The EAA – European Actuarial Academy offers a variety of learning formats to support actuaries in their professional development. This quarter’s selection includes a combination of web sessions, in-person seminars, and the 6th EAA e-Conference on ‘Data Science & Data Ethics’, providing flexible options to suit different learning preferences.
With interactive web sessions for convenient online participation, in-depth seminars for face-to-face discussions, and a conference bringing together experts and practitioners, these 10 highlighted trainings offer a diverse range of opportunities.
Enjoy the read and EAA looks forward to welcoming you!
Web Session 'Non-Life Pricing Using Statistical Techniques with R Applications'
on 7-10 April 2025 | 9:00-12:30 CEST
Non-Life insurance is facing many challenges ranging from fierce competition on the market or evolution in the distribution channel used by the consumers to evolution of the regulatory environment. Pricing is the central link between solvency, profitability and market shares (volume). Improving pricing practice encompasses several dimensions:
- Technical: Is our pricing adequate to cover the underlying cost of risk of my policyholders and the other costs we are facing? Which are the key variables driving the risk? Are they adequately taken into account in our pricing? What’s the impact of the claims history of my policyholder on its expected risk? In which segment are we profitable and in which are we not profitable?
- Competition: At what price will we attract the segments that we target and price out those that we do not want? Is the positioning of our competitors influencing our pricing practice and our profitability? What’s my position with respect to my competitors in term of pricing? What are the segments in which I am well positioned and the segments where I am not well positioned?
- Elasticity: What price (evolution) are our existing customers prepared to accept? Does the sensitivity to price evolution depend on the profile of my customer?
- Segmentation: Is our segmentation granular enough for our purposes?
The aim of this web session is to present some advanced actuarial/statistical techniques used in non-life pricing or underwriting. The web session focuses on selected practical problems faced by pricing actuaries and product managers.
Web Session 'Understanding IFRS 17'
on 8/9 May 2025 | 9:00-16:30 CEST
The goal of the two-day web session is to provide participants with a comprehensive introduction to the new measurement, presentation and disclosure guidance for insurance contracts. It will cover life, health and non-life business, including the special guidance on direct participating contracts and shorter term non-life contracts and give useful examples.
In the web session, we will first shed a light on the context of accounting for insurance contracts within the IFRS 17 framework. We will present and discuss the general concepts behind the new model and refer to the application of valuation models like the Variable Fee Approach (VFA) and the Premium Allocation Approach (PAA). The web session will proceed with a discussion of topics specific to individual lines of business. We will close with an overview of methodical most relevant topics seen in various European markets, share emerging market experience and discuss these with the participants.
Overall, the goal is to enable participants to understand the standard and help transferring the requirements into your specific situation. It is thus intended to prepare participants for model development, implementation, testing, reviewing and consulting with management, accounting and auditors.
Web Session 'How to Read the IFRS Balance Sheet for Insurers'
on 12 May 2025 | 9:00-12:15 CEST
The goal of this three-hour web session is to provide participants with a comprehensive introduction on the IFRS reporting requirements for insurance contracts after go-live of IFRS 17. Focus will be the illustration of the reporting requirements of IFRS 17 to “demystify” the new presentation requirements on the IFRS balance sheet and the statement(s) of financial performance (Profit and Loss as well as Other Comprehensive Income). The web session will also briefly compare key aspects of the reporting requirements to former IFRS 4-reporting practice, contain a brief summary of the main information which can be found within the IFRS 17 reporting and cover the different aspects for primary and reinsurance related business.
Overall, the goal is to enable participants to understand the IFRS 17 reporting and help transferring the reporting requirements into the specific situation of the participant. It is thus intended to prepare participants for analysing, testing, reviewing, and consulting with management, accounting, and auditors.
EAA e-Conference on 'Data Science & Data Ethics'
on 14 May 2025 | 9:30-17:00 CEST
In an era marked by unprecedented technological advancements, the actuarial landscape has experienced profound transformations. The exponential growth of computational power and the abundance of data have converged and provide an exciting opportunity for the actuarial profession to redefine its boundaries and explore the ethical implications of this new field.
The role of actuaries is evolving at an incredible pace but remains incompletely defined. We are at a crucial point where a new understanding of the possibilities of actuarial science and its ethical obligations needs to be created. Best practice experience sharing, and exchange of ideas is needed. We are delighted to offer all interested actuaries and other experts a forum for knowledge exchange:
On 14 May 2025, the virtual EAA e-Conference on ‘Data Science & Data Ethics’ will take place. The programme blends keynote speeches featuring insights from renowned experts with selected talks delivered by professionals participating through a call for speakers, providing a diverse range of perspectives and food for thought.
Seminar in Zagreb 'Climate Days 6.0: Climate Change and the European Insurance Industry – Evolving Approaches to Risk Quantification'
19 May 2025, 8:45-17:00 & dinner | 20 May 2025, 9:00-15:00
Organised by the EAA – European Actuarial Academy GmbH in cooperation with the Hrvatsko Aktuarsko Drustvo.
While the actuarial community develops new ways to measure the economic impact of the risk posed by climate change, it is exceedingly important for actuaries to gain an understanding of how to use climate data, how to bridge the gap between climate models and actuarial projection models and how to produce relevant KPIs. Additionally, how actuaries can leverage new technologies to make more sense of available data in insurance to develop strategies to adapt to the risks posed by climate change.
- During our Climate Days 6.0, we will explore the following key topics in depth:
- The Impact of Climate Change on Low-Income Populations
- Quantifying the Relationship Between Climate Change and Mortality
- Machine Learning for Climate Data Modelling
- Measuring Climate Impact on Asset Portfolios
- Leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) for ESG Reporting and Climate Stress Testing
- Natural Language Processing (NLP) for Climate Risk Sentiment Analysis
- The Impact of Shifting Ecological Conditions on Disease Transmission
Web Session 'Explainable AI for Actuaries: Concepts, Techniques & Case Studies'
on 27/28 May 2025 | 9:00-12:30 CEST
The increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in the insurance industry in general and in actuarial issues in particular presents both opportunities and risks. Acceptance of complex methods requires, among other things, a degree of transparency and explainability of the underlying models and the decisions based on them.
Welcome to this four-part training. In the first part, we will explore the concept of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) through a qualitative discussion. We will not only characterize both model complexity and explainability, but also examine when a model can be considered sufficiently explained. Actuarial diligence will be addressed as well, using the counterfactual XAI method as an example. Additionally, we will provide an illustrative and comprehensive overview of explainability techniques, along with a compilation of useful and practical notebooks.
The second block will introduce the participants to variable importance methods. These methods try to provide an answer to the question: “Which inputs are the most important for my model?”. We will provide a general overview of variable importance methods and introduce some selected methods in depth. In addition to providing examples and use cases, we will cover enough of the theory underlying the methods to ensure that users have a good understanding of their applicability and limitations. Throughout, we will also discuss practical aspects of actuarial diligence such as how to interpret and communicate results from these methods.
In the third part, we will focus on further specific standard methods for XAI. Here, we explain how the model-agnostic methods “Individual Conditional Expectation”, “Partial Dependence Plot” and “Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations” work and refer to well-known Python packages and several Jupyter Notebooks. Additionally, we examine the model-specific tree-based “Feature Importance” of the Python package “scikit-learn”. Throughout this part, we also discuss aspects of actuarial diligence and limitations of the considered methods.
The last part of the online training provides an interactive, hands-on experience with explainable AI using a Jupyter notebook designed around an actuarial use case. Participants will be guided through a comprehensive machine learning workflow before exploring the implementation of various XAI techniques. In analyzing several XAI methods, we will study their main ideas on a conceptual level and their concrete implementations, apply each to the given machine learning problem, and discuss their advantages and disadvantages. The interactive segment concludes as participants are given an additional case study to tackle, applying the XAI methods they have learned to deepen their understanding.
Seminar in Vienna 'Python for Actuaries'
5 June 2025, 8:45-17:00 & dinner | 6 June 2025, 9:00-15:00
Organised by the EAA – European Actuarial Academy GmbH in cooperation with the Aktuarvereinigung Österreichs (AVÖ).
As the actuarial field evolves with technology, learning Python has become increasingly important. Python is a versatile programming language that enables actuaries to efficiently handle large datasets, perform complex statistical analyses, and apply machine learning techniques. Whether you are working with pricing models, risk assessments, or data visualization, Python can significantly enhance your productivity and decision-making.
In this seminar, we will cover:
- Python Basics: An introduction to Python programming, focusing on data structures and fundamental syntax.
- Data Manipulation: Working with datasets using Pandas for data cleaning and transformation.
- Data Visualization: Creating insightful charts and graphs using Matplotlib and Seaborn.
- Machine Learning: Applying basic machine learning models to actuarial data.
This seminar is designed to give you hands-on experience and practical knowledge of how Python can be a valuable tool in your day-to-day work.
Web Session 'Quantifying Uncertainty in Actuarial Models: An Introduction to Conformal Prediction'
12 June 2025 | 9:30-13:00 CEST
As the actuarial landscape becomes increasingly data-driven, traditional statistical methods are evolving, linking point estimates with quantifiable uncertainty. Conformal Prediction is a powerful framework used to evaluate the uncertainty of predictions. It turns point predictions into prediction regions, in this way, when you make a prediction, the output has probabilistic guarantees that it covers the true outcome.
In this web session, we will explore the theoretical foundations of Conformal Prediction, its assumptions, methodology, and advantages over traditional approaches. Participants will see how this technique can be a disruptive innovation in risk assessment, pricing, reserving, and forecasting by integrating uncertainty directly into predictions. The session is balanced between theory and hands-on activities, offering real-world examples and code demonstrations in classification, regression, time series, natural language processing (NLP), and computer vision, all applied to challenges in the actuarial field.
Web Session 'Non-Life Pricing Using Machine Learning Techniques with R Applications'
16 June 2025, 9:00-14:00 CEST | 17/18 June 2025, 9:00-13:45 CEST
Non-Life insurance is facing many challenges ranging from fierce competition in the market or evolution in the distribution channel used by consumers to evolution of the regulatory environment.
Pricing is the central link between solvency, profitability and market shares (volume). Improving pricing practice encompasses several dimensions:
- Technical: is our pricing adequate to cover the underlying cost of risk of my policyholders and the other costs we are facing? Which are the key variables driving the risk? Are they adequately taken into account in our pricing? What’s the impact of the claims history of my policyholder on its expected risk? In which segment are we profitable and in which are we not profitable?
- Competition: at what price will we attract the segments that we target and price out those that we do not want? Is the positioning of our competitors influencing our pricing practice and our profitability? What’s my position with respect to my competitors in terms of pricing? What are the segments in which I am well positioned and the segments where I am not well positioned?
- Elasticity: what price (evolution) are our existing customers prepared to accept? Does the sensitivity to price evolution depend on the profile of my customer?
- Segmentation: is our segmentation granular enough for our purposes?
The aim of this web session is to present some advanced actuarial/statistical techniques used in non-life pricing, competition analysis and profitability analysis. The web session focuses on some practical problems faced by pricing actuaries and product managers and presents some new techniques used in non-life pricing in order to open new perspectives for product development (competition analysis, profitability analysis,…).
Web Session 'Third-Party Risk Management: Managing External Service Providers'
23 June 2025 | 9:00-13:30 CEST
In an increasingly globalized and competitive business environment, outsourcing activities or services has become a key strategy for many organizations. This approach allows access to specialized expertise, reduces operational costs, and enables a focus on core competencies. However, it also involves transferring critical responsibilities to third parties, introducing new financial, operational, legal, technological, and reputational risks that can significantly impact the organization if not properly managed.
The Outsourcing Risk Management Program is designed to address these challenges by providing a systematic framework to identify, assess, mitigate, and monitor the risks inherent to outsourcing. This program focuses on establishing strong relationships with providers, ensuring compliance with applicable regulations, and protecting the interests of the organization, its customers, and other stakeholders.
By implementing this program, the goal is not only to minimize the risks associated with outsourcing but also to maximize the benefits of this practice, ensuring operational continuity, service quality, and alignment with the company’s strategic objectives. This is achieved through structured processes, advanced monitoring tools, and an organizational culture that values proactive risk management.