Description: This paper aims to help financial and insurance practitioners better recognize, assess, and respond to large scale, large impact, rare events (LSLIRE’s) which are occurrences currently often wrongly labeled as being unpredictable black swans. A black swan, as Nassim Taleb defines it in his popular book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Random House & Penguin (2007-2010 2nd. Ed.) is 1) an outlier event, which 2) carries extreme impact, and 3) “makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact.” Elsewhere, Taleb says it is unpredictable, which is why people concoct explanations. Other people use the term in many and various ways, to enfold events missed by most people because they are rare, missed by computer models and/or experts, and to include events they simply seem personally to have misunderstood. The paper also discusses building better ways to assess such events’ background characteristics, emergence dynamics, logics, and other foreseeable attributes. A secondary focus is educating practitioners to better respond - whether to limit damage or to take advantage of - the opportunities that arise from what others are likely to miss or misjudge during and after the emergence of LSLIRE (AKA black swan) events.

Description: In session 74OF of the Montreal Spring Meeting panelist discuss the overall structure of management of corporate risk, including asset/liability management. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Vol. 23, No. 2.

Description: 1993 SOA Spring Meeting, Boston. This session is about the marketing front, including demographic trends, impact on products, market research, market segments and distribution.

Description: Feature article discussing how to bring value to clients seeking reinsurance.

Description: 1992 SOA Regional Meeting, Chicago. This discussion is about direct marketing growth in the 1980s, sustaining the growth in the 1990s, regulatory constraints in the 1990s, impact of continuing production cost increases, new product designs, and declining response rate.

Description: This session at the SOA 2001 Toronto Spring Meeting discusses customer relationship management [CRM] including the definition of CRM, why it matters, how to implement it, and how to model a customer and determine the lifetime value of a customer.

Description: Feature article discussing the Life Settlements business: recent growth, pricing, and future of the business.

Description: This session from the 1995 SOA Boston Meeting covers the strategic planning cycle: vision, mission, values, strategies, objectives, tactical plans, and resourcing. Discussion includes the annual planning cycle and day-to-day strategic behavior. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Vol. 21, No. 4b.

Description: Presented at October 1986 Annual Meeting. This session discussion is about recent trends in direct response marketing. This discussion will be led by two prominent direct response marketing professionals. Their initial remarks will provide a contrast of the growth strategies of a large established direct response company with those of a smaller, more recent entrant into this increasingly competitive market.

Description: The 1997 Valuation Actuary Symposium, Session 16 examines valuation issues for equity-indexed products.