Description: SOA Product Development Section Contest Winning Article. Contest was to provide a creative article on future technology for the life insurance industry.

Description: A nationally recognized market research firm recently conducted a consumer survey pertaining to income term life insurance. Income term life insurance offers a death benefit which includes an upfront-specified income stream, commencing upon death of the insured during the term period, to a surviving beneficiary until (a) a predefined date or (b) death of the beneficiary. This article provides an overview of the results of the survey.

Description: The Congressional Budget Office reports that out-of-pocket expenses accounted for 19 percent of the total long-term care LTC expenses in the United States in 2006, and private LTC insurance accounted for only 8 percent of these expenses, which shows that Americans are underinsured for LTC expenses. While it is true that public programs like Medicaid and Medicare cover much of the nation’s LTC expenses 68 percent of the total LTC expenses in the United States in 2006, eligibility for these programs comes at a great cost to the individual.

Description: Summary of the December 2003 NAIC Meeting

Description: This is a summary of the NAIC meeting held in September of 2008.

Description: In the June 2014 issue of Product Matters, Doug Robbins of Pacific Life authored a fascinating article entitled “Velocity of Diversification.” Therein, he proposed a pricing measure that describes the “…speed at which confidence in profitability is attained”. How can stochastic modeling of mortality be applied to analyze the velocity of diversification, and how would that measure be affected by volatility in the underlying assumptions?

Description: Long-term guarantees place unanticipated burdens on companies because of the degree to which the environment can change. These risks are compounded when combined with estimation of policyholder behavior, especially when solid experience data is not available. When risks are properly reflected, long-term guarantees do not always provide value to the customer in excess of the manufacturing cost. The product development actuary is challenged to compare customer value to company cost and use that measurement to identify novel ways to design products to better serve customers.

Description: This article reviews the topics discussed at the December 2004 meeting of the Life and Health Actuarial task force. The covered topics include Actuarial Guideline 38 and Reserves for Variable Annuities C-3 Phase 2 reserves.

Description: This article analyzes, understands, and discusses the impact of the upcoming Principle-Based Reserving (PBR) on non-variable deferred annuities.

Description: Discussion of topics addressed at pricing methodologies seminar,including a review of the results of the Tillinghast Pricing Methodology Survey. This survey covers the most popular profit measures for various companies within various product lines. The concept of market consistent embedded value was also discussed, as well as a review of pricing indexed products. Finally, there were case studies presented on pricing Universal Life with Secondary Guarantees, Return of Premium Term and Variable Annuities with Living Benefits