Risico en Rendement in Balans voor Verzekeraars

Antoon Pelsser (1968) is Head of the Asset-Liability Matching department of ING-Insurance. The ALM department advises the board on the optimal asset allocation to cover the insurance liabilities. The department is also responsible for the calculation of market values and risk measures of insurance contracts. He also holds a part-time position as Professor of Mathematical Finance at the Econometric Institute at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam. His research interests focus on pricing models for interest rate derivatives, the pricing of insurance contracts and Asset-Liability Management of insurance contracts. He has published in several academic journals including Finance and Stochastics, Journal of Derivatives, European Journal of Operational Research and European Finance Review. He is also author of the book Efficient Methods for Valuing Interest Rate Derivatives, published by Springer Verlag.

In this inaugural address Professor Pelsser investigates how one can strike a balance between investmens with a high expected return and high risk (e.g. stocks) versus low-risk investments with a low return (e.g.bonds). Using an example of a life-insurance company he shows in this address how one can employ optimisation-techniques to make a trade-off between the desire to find an investment return as high as possible under the constraint that the insurance company should be able to meet its obligations to the policyholders under all economic circumstances.