This paper looks at the problems of assessing, for solvency purposes, the capital requirements of a non-life insurer in the context of the United Kingdom. It considers how these capital requirements might vary according to the different risks to which an insurer is subject and how this Risk-Based Capital (RBC) might be measured in practice, using as a case study the RBC formula recently introduced in the United States of America. The paper also discusses the application of RBC concepts to the problem of internal capital allocation, to assist in measuring an insurer's rate of return to shareholders by business unit, as well as the more obvious regulatory application. The advantages and disadvantages of a formula-based approach to capital requirements for solvency purposes are discussed in comparison with possible alternative approaches to insurance supervision.

This is a study into the future of the actuarial profession. Its main purpose is to assist the United Kingdom profession to respond effectively to the changes and opportunities of the next ten plus years. Scenarios are developed to show where the profession could progress to in that period; the major changes and developments implied by these forward views are identified and actions to take the profession in the desired directions are proposed.

The study covers the key issues relating to most of the various business areas in which actuaries practise, and considers, in particular: the future supply of, and demand for, actuaries; actuarial education and training and relations with other professions.

This paper surveys some statistical models of survival data. Competing risks models are described; the unidentifiability of net decrements suggests a sceptical approach to the use of underlying single decrement tables. Approaches based on observations of complete lifetimes (with censoring) are surveyed including the Kaplan-Meier and Nelson-Aalen estimates. Regression models for lifetimes depending on covariates are discussed, in particular the Cox model and partial likelihood estimation.

Deaths and exposures by individual calendar year and individual years of age for the U.K. male assured lives experience over the recent past are comprehensively modelled using generalised linear modelling techniques. Our principal objective is to develop a model which incorporates both the age variation in mortality and the underlying time trends in the mortality rates. The approach has considerable advantages over ad hoc methods of fitting parametric models to represent the age variation in mortality and then separately attempting to represent the time trends in the parameters of these models. The approach advocated can be seen as an extension to the conventional parametric graduation techniques used by the CMI Bureau to represent trends in mortality.

The European Community 3rd Life and Insurance Accounts Directives have necessitated changes to United Kingdom life insurers' statutory solvency valuations and published accounts. This paper details these, together with associated guidance. It also describes certain other developments in U.K. life office financial reporting and discusses some inter-professional issues.