DFA Seminar Planned

ARLINGTON, Va. - The 1997 CAS Special Interest Seminar on Dynamic Financial Analysis will be held July 21-22 in Seattle, Wash., at the Sheraton Hotel and Towers. This seminar is designed to enhance the actuary's role in assisting insurance company management in decision making.

Sessions are planned for beginning and more experienced DFA professionals. Basic education sessions will introduce the fundamental concepts of business planning and the asset side of the balance sheet. A series of sessions devoted to state-of-the-art dynamic financial modeling are also being planned, with a focus on advanced asset and liability modeling techniques. Attendees will also hear from the actuary's customers for DFA work, with comments from outside regulators and rating agencies and company management.

The seminar will feature presentations of the call paper program on DFA variables, directed by the DFA Task Force on Variables. The research being done in the area of selection of appropriate variables for the models builds on the research presented at last year's seminar.

Susan T. Szkoda is the featured speaker. Szkoda is the CAS Vice President-Continuing Education and was the chairperson of the committee that published the DFA Handbook in 1996. Szkoda is a consulting actuary in Glastonbury, Conn. A series of her articles on DFA is appearing in the Actuarial Review.

Szkoda views DFA as an important means of getting a diverse group of professionals within an insurance organization to think about how knowledge and decisions interact with one another. That way individuals can develop a single holistic view of the organization. Szkoda comments, "The quality of decision-making improves, if people at many levels and areas of the organization are talking to one another. DFA can be the catalyst for sharing knowledge and the distribution of it throughout the organization. The discipline of looking at the company through a structured DFA process is beneficial at all levels of the organization."