At Pinnacle, giving back is a centerpiece of our culture. In fact, community involvement is one of our core values as an organization. During the year, our employees give to and volunteer at all kinds of charitable organizations, from Wounded Warrior and St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital to local churches, schools and food pantries. We’re proud of everything our people do, both for our clients and in making our communities (and the world) a better place. We truly have great people at Pinnacle.

We are finishing our 17^th year as Pinnacle Actuarial Resources, although we’ve played a major role in the profession much longer with our predecessor organizations. In fact, eight of our actuarial professionals worked together for more than 20 years, and have made countless material contributions to the growth and success of Pinnacle’s clients and our profession.

In 2018, the NCAA introduced a new tool to help evaluate and select teams for its annual NCAA tournament, March Madness. The NCAA Evaluation Tool (NET) and metric was designed as a way to rank NCAA basketball teams using various criteria such as strength of schedule and quality of wins or losses (akin to rating variables). It replaced the Ratings Percentage Index (RPI) that the NCAA had used for almost 40 years.

Pinnacle Actuarial Resources is dedicated to keeping our clients up-to-date on relevant regulatory, administrative and economic conditions that impact their businesses. Recently, the Workers Compensation Insurance Rating Bureau (WCIRB) of California issued guidance regarding lower-than-anticipated workers compensation (WC) system loss costs. On September 5, the insurance commissioner of California approved all of the WCIRB’s proposed changes. The most current pure premium WCIRB filing, dated August 20, 2019 recommended a 5.4% decrease in average advisory loss costs, effective January 1, 2020.

It is certainly nothing new that data privacy and questions over how different organizations collect, maintain, and utilize an individual’s data is a hot topic among consumers, lawmakers, and companies alike. Past data breaches from several well-known companies have raised the antennae on the topic, and ongoing questions around what data is being stored and how it is being used by other high-profile corporations continue to draw attention.