The Management Board of the UK Actuarial Profession has identified enterprise risk management (ERM) as an area of growth, particularly within the financial sector. It is an area which offers opportunities for actuaries, working with other disciplines, to move out of their traditional sectors of employment, with the skill set required fitting well with an actuary's training and practical focus.

Members of the Profession also highlighted ERM as one of the two main areas where they wanted the Profession to focus their research efforts in the membership survey in 2009. Consequentially the Management Board allocated funds to support research projects in ERM in 2010–2011 and has worked with the ERM Practice Area Committee to identify the topics that they feel most suited to external research where the outputs will have a broad strategic value to the financial services sector.

For some while there has been a growing awareness from both internal and external stakeholders that the governance and risk management in United Kingdom (U.K.) insurance companies needed to be enhanced. The proposed European Union Solvency II Directive makes this very explicit and the current economic turmoil has put a much stronger emphasis on the whole process: it is being seen as the right thing to do, rather than simply a regulatory requirement. In this paper, we set out the background to and recent history of governance for U.K. insurance companies, and consider how enterprise risk management can bring together the various control frameworks needed to support that governance. Whilst no two companies are the same, and hence the solutions to these issues will vary, there are several common themes linked to successful implementation. Similarly, various barriers to success are identified, together with solutions to resolve them.

A major outcome of ERM activities in insurance companies has been the bringing together of all of the key risks in the company, to be managed collectively in a holistic fashion. The authors of this paper believe that an ERM framework also needs to look beyond the company, and have regard to the risk management needs of investors, from the point of view of the contribution of the insurance company to the overall risk and reward of their total investment portfolios. To meet these needs, the ERM framework needs to provide sufficient information on topics such as systematic risk, potential correlations of earnings from future new business with macroeconomic trends, other risks to franchise value, and sources of model risk within the company. The paper does not provide solutions for the issues described above; but limits itself to describing and discussing the direction for some important new initiatives in ERM activities.