Responsibilities at Internship To-Date

My internship has been nothing but a blessing. I will be an actuarial intern at W&S for two quarters: spring and summer. Since today marks the end of the Spring Quarter, I thought I would write about my work to-date.

Summary of Responsibilities:

My first and foremost responsibility at this point is to assist in the conversion from Lafayette’s software for organizing reinsurance treaties (Quasar) to Western and Southern’s (TAI). Lafayette was acquired by Western and Southern about 6 years ago, but they operated independently until this year. A few months ago, Lafayette’s operations completely moved from Lafayette IN, to Cincinnati. Since Lafayette moved to Cincinnati, converting Lafayette’s practices to match W&S has been a major project for the majority of departments within the W&S Insurance Company.

My role in the reinsurance conversion includes:

• Understanding the structure and fields of data on the Quasar operating system; ability to extract and reference data as needed.
• Organize all data in a methodological, easy-to-understand way in Excel. Reorganize and manipulate this data as our understanding of this data continuously grows and changes.
• Understand the structure and fields of data on the TAI operating system and the method for importing the data into TAI
• Create a quick and easy way to pull Quasar’s relevant fields of data from where it is stored in Excel to the specified format and structure needed to import the relevant data into TAI
• Discover and consolidate Quasar’s current treaty entries, as Lafayette was required to create several different treaty entries on Quasar per paper treaty.
• Run error-checking tests on the TAI system by repeatedly importing data into TAI and fixing discovered errors
• Update head managers of the Actuarial Department on the conversion’s progress, possible future challenges, etc.

My next most important responsibility is performing monthly valuation reporting for Western & Southern’s traditional line of business. While monthly reporting work can be tedious and lackluster, it’s work that is universal for any company in any field of insurance. I assume that any actuarial position in the insurance industry would include this work, making it as valuable on my resume as it is to the company. My role in the valuation department’s monthly reporting work includes:

• Update fluctuating parameters in ARCVAL, the software used by Western & Southern for valuation, financial reporting, and making projections for various lines of business.
• Run calculations on ARCVAL and generate reports, or print-vals, to be exported into Excel
• Embed relevant data from print-vals into comprehensive financial reports on Excel
• Create and implement macros using Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) to automate and expedite monthly reporting for the traditional line of business. 

Finally I also am working on a case study concerning market value adjusted annuity policy-holder behavior. These Responsibilities include:

• Run queries in Access to pull all Market Value Adjusted Annuity policy data that is nearing the end of its surrender charge or guarantee period.
• Analyze policy holder behavior and determine the shock lapse rate and any other interesting characteristics of the data