An actuary is a business professional with advanced statistical skills who deals with the measurement and management of risk and uncertainty. The name of the corresponding field is actuarial science. These risks can affect both sides of the balance sheet and require asset management, liability management, and valuation skills. Actuaries provide assessments of financial security systems, with a focus on their complexity, their mathematics, and their mechanisms.
A pension is a fund into which a sum of money is added during an employee's employment years and from which payments are drawn to support the person's retirement from work in the form of periodic payments. A pension may be a "defined benefit plan", where a fixed sum is paid regularly to a person, or a "defined contribution plan", under which a fixed sum is invested that then becomes available at retirement age. Pensions should not be confused with severance pay; the former is usually paid in regular amounts for life after retirement, while the latter is typically paid as a fixed amount after involuntary termination of employment before retirement.
Actuarial science is the discipline that applies mathematical and statistical methods to assess risk in insurance, pension, finance, investment and other industries and professions. More generally, actuaries apply rigorous mathematics to model matters of uncertainty.
Financial regulation is a form of regulation or supervision, which subjects financial institutions to certain requirements, restrictions and guidelines, aiming to maintain the stability and integrity of the financial system. This may be handled by either a government or non-government organization. Financial regulation has also influenced the structure of banking sectors by increasing the variety of financial products available. Financial regulation forms one of three legal categories which constitutes the content of financial law, the other two being market practices and case law.
A tontine is an investment linked to a living person which provides an income for as long as that person is alive. Such schemes originated as plans for governments to raise capital in the 17th century and became relatively widespread in the 18th and 19th centuries.
The Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) is a right-wing pressure group and think tank registered as a UK charity Associated with the New Right, the IEA describes itself as an "educational research institute", and says that it seeks to "further the dissemination of free-market thinking", and that it does so by "analysing and expounding the role of markets in solving economic and social problems." The IEA subscribes to a neoliberal worldview and advocates positions based on this ideology. It published climate change denial material between 1994 and 2007, and has advocated total privatisation, in effect abolition, of the National Health Service (NHS), in favour of a healthcare system the IEA says is similar to Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Israel. The IEA has received more than £70,000 from the tobacco industry, and IEA officers have been recorded offering "cash for access". The IEA is headquartered in Westminster, London, England.
Sir James Alexander Mirrlees was a British economist and winner of the 1996 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. He was knighted in the 1997 Birthday Honours.
The Institute of Actuaries was one of the two professional bodies which represented actuaries in the United Kingdom. The institute was based in England, while the other body, the Faculty of Actuaries, was based in Scotland. While the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries were separate institutions, they worked very closely together, and their professional qualifications and actuarial standards were identical. On 25 May 2010, voting members of the institute who took part in a ballot voted to merge the institute with the faculty, thus creating the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, which came into being on 1 August 2010. The Institute of Actuaries ceased to exist on that date.
An institutional investor is an entity which pools money to purchase securities, real property, and other investment assets or originate loans. Institutional investors include commercial banks, central banks, credit unions, government-linked companies, insurers, pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, charities, hedge funds, REITs, investment advisors, endowments, and mutual funds. Operating companies which invest excess capital in these types of assets may also be included in the term. Activist institutional investors may also influence corporate governance by exercising voting rights in their investments. In 2019, the world's top 500 asset managers collectively managed $104.4 trillion in Assets under Management (AuM).
The Faculty of Actuaries in Scotland was the professional body representing actuaries in Scotland. The Faculty of Actuaries was one of two actuarial bodies in the UK, the other was the Institute of Actuaries, which was a separate body in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. While the Faculty of Actuaries and the Institute of Actuaries were separate institutions, they worked very closely together, and the professional qualifications and professional standards for actuaries were identical in each of them. On 25 May 2010, voting members of the Faculty who took part in a ballot voted to merge the Faculty with the Institute of Actuaries, thus creating the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries which came into being on 1 August 2010, superseding the Institute of Actuaries which ceased to exist on that date.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to finance:
Frank Mitchell Redington was a noted British actuary. Frank Redington was best known for his development of Immunisation Theory which specifies how a fixed income portfolio can be "immunised" against changing interest rates.
Avinash D. Persaud is Emeritus Professor of Gresham College in the UK. He was Chairman of Intelligence Capital Ltd., a company specializing in analyzing, managing and creating financial liquidity in investment projects and portfolios. He was also the non-Executive Chairman of the London-based Elara Capital, an investment bank. Persaud was a Non-resident Senior Fellow of the Peterson Institute of International Economics, Executive Fellow of London Business School and Senior Fellow with the Caribbean Policy Research Institute and Head of its Barbados office.
Financialization is a term sometimes used to describe the development of financial capitalism during the period from 1980 to present, in which debt-to-equity ratios increased and financial services accounted for an increasing share of national income relative to other sectors.
Olivia S. Mitchell is an American economist and the International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans Professor at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Her interests focus on pensions and social security, and she is the executive director of the Pension Research Council, the oldest U.S. center devoted to scholarship and policy-relevant research on retirement security. She also heads Wharton's Boettner Center for Pensions and Retirement Research.
Environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG), also known as environmental, social, governance, is a framework designed to be embedded into an organization's strategy that considers the needs and ways in which to generate value for all organizational stakeholders.
The Institute and Faculty of Actuaries is the professional body which represents and regulates actuaries in the United Kingdom.
Kevin Dowd is a British economist, having research interests in private money and free banking, monetary systems and macroeconomics, financial risk measurement and management, risk disclosure, political economy and policy analysis, and pensions and mortality modelling. As of this date, he is a partner in Cobden Partners based in London, and Professor of Finance and Economics at Durham University Business School.
Sir Alfred William Watson KCB FIA was a British actuary and civil servant. In 1917 he became Britain's first government actuary and was very influential in setting up the funding by National Insurance for the newly introduced state pension.
Dr. Shariq Nisar is an Indian finance professional, academic and activist. He received PhD in economics from Aligarh Muslim University, one of the oldest universities in India. He co-founded TASIS, a shariah advisory institution, related to finance, based in Mumbai, that screens stocks for Shariah compliance. His first major work was the launch of India's first Shariah Index in association with the Bombay Stock Exchange. Later on he worked with the National Stock Exchange to launch Shariah index for them. He is advisor to Kerala Government's Islamic Finance venture Cheraman Financial Services Ltd. He also helped Government of India owned General Insurance Corporation of India establish its Retakaful division in 2009. During 2013 and 2014, he served as a senior visiting fellow at Harvard Law School. He was invited to share his views before the Select Committee of Indian Parliament on the Insurance Laws (Amendment) Bill (2015). He served as a non-executive independent director at Octaware Technologies from November, 2015 to December 2018, India's first shariah compliant publicly listed company. Dr. Nisar has also authored various books in the area of Islamic Finance with International as well as Indian perspectives. He has been awarded Bharat Inclusion Research Fellowship 2020.
