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: There is no right price for a piece of insurance. There is simply the transacted market price, which is high enough to bring forth sellers and low enough to induce buyers. From Securitization of Insurance Risk: The 1995 Bowles Symposium, M-FI97-1.

Description: When annuity products became prevalent in the U.S., they all looked more or less the same. It was where folks put their safe retirement money, yielding modest guaranteed returns with a menu of payout options to help secure their retirement. Over time, this commoditization lead to a pricing squeeze and an exhaustive set of product options and features, exposing carriers to market and policyholder behavior risk over the past decade or so.

Description: Ceding companies must react appropriately to changes in the substandard reinsurance market to avoid losses. By using the substandard/insurance pricing algorithms presented in this paper, ceding companies may develop an effective placement method and thereby avoid potential future losses. From the Actuarial Research Clearing House 1994 Vol. 2 .

Description: The presenters will explore the current state of the North American mortality baseline and long-term improvement assumptions and determine what we can learn from the UK's approach. They will share research done by the Society of Actuaries and other organizations to describe how to build a better model, plus show the impact socio-economics and other factors have on longevity expectations. The presenters will offer suggestions for how U.S. and Canadian pension plan and insurance actuaries--and the industry itself--can best use this research to develop a better model for the risk management of pension plans and group annuities

Description: This session will look into life insurers’ anticipated business impacts as a result of the implementation of the new accounting standard for insurance contracts, IFRS 17. What will be the financial impact as of day one as a result of transition? How will embedded value for common life insurance products change? How will costs of reinsurance be affected? Will products have to be re-designed and/or re-priced? IFRS 17 may have more ramifications into the way insurers are doing business than we have anticipated so far. While we are working on the implementation of this new standard, we should not lose sight of the business impacts that will follow. At the conclusion of the session, attendees will be able to: Understand key impacts of the transition to IFRS 17; See illustrative examples of the impact on embedded value; and Understand key impacts on product design and pricing Country Relevance: US and Canada

Description: Key considerations when modeling reinsurance to calculate reserves under PBR as well as a case study examining the impact of reinsurance structures on reserves.

Description: This article highlights the findings of a recent SOA survey on accelerated underwriting (AU) practices, including the amount of AU business ceded, the results of three opinion questions, and an estimate of mortality slippage among AU programs.

Description: The cyber insurance market looks like it’s growing—rapidly, in fact. However, there’s more to the cyber insurance market than the outward appearance of strong growth. Worldwide aggregate premium’s upward trend may even be cause for alarm. The increase in premium against a flat rate of insured exposure is a key sign that the market could turn from growth to constriction if a solution isn’t found in the near future. If the cyber insurance sector hopes to reach such lofty goals as exceeding $30 billion in global premium by 2028, it’s going to need more capital. Whether directly into the insurance sector or via support from reinsurance and retrocession, fresh capital should help insurers achieve greater market penetration, build a broader foundation for ongoing expansion, and chart a course for long-term sustainable profitable growth. The same sources capital insurers have used since the early days of the market won’t be enough, though. Thankfully, the insurance linked securities (ILS) market seems poised to help, particularly with several promising recent transactions. New sources of capital could bolster the foundation for future cyber re/insurance growth.

Description: This paper proposes a new method to price the longevity risk premia in order to tackle the pricing obstacle. Based on the equivalent utility pricing principle, our method obtains the minimum risk premium required by the longevity insurance seller and the maximum acceptable risk premium by the longevity insurance buyer.