IC-47 Foundation of Casualty Actuarial Science Part I
IC-47 Foundation of Casualty Actuarial Science Part I is a 40-credit compulsory Fellowship paper — the point where general insurance stops being descriptive and turns quantitative.
Casualty actuarial work is not life actuarial work
If your background is life insurance, the instinct to carry technique over is the one to resist. Life contracts run long, the main uncertainty is when a known benefit is paid, and mortality tables give a firm base. General insurance is the opposite: contracts are short, claim amounts are as uncertain as claim frequency, and one event can produce thousands of correlated claims.
That difference drives the whole paper. These techniques exist because general insurance liabilities behave badly.
What the paper deals with
- Frequency and severity — the two components of claims cost, why they are modelled separately, what each responds to.
- Ratemaking — turning past experience into a forward-looking premium, including the adjustments that make history comparable.
- Reserving — estimating what is owed on claims already incurred, including those not yet reported.
- Development and the run-off triangle — why claims take years to settle, and how that lag is measured.
- Data quality and its limits — what you can and cannot conclude from a thin or distorted dataset.
- Exposure measures — choosing the unit that actually drives risk for a class.
Check your edition's contents page for the definitive list.
The topics that repay study
Understand IBNR properly. Claims incurred but not reported are the defining problem of general insurance reserving. A candidate who can explain why the reserve exists and how it is estimated is most of the way to a good grade.
Learn to read a run-off triangle. It looks like a table and is really a story about how a class of business settles. Fluency with it pays across the whole paper.
Separate frequency from severity in your head. Many exam scenarios are testing whether you can say which of the two moved, and why.
Do not skip the data-limitations material. It reads like filler and is exactly where the thoughtful questions get asked.
How to prepare
Work problems. This is not a paper you can read your way through — the understanding arrives while calculating, not while highlighting. Budget more time per chapter than for an operational subject and expect the early chapters to feel slow.
The exam permits simple and scientific calculators, so practise with the one you will actually carry rather than a phone.
Certena serves 336 verified IC-47 questions. Use short sets while learning a technique and full timed mocks once it is solid — working under the clock is a separate skill from the mathematics.
Read alongside IC-45 General Insurance Underwriting, which supplies the business context for the numbers.