Old Mutual Insure chief actuary wins first prize at Risks Journal 2021 Best Paper Awards

<!-- wp:image {"align":"right","id":149418,"sizeSlug":"medium","linkDestination":"none","className":"is-style-default"} --><div class="wp-block-image is-style-default"><figure class="alignright size-medium"><img src="https://cover.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Ronald-Richmond-016-BW-300x276.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-149418"/></figure></div><!-- /wp:image --><!-- wp:paragraph --><p>Ronald Richman, chief actuary at Old Mutual Insure, walked away with first prize in the Risks Journal 2021 Best Paper Awards. The title of the paper is “Nagging Predictors”, which he wrote together with renowned Swiss actuary Mario Wüthrich.</p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --><p>Risks Journal is an international, scholarly, peer-reviewed, open-access journal for research and studies on insurance and financial risk management. Nominations were chosen from all papers published in Risks Journal in 2021. After a thorough evaluation the committee selected winners based on the originality and significance of the papers as well as the citations and downloads in 2021.</p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --><p>Richman’s paper addresses how the accuracy of predictions from neural networks can be enhanced by aggregating the outputs of multiple networks, showing how the resulting ensemble prediction improves performance while enhancing the reproducibility of the results. “Thank you to my co-author Mario Wuthrich for this project which represents an important step in using neural networks in regulated contexts such as insurance companies. Our work further looks at how using this technique provides insight into whether the datasets used for fitting networks contain data that is anomalous or unusual,” says Richman.</p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --><p>Garth Napier, MD at Old Mutual Insure says, “Old Mutual Insure is proud of having such an experienced actuary and risk manager who continually pushes the boundaries of his expertise to bring value to the non-life insurance industry through his research and work as part of our team.”</p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --><p>This past December, Richman was also awarded the highly acclaimed Brian Hey prize 2021 for actuarial research in the short-term(non-life) insurance market. He is the very first recipient to have won the award more than once since the inception of the awards in 1998. Presented by the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA) in the UK, this international actuarial research award is given to the best short term insurance papers every year.</p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --><p>“Richman has been playing a pivotal role in assisting us to enhance our business and has taken an active role in promoting the non-life insurance industry as an attractive practicing area for actuaries. The profession is becoming critically important as the demand for actuarial professionals continues to grow. Organisations rely on actuarial skills to model, predict and interpret data, to plan for a future in which increased geo-political, climate and socio-economic risks are becoming the norm.” concludes Napier.</p><!-- /wp:paragraph -->