Chairperson’ s Corner
By Ariel Weis
Risk Management, February 2023
In late 2022, the Joint Risk Management Section (JRMS) Council’s term came to an end and started anew. We said goodbye to a few familiar faces who had been graciously volunteering their time to serve our membership and the actuarial profession, and wished them well in their new endeavours. At the same time, others remained, and a few new faces came on board to bring renewed energy and fresh ideas.
During the first few meetings of the Council for the 2022/2023 term we vowed to renew our commitment to focusing on research and continuing education. For 2023, this translates to three central pillars to our strategy:
- Planning and organizing our ongoing activities to maintain the level of service and delivery to our membership that we’ve all gotten used to.
- Updating our long-term planning to give ourselves a solid foundation for 2024 and beyond.
- Reviewing our mission statement and ensuring that our efforts and resources are spent toward bringing our vision forward.
The first one of these pillars is the most concrete and short-term one, and the one that will have the greatest impact on our members over the next few months. As of this writing, the council has already submitted a tentative schedule of webcasts and topics to the SOA to slot into the 2023 calendar, so that our webcasts are spaced out and our members can attend them over time. At the same time, we have penciled down the dates on which the newsletter will come out and started planning what articles and topics it will cover.
During our next few meetings, our agenda will be partially devoted to planning for risk management content for the various meetings that the SOA, CIA, and CAS offer, in order to support the teams of volunteers and staff members that organize them every year. The council unanimously agreed that our focus for those meetings should be on producing quality content rather than quantity.
The ongoing efforts to clean up and update the e-library that’s available on our webpage continue and should come to fruition in early 2023. Similarly, our efforts to continue funding good quality research on topics that expand and evolve our membership’s understanding of risk management will continue in 2023.
Another item on our agenda for 2023 is related to direct feedback we received during the ImpACT meeting of 2022. Several members who were in attendance inquired about the ERM Symposium, particularly within the context of in-person meetings returning after the COVID break that we all took. The council is taking this feedback to heart, and one of our planned activities for 2023 will be to define the viability of a JRMS conference that satisfies the needs of our membership. The ERM Symposium was that conference for many years, but, due to dwindling registration and the break during COVID, we want to explore if other options can be more meaningful and impactful. If you have ideas you want to share with us, please reach out to me or to the SOA staff to let us know.
As I mentioned at the start of this article, these are just some of the activities that support our Section’s current commitment to our members.
In addition to these, and somewhat intertwined, the council is trying to assess over 2023 what the state of our membership is, what your needs are so we can create activities to satisfy them, and, potentially, how to expand volunteering opportunities to the membership at large to support the development of our profession and risk management in general, as well as raise the profile of risk management within and without the profession.
Thanks to the work of the council over 2022, we can bring forward ideas for articles, research, webcasts, and meeting sessions that haven’t been fully developed yet. A lot of great ideas were brainstormed over 2022. In fact, so many, that if you’ve seen some of the ideas that past articles in this newsletter have listed and they have piqued your interest in one way or another, we want to hear from you.
I’m very excited at the prospect of all the efforts that have been and continue to be underway through the end of 2022 and in 2023 coming to fruition and delivering great content and opportunities to the membership at large.
I plan to continue keeping you updated of our progress, successes, and obstacles in this newsletter. 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.
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.