Edition

Chairperson's Corner

By Frank Reynolds

Risk Management, December 2021

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By the time this is sent out, I will no longer be chair. Sandee Schuster will be. The 2021 council was by far the best council I have ever seen in 13 years on section councils.

What did it accomplish in 2020 to 2021?

  1. Sandee got funding for the Crisil project and it is currently in progress. The section contributed $29,500 to this important research.
  2. David Paul produced a standard agenda, which needed only minor changes each month. This saved a lot of time. His minutes were accurate which again saved a lot of meeting time.
  3. Magee Ma produced the best financial reports I have seen, which speeded up meetings.
  4. Bob Wolf engineered an ERM Day to replace the ERM Symposium (which The SOA Board discontinued). Unfortunately, the timing was off and the ERM Day had to be canceled at the last minute for lack of participation. For our members, it would have provided 4.5 hours of continuing education credit in one day on a cohesive topic. Hopefully this ERM day will continue under Sandee’s leadership.
  5. Tony Dardis accomplished a lot. First, he managed to put in writing the rules for council membership and the sharing of the chair’s role. This is very complex because of the triparte sponsorship and the need to see that at least one person is elected two years in advance to be eligible for the chair’s role when that constituency’s turn to chair the council comes up. Also, council membership must be reasonably split among the three sponsoring organizations. Secondly, Tony did an excellent job of providing seven webinars that provided you with continuing education and provided the section with the money to sponsor research and get into respectful finance condition.
  6. Kailain Shang did an excellent job of producing three versions of the newsletter with help from Rhibi Alam, Jing Fritz, and Florian Richard, the previous chair. Kailain also served as the liaison with the CIA.
  7. Ariel Weise produced two very interesting podcasts and helped organize the sessions for the SOA ImpACT Conference.
  8. Gerald Adamski assisted in preparing the podcasts and the sessions for the SOA ImpACT Conference.
  9. Vy Le updated the library and kept the webpage up to date.
  10. Vincent Chen and Tom Mao did an excellent job of providing risk management sessions for the Life Meeting.
  11. I would like to thank the CAS staff representatives for their many contributions and Helene Baril, the CIA staff representative for her contributions.
  12. Finally, I would like to thank Ladelia Berger for being by far the best staff partner I have ever worked with. She knew exactly when to intervene and was a fount of knowledge when it was needed.

All in all, I would like to thank each and every member of the council for making my time as chair easy, working so well together, and for accomplishing so much in a year when everyone’s time was precious.

Statements of fact and opinions expressed herein are those of the individual authors and are not necessarily those of the Society of Actuaries, the newsletter editors, or the respective authors’ employers.

Frank Reynolds, FSA, FCIA, MAAA, is the departing chair of the Joint Risk Management Section Council and has taught at the University of Waterloo for 35 years. He can be reached at fgreynolds@uwaterloo.ca.