As part of the AAIS Webinar Series, AAIS hosted a virtual presentation on June 13, 2023, featuring AAIS Partner, Davies. Moderated by AAIS Personal Lines Product Manager, Linda Jancik, the session explored how wind models are created, used, and regulated. Featured guest speakers, Greg Fanoe, Director & Consulting Actuary at Davies, Sandra Darby, Property & Casualty Division Actuary at the Maine Bureau of Insurance, and Shaveta Gupta, Catastrophe Risk & Modeling Actuary at the NAIC, discussed how this data is gathered from inside the storm, why it’s collected, and how it is used by insurance carriers to price policies. The panel also analyzed hurricane models from the regulation side, explaining how regulators use this data to develop legislation to further protect consumers and ensure a healthy market.

As part of the AAIS Webinar Series, AAIS hosted a virtual presentation on June 6, 2023, regarding California’s Mandatory Wildfire Mitigation Credits regulation. AAIS industry leaders, Robin Westcott, Vice President of Government Affairs, Legal & Compliance/General Counsel, Linda Jancik, Product Manager of Personal Lines, Mike Payne, Chief Pricing Actuary, and Matt Hinds-Aldrich, Senior Risk Strategy Lead, presented an overview of how the regulation was addressed across impacted programs from both a product and actuarial perspective. The panel also focused on the consumer notice requirement, highlighting how notice design can help motivate consumer action to complete wildfire mitigations on their properties. Panelists shared a notice template developed in response to this regulation that can easily be used and adapted in response to this regulation.

This is the next installment in a series of conversations with AAIS leadership to get to know them, their background, and the unique work they’re doing within AAIS to further the insurance industry. In this edition, AAIS Views spoke with Michael Payne, Chief Pricing Actuary, about his career, being creative as an actuary, the role data is playing to create better pricing models, and how AAIS is leveraging those models to deliver value to our Members.

Tell us about your background.

Michael Payne: When I was in college, I liked math, but really didn’t know what I wanted to do. Then I heard about Actuarial Science from an alum who came back to campus and gave a presentation about the career path. That’s what sparked my interest. I got an internship at Zurich and that turned into my first job out of school. I started out doing pricing at Zurich, went to SCOR Re to do reinsurance pricing, and went back to Zurich to eventually lead a pricing tools team.

One not-so-traditional role in my career was a stint I did at Sears in their Home Services unit where I was the Director of Underwriting Analysis. Basically, if you bought a refrigerator at Sears, they were going to offer you a protection plan. It was my role to figure out the prices for those protection agreements based on how likely the appliance was going to need to be repaired or even replaced.

Overall, I really like pricing. It’s prospective in nature as you try to determine what might happen in the future.

In the winter of 2018, I joined AAIS where I’ve been able to leverage my pricing experience. My role includes product development and delivering loss costs that are appropriate for the coverage being offered. Not all carriers have a large team of actuaries or loads of data, so our rating plans offer them a faster speed to market for a new line of business, or even insurtechs to get their first policies written.

The AAIS Pulse newsmagazine recently featured AAIS Chief Pricing Actuary Mike Payne and Somil Jain, VP & Consulting Actuary at Lewis & Ellis Actuaries and Consultants, spotlighting forces reshaping the role of pricing actuaries.