COVID-19 has been of those rare events that has gotten the entire nation and the entire world to stop and pay attention to it. There have been a few of these events that have occurred in my lifetime, including the September 11 terrorist attacks, the hurricane season of 2004, Hurricane Katrina and the stock market crash of 2008. For me, however, the COVID-19 pandemic is the first crisis I have experienced as a part of the workforce. I sat down with Principal and Consulting Actuary Rob Walling to better understand the impact those earlier, notable and older disasters had on insurance, as well as the potential parallels with COVID-19. Rob has experience working with a wide variety of insurance coverages through all of these periods of time and provides a keen perspective to the effects any of these catastrophes have on the insurance industry.

Joe Herbers, managing principal of Pinnacle Actuarial Resources, has over 35 years of actuarial experience. He has seen major industry changes from asbestos and environmental claims liabilities to the emergence of claims-made policies. He has witnessed the advent of CAT models and the nascence of construction defect claims. For decades, he has seen new problems emerge and the creative solutions that have followed. I sat down with Joe to discuss his perspectives on COVID-19 and how the pandemic may affect younger, current and future actuaries and those others working in today’s insurance industry.

Pinnacle University (Pinnacle U) is a complex program to pull off. Designing, planning and executing an event like Pinnacle U, usually requires a lot of flexibility in the process. This year, however, required a higher level of flexibility than we might have ever expected. Pinnacle U is an immersive, in-person symposium at which students, professionals, panelists and participants meet and spend the day discovering and debating important actuarial issues of the day.