Actuarial Firms Editing and Proofreading Services

The reserve is £48.2 million. That is the number that goes in the accounts, and it is a point somewhere inside a range that runs from about £41 million to £59 million. A board that is shown only the point makes decisions as though the £48.2 were a measurement, and when the outcome lands at £54 million somebody is asked why the actuaries got it wrong.

We edit what actuarial practices produce — reserving and valuation reports, board and audit committee summaries, technical actuarial reporting and its required statements, pricing and experience analyses, assumption-setting documentation, peer review notes, and the letters that accompany a change of basis. Our editors work on documents read by people who cannot audit the model.

Communicating the range rather than the point is what makes an actuarial report useful, and its failure is a single figure presented with the certainty of arithmetic. Every reserve is an estimate with a shape. We work through these so the central estimate is given with the range around it and the basis on which that range was drawn, since a board that does not know whether the answer is ± 4% or ± 25% cannot judge how much capital to hold; so the assumptions that actually move the number are identified and separated from those that do not, because a page listing forty assumptions treats them as equally consequential and three of them are carrying the result; so the sensitivity is expressed in money rather than in percentage points of an assumption, given that "a 0.5% change in the discount rate" means nothing to a director and "£3.1 million" means something immediately; so any change of assumption since the last valuation is stated with its effect isolated from the effect of experience, as these are routinely reported together and the reader cannot tell what was decided from what happened; so the areas of genuine uncertainty are named rather than smoothed, since the report's credibility rests on the actuary saying where they are unsure; so the technical statements required by the profession are included without letting them absorb the reader's attention; so the summary is written so that somebody reading only the first page is not misled; and so the report says what would have to change for the estimate to move materially. Reports written this way get read by the board rather than filed.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including reserving data, pricing information and unpublished valuations. We are editors rather than actuaries, accountants or regulators, and we offer no view on methods, assumptions or any figure. What we can do is make the uncertainty as visible as the estimate.