip side that applies to risk analysis and risk management.

a.  Bad results <> Bad Culture – there are may possible reasons for poor results.  Culture is one possible reason for bad results, but by far not the only one.

b.  Causation and Correlation – actually this one need not be flipped.  Correlation is the most misunderstood statistic.  Risk managers would do well to study and understand what valuable and reliable uses that there are for correlation calculations.  They are very likely to find few.

c.  Single explanations  – are sometimes completely wrong (see c. above), they can be the most important of several causes, they can be the correct and only reason for a loss, or a correct but secondary reason.  Scapegoating is a process of identifying a single explanation and quickly moving on.  Often without much effort to determine which of the four possibilities above applies to the scapegoat.  Scapegoats are sometimes chosen that make the loss event appear to be non-repeatable, therefore requiring no further remedial action.

d.  Barn door solutions – looking backwards and finding the activities that seemed to lead to the worst losses at the companies that failed can provide valuable insights or it can lead to barn door solutions that fix past problems but have no impact on future situations.

e.  Data Quality – same exact issue applies to loss analysis.  GIGO

f.  Regression to the mean – may be how you describe what happens to great performing companies, but for most firms, entropy is the force that they need to be worried about.  A firm does not need to sport excellent performance to experience deteriorating results.

g.  Concentration risk – should be what a risk manager sees when strategy is too highly concentrated.

h.  Uncertainty prevails – precision does not automatically come from expensive and complicated models.

Risk and Return – A Balancing Act

From Max Rudolph

There are similarities between value investing and enterprise risk management (ERM) methods. For some, especially portfolio managers, this may be obvious. These investors come to the table with experience using risk as a constraint while trying to optimize returns. Years of experience have taught this group that risk balances return, and that return balances risk. Value is added by creating favorable imbalances. The investor with high returns and average risk has succeeded, as has the investor reporting average returns and low risk.
Many concepts are shared between ERM and value investing. When defining risk, which is generally unique to the individual, an analyst considers uncertainty, downside risk, and optimization. Value investors look at concepts like conservative assumptions, margin of safety, and asset allocation. These concepts are comparable, and this paper uses the International Actuarial Association’s Note on enterprise risk management (ERM) for capital and solvency purposes in the insurance industry to take the reader through general ERM topics. This is followed by a comparable value investing discussion and a comparison of the two practice areas.

In some firms, a risk manager is placed in a position with little authority, limiting the benefits of ERM. A process driven ERM function can identify risks and risk owners, create a common language, and send useful reports to the Board. A stronger risk officer adds value by using transparency to understand risk interactions, scanning for emerging risks and generally keeping a focus on how an entity’s risk profile is evolving.

Continued in Value Investing and Enterprise Risk Management: Two Sides of the Same Coin

Has the risk profession become a spectator sport?

The 2013 ERM Symposium goes back to Chicago this year after a side trip to DC for 2012. This is the 11th year for the premier program for financial risk managers.   April 23 and 24th.

This year’s program has been developed around the theme, ERM: A Critical Self-Reflection, which asks:

• Has the risk profession become a spectator sport? One in which we believe we are being proactive, yet not necessarily in the right areas.
• For the most significant headlines during the past year, how was the risk management function involved?
• Since the financial crisis, has there been genuine learning and changes to how risk management functions operate?
• What are the lessons that have been learned and how are they shaping risk management today? If not, why?
• Does risk management have a seat at the table, at the correct table?
• Are risk managers as empowered as they should be?
• Is risk management asking the right questions?
• Is risk management as involved in decision making and value creation as it should be, at inception of ideas and during follow through?

On Wednesday, April 24 Former FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair will be the featured luncheon speaker

Sheila C. Bair served as the 19th chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation for a five-year term, from June 2006 through July 2011. Bair has an extensive background in banking and finance in a career that has taken her from Capitol Hill to academia to the highest levels of government. Before joining the FDIC in 2006, she was the dean’s professor of financial regulatory policy for the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst since 2002.

The ERM Symposium and seminars bring together ERM knowledge from the insurance, energy and financial sectors.  Now in its 11th year, this premier global conference on ERM will offer: sessions featuring top risk management experts; seminars on hot ERM issues; ERM research from leading universities; exhibitors demonstrating their ERM services.  This program has been developed jointly by the Casualty Actuarial Society (CAS), the Professional Risk management International Association (PRMIA) and the Society of Actuaries (SOA).

Riskviews will be a speaker at three sessions out of more than 20 offered:

• Regulatory Reform: Responding to Complexity with Complexity – Andrew Haldane, executive director of Financial Stability at the Bank of England, recently made a speech at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City’s Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium titled “The Dog and the Frisbee” warning that the growing complexity of markets and banks cannot be controlled with increasingly complex regulations. In fact, by attempting to solve the problem of complexity with additional complexity created by increased regulation, we may be missing the mark—perhaps simpler metrics and human judgment may be superior. Furthermore, in attempting to solve a complex problem with additional complexity, we may not have clearly defined or understand the problem. How does ERM fit into the solutions arsenal? Are there avenues left unexplored? Is ERM adding or minimizing complexity?
  • We are drowning in data, but can’t hope to track all the necessary variables, nor understand all or even the most important linkages. Given the wealth of data available, important signals may be lost in the overall “noise.”
  • Unintended consequences maybe lost/hidden in the maze of complexity thereby magnifying the potential impact of future events.
  • The importance of key variables changes throughout time and from situation to situation, so it’s not possible to predict in advance which ones will matter most in the next crisis.
  • We experience relatively few new crises that are mirror images of prior crises, so we really have limited history to learn how to prevent or to cure them.
  • Complex rules incent companies and individuals to “manage to the rules” and seek arbitrage, perhaps seeding the next crisis.

• Actuarial Professional Risk Management  -  The new actuarial standards for Risk Evaluation and Risk Treatment bring new help and new issues to actuaries practicing in the ERM field. For new entrants, the standards are good guidelines for preparing comprehensive analyses and reports to management. For more experienced practitioners, the standards lay out expectations for a product worthy of the highly-qualified actuary. However, meeting the standards’ expectations is not easy. This session focuses on clarifying key aspects of the standards.
• Enterprise Risk Management in Financial Intermediation  -  This session provides a framework for thinking about the rapidly evolving, some would say amorphous, subject of ERM, especially as applied at financial institutions and develops seven principles of ERM and considers their (mis)application in a variety of organizational settings. The takeaways are both foundational and practical.

Please join us for some ERM fun and excitement.