The Address is a journey in three parts. The first part describes the world scene in the last century when the Institute was founded and traces the development of actuarial work to the present day. The current U.K. pension scene is then broadly reviewed and the journey ends with vistas of the future. The concentration of actuarial work towards life assurance and pensions is attributed to meeting the needs of the past and encouragement is given to the urgent extension of the work of the profession into wider fields.

The U.K. pension scene is described as being complex, confused and filled with uncertainty. The profession is urged to assist government actively and positively, to examine the expected future growth of pension funds, and to compare the financing of retirement benefits in the U.K. with other methods adopted in Europe.

Work in wider fields is envisaged as embracing general insurance, the health and care of the aged, banking and finance, and the appraisal of capital projects.

The historic barriers between the different companies which comprise the financial services industry are breaking down. In order that organisations may prosper in the new environment the relationships between products, distribution and clients need to be understood. A theory is developed to explain the historic position and the dynamics of the current environment and indicate future trends. The conclusion is that successful organisations will be those which fully understand and specialise in a limited number of sectors, and those who start with a clientbase and a distribution system which will not inhibit the introduction of other distribution methods so that they can become multi-product and multi-distribution organisations. Finally, the paper explores the relationships between pricing policy and distribution by means of distribution chains to determine the point and degree of price sensitivity.

This paper looks at the existing controls on minimum funding standards and the solvency of defined benefit pension schemes in the United Kingdom. It considers the definition and disclosure of solvency margins and then goes on to look at the operation of a ‘Pensioners’ Protection Fund which would underwrite the solvency of schemes in a winding-up. With submissions due to the Goode Committee before the end of 1992, this paper will provide a well-timed opportunity to discuss some of the issues to be addressed by that Committee.

In this paper an asset/liability model is used to compare the quality of information available from a set of stochastic simulations with a traditional deterministic sensitivity test approach.

The traditional approach applied to a range of variants of the basic model office fails to distinguish adequately very risky strategies from relatively secure strategies. The stochastic simulation method succeeds in ranking the various strategies considered into an intuitively satisfactory order of insolvency risk, as well as giving quantitative information on the relative probabilities of insolvency of different strategies and on the timing of potential solvency problems.

This paper extends the theory of graduation by parametric formulae to include dynamic estimation methods. This is an application of the Kalman filter and allows the parameters of the curve fitted to vary with age. The amount of variation is determined by the amount of smoothing required, and the method can be regarded as a combination of curve fitting and sequential smoothing, each of which has been used separately for performing graduations. In practice, a dynamic straight line can always be used for the graduation and the method has a sensible logical interpretation.

This paper considers the application of loglinear models to claims run-off triangles which contain negative incremental claims. Maximum likelihood estimation is applied using the three parameter lognormal distribution. The method can be used in conjunction with any model which can be expressed in lognormal form. In particular the chain ladder technique is considered. An example is given and the results compared with the basic actuarial method.

Continuing process of updating company classifications.

Fifty-three constituents deleted during 1992—more as a result of casualty rule than those taken over. Only forty-one replaced—reflecting difficulty in finding suitable new non-industrial constituents.

Introduction of the new F.T.–S.E. Actuaries Share Indices, bringing F.T.–S.E. 100, 250 Mid Cap and Small Cap into a single family, with the All-Share widened to include 800 constituents.

A seminar on ‘The Practical Applications of Risk Theory’ was held at Staple Inn on 29–30 September 1992, organised jointly by the Institute and the Department of Actuarial Mathematics and Statistics at Heriot-Watt University. The aim of the seminar was to combine introductory talks on several aspects of risk theory with detailed presentations of case studies by practitioners.

The first three sessions dealt with risk models.

Ms Mary Hardy gave a short survey of the classical collective risk model, compound Poisson distributions, and some simple approximations to such distributions.