Description: On October 30, 2015, the SOA Assumption Development and Governance Group, an informal discussion group consisting of nearly 200 interested actuaries with topics pertaining to actuarial assumption development and governance, organized an industry discussion call on end-to-end assumption documentation practices. The purpose of this call was to generate a large list of ideas for best-practice assumption documentation. More than thirty companies were represented in the call, including direct insurers, reinsurers and consulting firms. This article is the work product of the discussion written by Laurie Li and Alex Zaidlin.

Description: The author describes a recent LIMRA study of agent terminations. The article describes the assumptions and methods used in the study, and provides a table comparing the results of this study, called the Brzezinski 1979 Agent Termination Tables, with agent termination rates derived from previous studies.

Description: Matrix decomposition techniques are used to find main features of a dataset. These features can be used to describe the data or to find clusters of objects. The decompositions have problems when the matrices have missing data or are from different exposures. This article examines the issue and some papers dealing with it.

Description: In this article, the author comments about an exposure draft of a proposed revision of Actuarial Standard of Practice 23 dealing with data quality.