Optial has signed up to sponsor this year's Association of Financial Mutuals (AFM) conference and AGM which is taking place on 18th and 19th October at the Merchant Taylor's Hall in London.
The Conference will take the theme of the Future of Mutuality; full details of the venue are shown on the conference website www afmagm.co.uk. With senior speakers from the industry, government and regulator, the chance to fully understand what your trade body is doing for its members, and ample opportunity to network with friends old and new, the AFM Conference promises to make a strong statement about the vibrancy of the sector.
Optial is providing sponsorship for the pre-dinner champagne reception and will be on hand during the whole event to discuss and demonstrate its powerful Operational Risk Management software solution.
We will be joined at the event by our Insurance/Solvency II consulting partner SolvEcon. Paul Ormerod, Director of SolvEcon, will be presenting at the conference on the topic of "What the Fat Tail can do to hurt you and how to avoid it." See blow for more detail.
We very much look forward to seeing all delegates at the event and to the opportunity to demonstrate how Optial and SolvEcon can assist organisations in terms of defining risk management methodologies and frameworks, preparing Solvency II programmes and implementing robust systems of governance to fullfil the ERM requirement set out by the Solvency II directive.
What the Fat Tail can do to hurt you and how to avoid it
Existing risk assessment systems are very well geared to anticipating and dealing with ‘normal’ risks. But the financial crisis highlighted the fact that ‘abnormal’ events, whilst rare, are very much more frequent than the standard approaches allow for. The more extreme the event – the bigger the impact on your business – the bigger the discrepancy between the true level of this happening and the level assessed by conventional approaches.
By definition, extreme events of this kind are very hard to anticipate. We propose a conceptual framework for thinking about such problems and the circumstances in which they might arise. This can be demonstrated using usual techniques which facilitate the understanding of the problem by senior management
Paul Ormerod
Paul Ormerod is a Director of SolvEcon and an economist with 30 years’ experience in consulting. His book ‘Why Most Things Fail’ was named by Business Week as a US Business Book of the Year in 2006, and he was profiled in the Harvard Business Review in 2007. He is a Visiting Professor at the University of Durham’s Institute for Hazard, Risk and Resilience, and is a Visiting Scholar on the Extreme Events research project at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria.