Chairperson’s Corner

By Ariel Weis

Risk Management, April 2023

By the time this is published we will be a third through 2023, and gears will be fully in motion to deliver on the activities that the Joint Risk Management Section (JRMS) Council has been targeting to perform this year. By this time, we have all settled into various roles within the council, and I would like to take this opportunity to open a window into how the volunteers that our section membership elects every year organize ourselves to do all the things that we believe are going to be of value to you.

The first to always come to mind are webcasts and newsletters. These are activities that we undertake every year, and they require quite a lot of work by our coordinators and the rest of the council to organize, recruit for, and generally pull off as successfully as they do. We also have leaders collaborating with the Joint Risk Management Research Council (JRMRC) and other sections, and, new to this year, liaisons with the Professional Development Committee (PDC). Other members of the council oversee membership, our website, the e-library that we have available to all our members, and coordinate with volunteers from within and without the section. Others manage our support for the various professional conferences and meetings that are organized every year to bring good quality sessions into them. Some of us are tasked with the responsibility and privilege of running the council meetings smoothly, as chairs and vice chairs, and looking after the organization and finances as secretaries and treasurers.

There are other roles and activities that I haven’t listed here, but I’m hoping that this gives all the readers a sense of how much work the council members put into serving the section every year, and what amazing opportunities exist for people who want to develop themselves in leadership roles. I would hope this serves as encouragement to section members to volunteer their time supporting some of these activities (if you are interested, please reach out to me directly), becoming a Friend of the Council, and/or running for council membership in our upcoming elections. As effortful as I’m making it seem here, and it is additional work on top of everything else we do, it is incredibly rewarding, developing, and a manageable amount within the daily chaos of our lives.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t also use this opportunity to inform you that in February the JRMS Council and the JRMRC leadership met to discuss topics of interest that the JRMRC should pursue in sourcing and generating research on for our members to eventually consume. The list of topics proposed was phenomenal (in my opinion), and spanned ideas from refreshing what the role of the CRO and the risk function is nowadays in most companies, through ChatGPT, AI, and ethics through a risk lens, all the way to understanding what the changing economic environment of the last 18 months means for risk practitioners and risk functions across various geographies.

Again, and importantly because of all the activities that are ongoing and the ones that keep surfacing, I want to make sure that you (you specifically, reading this, right now) are aware that volunteering with the section doesn’t need to be an all-or-nothing situation. You don’t have to run for the council to participate in any of these activities if they interest you. You don’t have to commit to multiple meetings in the year if you don’t have the time. If you have an interesting topic that you’d like to talk about and disseminate to others, you can reach out and we can collaborate with you to make it into a webcast, podcast episode, article, or research topic. If you have a topic you’d like to know more about, you can reach out and we can make sure that we prioritize it along with all the other work that is ongoing. If you have feelings about the direction of the section and what we should be spending our time on, you can join the council as a friend and you can run for election. Or you can just reach out by email and let us know your thoughts and comments. These are all options that are always available to us all. The section becomes stronger through its volunteers, and it lives and breathes when we exchange ideas and thoughts. If you have time to let us know your thoughts, we want to hear from you.

I’d like to finish this corner article by thanking all the volunteers, past and present, that have already done one or more of the things that I describe above, donating their time, thoughts, and efforts to each other, the section membership, the profession, and the public to make us all better in one way or another. And I hope that you continue serving as inspiration for all of us who are thinking about helping with making the JRMS and the profession successful.

As usual, if at any time you have any questions, ideas, suggestions, or concerns, I invite you to let us know by contacting any council member, myself, or the SOA staff. We want to hear from you.

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.

Ariel Weis, FSA, FCIA, MAAA, is the chair of the Joint Risk Management Section Council and works for Pacific Life. He can be reached at ariel.weis+soa@gmail.com.