Consultant Spotlight:

Consulting Actuary, Louise Francis, FCAS, MAAA, CSPA

Louise Francis has over 40 years of experience as a Casualty actuary, beginning her career at the National Council on Compensation Insurance. She has extensive experience working with common commercial lines exposure such as workers compensation, commercial auto, general liability and medical professional liability. She has also worked with personal lines exposures and more specialized situations such as property catastrophe insurance and casualty excess of aggregate reinsurance. She has served as the appointed actuary for a number of insurance companies, captive insurance companies and self-insurance trusts. She was Director and Associate Actuary for CIGNA Property and Casualty where she provided actuarial expertise to the Claims Division and ESIS, CIGNA’s third-party claims administrator. Ms. Francis has also worked for Tillinghast (now Willis Towers Watson) and F&G Re.

Louise Francis joined Huggins in the fall of 2023. Previous to that Louise collaborated with Huggins for many years. Through her relationship with Sullivan Hernandez she has worked with Huggins on the annual reserve analysis for a large public transportation system since 2019.

For over 20 years Louise has worked on a variety of actuarial and data science projects as Consulting Principal of Francis Analytics and Actuarial Data Mining. Applications have included underwriting, fraud detection and business profitability analysis. She has also led educational seminars on advanced actuarial modeling techniques such as loss reserve variability analysis.

Ms. Francis pioneered the application of data analysis in insurance. She was a leader in the adoption of predictive modeling methods such as generalized linear models as well as machine learning techniques in insurance. Ms. Francis is the author of numerous papers on data quality and data mining. Five of her papers were awarded the Data Quality/Data Technology prize by the CAS and IDMA (Insurance Data Management Association). She also has authored papers and essays on the 2008-09 global financial crisis (see The Financial Crisis: Why Won’t We Use the F-(raud) Word?). Her latest essay on inflation “Understanding and Coping With the New Normal in Insurance Inflation was published on the CAS’s website.

Louise is a former Vice President of Research for the Casualty Actuarial Society. She currently chairs the Joint Risk Management Research Committee, a joint committee of the CAS, CIA and SOA, which funds and oversees projects related to Enterprise Risk Management. She is a subject matter expert and committee chair for the CSPA (Certified Specialist in Predictive Analytics) credential of The CAS Institute. She is also a subject matter expert for the new CAS Predictive Analytics Project.

Louise’s favorite probability distribution? The Pareto distribution. This distribution is straightforward to use, it would be your go-to probability distribution if you were stranded on a desert island and needed a model for extreme events. Louise’s favorite machine learning technique? Classification and Regression Trees (C&RT). A relatively simple to apply, and its results can be visualized and explained to non-technical audiences. Louise’s hobbies include gardening and foraging. She is a member and secretary of the Hanover Herb Guild in Hanover County, Virginia, where she gardens on her six-acre property.

Contact Louise today to ask how these services can help you and your firm succeed.