John W. Gradwell

ACAS, MAAA, CPCU, ARe
Consulting Actuary

Mr. Gradwell is an Associate of the Casualty Actuarial Society (CAS), a member of the American Academy of Actuaries (MAAA), holds the Chartered Property-Casualty Underwriter designation (CPCU), and holds the Associate in Reinsurance (ARe) designation. He is also pursuing the Certified Internal Auditor (CIA) designation. Prior to joining Huggins, he was a Vice President at ACE and first served as the Enterprise Risk Management actuary and later as the first actuary in the Chubb Internal Audit department. John’s career has spanned more than 25 years and has included positions held at commercial insurers, reinsurers, brokers, and consulting firms.

At Huggins John draws on his extensive experience in both risk management and actuarial to specialize in providing Rate Making, Enterprise Risk Management, Economic Capital Modeling, and Individual Claims Simulating Modeling services to Insurers & Reinsurers, Captives & Risk Retention Groups, and Insurance Agent & Broker clients. He also provides Captive Feasibility Study, and Loss Reserving services. John also services Auditing Firm clients.

Mr. Gradwell’s professional experience includes the following:

• Authored the first Enterprise Risk Management Framework for a global insurance company based on a three line of defense model. Created a variety of supporting policy and procedure documents laying out rationale and how ERM works including one on model risk management.
• Designed and built a database of risk exposures for a global insurance company that for the first-time enabled identification, measurement, and monitoring of risk concentrations globally covering both insurance and credit risks.
• Assessed actuarial controls for adequacy and effectiveness using traditional Internal Audit processes and made recommendations for improvement in cases where controls were found lacking.
• Designed a testing framework and 200+ tests to assess the reasonableness of internal economic capital models and issued Solvency II compliant validation reports to company Boards and to regulatory bodies, particularly the UK’s Prudential Regulation Authority, including defending results and working with clients to drive continuous improvement.
• Performed loss and LAE reserve reviews for multiple lines of business including workers’ compensation, general liability, commercial package, and commercial property, including the use of traditional actuarial methods as well as non-traditional methods including regression analyses.
• Priced reinsurance treaties covering professional liability exposures including Directors & Officers and Errors & Omissions insurance.
• Evaluated the efficiency and efficacy of ceding company reinsurance programs using metrics such as the total cost of risk (TCOR), VaR, and TVaR, applied to the results of stochastic probabilistic risk models covering a wide variety of exposures including catastrophes, property & casualty lines of business, and in some cases foreign exchange risk, with results presented to brokers and directly to clients.
• Designed financing products for manufacturers having legacy liabilities, such as asbestosis and environmental degradation, using stochastic probabilistic risk models.
• Performed ratemaking analyses for the commercial package and farm-owners’ lines of business, including preparing and filing and defending submissions to state Departments of Insurance.
• Developed rating plans to price insurance coverages for large individual policyholders, including use of techniques to extend pricing on primary layers to higher excess layers using both traditional increased limits factor approaches and simulation modeling.
• Parameterized stochastic probabilistic risk models considering historical loss and exposure experience as well as industry and other sources and using statistical tools John designed and built.
• Priced insurance policies for individual large policyholders using traditional actuarial methods and non-traditional methods the latter including ANOVA.
• Designed and built a portfolio management tool used to guide the growth of the Political Risk book of business in consideration of country-specific and regional risk indicators and considering risk appetites and limits.

John graduated from The Pennsylvania State University with a Bachelor of Science degree in Economics. He also received minors in Business Administration and Mathematics.