The Actuarial Science Club at UIUC will be hosting its annual spring symposium, bringing insurance experts and business leaders from many fields together to highlight emerging trends within risk management and insurance.

This year’s theme will give attendees the opportunity to learn about telematics, cyber insurance, and AI among other topics that are relevant within insurance today.

The Risks Analytics Symposium 2024: Innovation in Insurance will take place in the Natural History Building Rm. 2079. University students, as well as academics and industry professionals, will have the opportunity to network and view presentations in-person at UIUC. There will be individual Q&A sessions following each speaker to ask questions.

SPEAKER: Steve Jackson

TOPIC: State of Cyber Insurance in the United States

Steve Jackson, Ph.D., is the director of research (public policy) at the American Academy of Actuaries. He works with all of the practice councils to generate, develop, and execute research projects that will enhance the work of the councils. In 2020, he was one of the authors of the Academy’s publication, Cyber Breach Reporting Requirements as well as a paper currently being reviewed for publication, “Monetizing Data Breaches”.

He currently works with the Cyber Risk Committee on their Cyber Risk Toolkit, and with Prof. Kratz (Essec, Paris) on a project modeling cyber risk. Prior to his work at the academy, Steve was a member of the faculty at Cornell University and at Washington University in St. Louis, teaching courses in research methods, statistics, political economy, and public policy. He published several books and papers on a wire range of topics and consulted widely with government agencies, nonprofits, and in the finance industry.

Steve will talk about the work in progress at the American Academy of Actuaries to better understand cyber risk and cyber insurance. He will been by introducing the work of the Cyber Risk Committee which has assembled a Cyber Risk Toolkit, a series of papers on various topics describing and assessing the state of cyber insurance and its challenges primarily int eh United States. He will then turn to describing a multi-year effort to evaluate the economic risk of cyber attacks in the United States. Finally, Steve will turn to a discussion of the data available for evaluating cyber risks, reflecting on two papers produced by the research program at the academy.

SPEAKER: Amogh Bhoopalam

TOPIC: Emerging casualty risks and exposure based pricing and reserving

Amogh Bhoopalam (based in New York City) is the head of client portfolio risk analytics and a client engagement manager at Praedicat. He manages the relationships of a range of direct corporate insurance and reinsurance companies, working directly with auctions such as pricing, reserving, capital modeling, risk management, claims, and underwriting.

Prior to Praedicat, Amogh worked at AXIS Capital as an Insurance natural Catastrophe Accumulation Analyst within their Group Exposure Management team and worked in a variety of roles as an intern within the AXIS research center at research park in Champaign, IL. He received his B.S. with High Distinction in both Actuarial Science and Statistics with a minor in Atmospheric Sciences and a certificate in Data Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).

Within UIUC, Amogh was involved with a number of student organizations, such as Gamma Iota Sigma (Gamma-Lambda chapter), Alpha Chi Sigma (Zeta chapter), Smashing Illini, Penny Dreadful Players, and of course, the Actuarial Science Club.

For this year’s Risk Analytics Symposium, Amigo’s presentation will be an introduction to casualty emerging risks and the concept of exposure-based pricing and reserving

SPEAKER: Kelsie Rebhan

TOPIC: Turning big data into big results for group reinsurance

Kelsie Rebhan, FSA, CERA, works in Data Commercialization at Reinsurance Group of America based out of Chesterfield, Missouri. She has experience in data analytics, experience studies, modeling, and data solutions.

She currently works on the MedScore® product suite. MedScore® is a risk assessment tool for group business that combines the predictive power of prescription drug (Rx) and digital health data (DHD) in a single score and is highly predictive of group mortality experience.

She Holds a Bachelors of Science in Actuarial Science from Illinois State University. The topic that Kelsie will be presenting on is “Turning Big Data into Big Results for Group Reinsurance”.

SPEAKER: Ben Tucker

TOPIC: Role of Telematics in Insurance Rating

Ben Tucker ACAS, FCAS, MAAA, CPCU is an analyst at State Farm. He has a background in chemistry with a PHD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. From 2010-2014, he served as a naval officer and instructor at Naval Nuclear Power School. He joined State Farm Mutual Insurance Companies in 2014. He currently works on Commercial Auto and Commercial Multi-Peril indications and ratemaking alongside focuses on telematics and regulation.

He will present to us about how telematics has been a major innovation within insurance rating! Starting with a discussion of the actuarial role in insurance, he will consider how a traditional automotive rating plan may function. He will then consider the challenges and benefits of incorporating telematics into a traditional rating plan using automobile insurance as an example. Finally, He will consider how telematics along with a changing economy and society shape development of new insurance products.