When you’re short of actuarial capacity, you call in actuarial consultants to make sure you’re assessing your risk correctly.
Most insurers and MGAs have actuaries in-house, but when they need an extra body to cover a workload, or if they need some specialist or niche expertise, they might consider calling in a consultant.
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Greg Fanoe, also a consulting actuary at Merlinos & Associates, an actuarial consulting firm based out of Peachtree, Georgia, said sometimes insurers will also go down the consultancy route if they just don’t want or need to hire a full-time employee to cover an actuarial project.
“Some companies, especially smaller ones, don’t have their own actuaries,” he explained. “Other companies do have their own actuaries, but want to hire a consulting actuary anyway … they may not have enough actuaries on staff to do all of the actuarial work that needs to be done … or a company may want to get an independent look at some of their projections. And some may want a consulting actuary to supplement the expertise of their in-house actuaries.”
Merlinos, as one of the larger actuarial consultancy firms in the United States, has 32 credentialed actuaries and 15 actuarial analysts. The company caters to various industry sectors, said Karen Landrum, another consulting actuary at Merlinos.
“About a third of our clients are in the insurance company space - that includes MGAs [and carriers and reinsurers]. About a third of our work is done in the captive space. And about a third of our work is in the regulatory space,” she said.
“Our firm is very broad in our experience base – it ranges from very niche areas like cannabis and flood, to very broad areas. We have people in-house that have tons of experience with homeowners, auto, commercial auto, commercial products including workers’ compensation, and general liability. We also have experience in niche products like pre-paid legal insurance or credit property insurance, and we have people on staff who do health and life.
“We might provide some guidance on ERM [enterprise risk management], processes, anything really that assesses risk.”
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