"A model is always as good as its data. All we have is the past."
Christian Bagh – in his professional capacity, at least – is a textbook mathematician. After the usual initial indecision about what he wanted to be, he fairly quickly set his sights on numbers, studied computer mathematics and has now been working for the company since April 2008.
His studies had two focuses that virtually made him an ideal candidate for a post at Deutsche Rück: mathematics and informatics. Which is exactly Bagh's business in our company. As an analyst, he assesses whole portfolios of reinsurance treaties and shares responsibility for mapping the premium risk in Non-Life. In doing so, the risks he deals with are not just minor risks, but in the main the major catastrophes, such as windstorms, large-scale fires or floods. Put simply: whereas our geologists and meteorologists try to predict what might happen, Bagh calculates how much it would cost. It sounds easy, but it's not.
It calls for the full armoury of probabilistic and statistical methods, such as model adaptation, maximum likelihood estimators, convolutions or Poisson processes. At Deutsche Rück, his tools include Monte Carlo simulations which, incidentally, have as much to do with gambling as astronomy has to do with astrology. Operating in the domain where mathematics and informatics meet, he is an excellent communicator between two professional groups and it is this which enabled him, in a short time, to share responsibility for the actuarial premium risk.
Other reasons why he feels very much at home at Deutsche Rück: flat hierarchies take the red tape out of the work environment; personal initiative is expressly welcomed; and further training is encouraged. And actively so, for Bagh is undergoing further training at his own request to become a DAV actuary (German Actuarial Society) – a move that, needless to say, Deutsche Rück is happy to support.