The fourth session of the Arab Conference of Actuaries kicks off in Dubai
DUBAI, 4th February, 2018 (WAM) – The activities of the fourth session of the Arab Conference of Actuaries, organized by the Emirates Insurance Federation in partnership with the General Arab Insurance Federation and the “Minamoney” company specializing in organizing financial events, kicked off today in Dubai.
The event is considered the largest gathering of actuarial experts and leaders from the insurance, banking, investment, pensions, healthcare, financial regulatory bodies, and government officials.
The conference, which is held under the slogan “The World through Actuarial Eyes,” discusses topics centered around existing and emerging risks faced by the financial and insurance sectors, and their evaluation and management. Its sessions this year, in particular, focus on artificial intelligence and data and their impact on the development of the insurance industry, new trends for health insurance in Arab markets, the shift towards capitalizing insurance companies according to risk, and the role of actuaries in risk management, in addition to the impact of generative artificial intelligence on actuarial work and the effects of digitization. Embedded insurance and insurtech are reshaping the sector.
Farid Lutfi, Secretary General of the Emirates Insurance Federation, said that the emergence of artificial intelligence has led to a change in the approach in which actuarial experts constituted the backbone of the insurance industry, taking advantage of mathematics and statistics to assess risks, determine insurance premiums, and ensure financial benefit. They can now harness it to analyze huge amounts of information in less time, reveal hidden patterns, and enhance predictive accuracy in an unprecedented way, pointing out that insurance companies that benefit from artificial intelligence-based analyzes have reduced claims processing times by 50%. The costs of detecting fraud increased by 30%, according to analyzes by international institutions, indicating that this transformation makes insurance more efficient.
He added that this development in the uses of artificial intelligence expands the role of the actuary, providing greater opportunities to drive innovation in the insurance technology ecosystem, pointing out that the developments and challenges that the world is witnessing in the field of financial technology require actuaries to constantly improve their skills in the field of artificial intelligence, data science and automation, to remain competitive.
Regarding the reality of actuarial work in the Arab Gulf countries, Lutfi pointed out that the Gulf insurance sector faced a severe shortage of qualified actuarial cadres, pointing out that this shortage is due to the difficulty of professional tests and the long period of qualification that may take between 7 and 10 years, and the increasing demand for this profession globally and regionally, which prompted regulatory bodies in the GCC countries to launch initiatives to qualify citizens and impose a minimum number of accredited actuaries for each company.
He pointed to an active move by the competent authorities in the UAE to launch initiatives to qualify citizens, most notably the “Actuarial” initiative, which aims to promote Emiratisation in the financial and insurance sector, and to qualify Emirati citizens to work as actuarial experts. A memorandum of understanding was also signed earlier, aiming to provide 100 annual scholarships in the field of actuarial science, and a number of citizens were chosen to benefit from these scholarships to pursue their studies in the United States and Australia.
He pointed to other initiatives underway with a number of national and international universities, including the Higher Colleges of Technology, Zayed University, and the American University in Dubai, to launch a bachelor’s program specializing in actuarial science with the support of insurance companies.
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