The Internal Model Industry Forum (IMIF) was launched on 19 June and promises to be an important development in addressing the issues that insurers face concerning the use and validation of internal models.
It will bring together senior risk and capital professionals, such as chief risk officers, heads of risk, model validation or capital, as well as other relevant stakeholders such as the Prudential Regulation Authority, the Association of British Insurers, the IFoA and key consultancy firms. Delegates at the launch event heard from Mark Chaplin, group enterprise risk director at Aviva plc, Vishal Desai, manager, general insurance risk specialists, at the Bank of England, Ian Marshall, chairman of Markel International and senior advisor at the Bank of England Prudential Regulatory Authority, and Jose Morago, group risk director at Aviva and deputy chairman at The Institute of Risk Management (IRM).
The forum is supported by the IRM and the IFoA is represented on the steering group. We are keen to ensure there is broad input from a range of general insurance and life practitioners. For details of how to join the forum, go to bit.ly/1pdu0Dm.
Although insurance companies are producing good evidence to support the validation of models, there remain a number of challenges as to how to embed them in decision-making, get the right visibility at the board level and build trust through a well focused and cost-effective validation framework. The IMIF will tackle these questions and produce an industry view of best practices and the level of maturity around the use and validation of internal models.
