Ivan Herboch's contributions to French reinsurer Scor's risk operations has seen him take the 2022 young actuarial and risk professional of the year award.
Recently promoted to deputy chief risk officer for property and casualty at Scor Ireland, Herboch's key distinctions in the past 12 months include co-authoring the firm's technical newsletter on modelling physical climate change risk in October 2021.
He also contributed to Scor's "deep-dive risk analyses" on perils including inflation, cyber and terrorism, and has presented over 20 of these analyses to the group and board risk committee over the past five years.
Herboch cites his "genuine interest in understanding risk" as being crucial to his contributions.
"I have worked on a number of new or less well-known risks such as cyber, antibiotic resistance, chemical terrorism and climate change," he says.
"The development of scenarios and risk analyses for Scor's risk committees is appreciated by the executive committee and the directors as they highlight new risks and what they mean for the company in terms of potential consequences."
Before joining Scor as a risk manager in 2017, Herboch spent nearly two years at Deloitte in France as a consultant for actuarial and insurance solutions. He began his re/insurance career in pricing at Axa in 2014.
Herboch is an engineering graduate of Ecole Centrale Paris, where he specialised in applied mathematics, and holds a master's degree in actuarial science from Université Paris Dauphine.
"Insurance (or at least the first hints of risk-transfer mechanisms) has its origins in Babylon during antiquity and was first created to limit the risks merchants were taking when conducting long-distance trade," says Herboch.
"I find it fascinating that the re/insurance industry we know today goes back so far. For me, that's the proof of the tremendous usefulness of our sector."
After eight years in the sector though, Herboch is quick to point out "tomorrow's world is maybe not the same as yesterday's."
"While actuarial models are usually based on historical data, they also include expert judgements, and it is increasingly necessary to develop networks within the company to ensure that the assumptions made in pricing/reserving are consistent between the various teams.
"Risk professionals (and actuaries working in risk management) will need even more in the future to understand which assumptions are made by the pricing and reserving teams (and how they are made)."
He points out there are three distinctive qualities needed for successful future risk managers, namely curiosity, the ability to summarise effectively and to be quantitative.
"The risk universe is infinite and because whatever can happen will happen, a risk manager must be curious about possible events to try to see if and how they could be relevant.
"All the information the top management requires to understand a risk will be there somewhere within the company's wide range of expertise. But it is there in a raw form, which the risk manager needs to refine and reproduce in a clear and accessible way.
"While not all risk managers are actuaries, or even quantitative, I believe the quantitative component of the risk manager role will increase in the future."
