Robert Bear is a Property and Casualty Consulting Actuary, Reinsurance Consultant and Insurance Arbitrator in the firm he has established, RAB Actuarial Solutions LLC.  He has performed loss reserve studies and reinsurance pricing analyses requiring complex loss simulations, provided actuarial support for a state’s financial examination of an insurance company, served as an insurance arbitrator and an actuarial expert witness in insurance and reinsurance arbitrations, provided litigation and investor support, resolved complex insurance coverage claim disputes, and performed research on loss reserving models.

RAB Actuarial Solutions LLC offers the following actuarial, statistical modeling and reinsurance consulting services: (1) loss reserve studies (2) reinsurance arbitration and pricing, including reinsurance commutations (3) actuarial and reinsurance expert witness and litigation support (4) research on loss reserving and economic capital models (5) statistical and econometric modeling, including optimization studies.

Robert Bear is a Fellow of the Casualty Actuarial Society, a member of the American Academy of Actuaries, a Chartered Property Casualty Underwriter, and an ARIAS-U.S. certified insurance and reinsurance arbitrator.  

Actuarial Expert Witness and Arbitration Experience

In addition to his traditional actuarial consulting assignments, Robert Bear has served as an insurance arbitrator and as an actuarial and reinsurance expert witness in arbitration proceedings, provided litigation support and resolved complex insurance coverage claim disputes.

He has been retained once as a party appointed arbitrator (the case was resolved with a reasoned award), three times as an actuarial expert in insurance and reinsurance arbitration proceedings, twice as an actuarial expert to resolve disputes arising in a London solvent scheme of arrangement, and he has provided litigation support in five cases.  He was retained by the plaintiff in two of the five litigation support cases.  In the two cases where he served as an actuarial expert to resolve claim disputes for a London solvent scheme of arrangement, he essentially fulfilled the role of an umpire in resolving those disputes.

Most of his litigation support and expert witness work has related to loss reserving issues and/or insurance policy (or reinsurance contract) issues. One litigation support case related to intellectual property rights, while another involved a shareholder class action suit.  Another case involved the impact that a potential large claim settlement could have on a company's rating and ability to continue in business based upon capital requirements.

He has been deposed as an actuarial expert in one insurance arbitration case and in two reinsurance arbitration cases.  He has testified before one reinsurance arbitration panel.  He was approved by a court to testify as an actuarial expert but his testimony was not needed.

Statistical Modeling Experience

Robert Bear’s statistical modeling work has included the following accomplishments:

1. Consulting assignments modeling the risk that insurance loss reserves will develop adversely, especially for long-tailed lines of business.
2. Worked with PXRE Group’s underwriting, actuarial, and systems professionals to measure the potential impact of each risk underwritten on economic capital requirements and profitability levels.  This required extensive work with alternative catastrophe models.      
3. Extensive experience fitting loss severity distributions and loss emergence patterns to insurance claims data.
4. Extensive experience pricing reinsurance treaties required the development of complex loss simulation models.  This work has included numerous risk transfer analyses for finite reinsurance contracts.
5. Research performed as a consultant in developing and testing econometric loss reserving models.
6. Econometric research at Insurance Services Office leading to improved forecasting techniques in ratemaking (received outstanding performance award for Inflation Adjusted Trend Procedure). 

As Chairperson of the Casualty Actuarial Society’s Loss Simulation Model Working Party (LSMWP), he led the development of the Loss Simulation Model that can be used to test loss reserving methods and models.  He contributed to the LSMWP paper on “Modeling Loss Emergence and Settlement Processes” that was published in the 2011 Winter CAS E-Forum.  He also presented a seminar at the 2010 Casualty Loss Reserve Seminar on Extreme Value Theory, which has attracted much interest after recent natural and financial catastrophes.