SAS^® Risk Management for the Insurance Industry

Insurance companies are seeking new ways to ensure shareholder value and earnings consistency. Market conditions remain volatile, regulators are increasing capital requirements, and catastrophic events result in immediate cash demands. Today more than ever, insurers need to remain profitable while keeping earnings consistent, investors confident and regulators from downgrading their portfolios. To accomplish these goals, you must pull information from historically separate areas-to get a complete picture of your total risk capital.

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Financial executives and portfolio managers need a platform that combines asset and liability data from different lines of business into one enterprise view. They need to employ enterprise risk management that allows them to base strategic business decisions upon strong positions that can be measured qualitatively and quantitatively. Because they know the more clearly their organization's risk position is depicted, the more competitive it will appear in the marketplace.

Meanwhile, IT managers need better ways to integrate disparate systems and leverage existing applications, in order to reduce the resources required to maintain and extend functionality.

Can your CEO accurately explain the company's earnings volatility? Can you view the impact of individual business unit decisions on the firm's total risk? Does your company stock appear under-valued compared to competitors? Can you identify risk by geography, business unit or equity market segment? Are your risk-adjusted capital requirements a good indication of capital sufficiency? Can you articulate risk controls to the marketplace?

A consistent, coherent approach to enterprise risk management
Consider one solution that could answer all these questions – one that could:

• Bring your data together into one location, where you could apply a full range of risk-management techniques for investment, liability and operational risk and create measures that represent your proprietary knowledge of the market.

• Provide unrivaled statistical modeling capabilities for robust econometric and time series analysis so you could apply modeling insights to data for more accurate risk measurement.

• Return results quickly, apply consistent approaches that can be scheduled to manage tens of thousands of variables and still produce coherent results.

• Compute at-risk measures to help you make decisions that increase shareholder value.

• Perform analyses within specific time frames and deliver results in an easy-to-use manner.

• Allow you to evaluate corporate assets, physical and financial, and their contributions to risk.

• Allow risk managers, senior managers and analysts to access and communicate risk measures across the enterprise, fueling better decision making so that everyone could retain a strategic vision without losing sight of the granular details.

• Integrate easily into existing IT and management frameworks and provide an environment that meets current and future needs.