Description: Introduce basic concepts of the Health Risk-Based Capital and show case a few strategies around Risk-Based Capital.

Description: The implementation of the IFRS 17 insurance accounting standard has brought significant changes to the financial reporting landscape of insurance companies. With new disclosure requirements and altered profit analysis, understanding and interpreting future profitability have become a topic of concern for the industry. While stability remains a key objective for insurance companies, the earning patterns might become more volatile especially when the contractual service margin (CSM) is exhausted, and a loss component (LC) needs to be established. Reinsurance, a common risk mitigation tool, can play a pivotal role in managing earnings volatility and minimizing losses for onerous measurement units. In this article, we propose a new key performance indicator (KPI) called “loss recoverability” to assess the performance of reinsurance treaties in achieving these objectives. We explain how this KPI can be utilized in multiple scenarios to evaluate the effectiveness of reinsurance strategies and pursue stability in earning patterns.

Description: Businesses across the board have been drastically impacted by the effects of COVID-19 over the course of 2020, and insurance was not immune. Perhaps most relevant to this industry’s current capital and liquidity concern is the prevailing low interest rate environment. This has been a global trend in the last decade, and treasury rates in much of the developed world are at or near zero. Reduced investment returns limit an insurer’s ability to achieve their desired return on equity, eliminating previously profitable strategies that depended on the leverage of life and annuity balance sheets. Focus and activity have instead shifted to other methods to counteract the low interest rate markets and accompanying capital strain. Examples include increased mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity within the insurance industry and an increasing focus by private equity firms in the insurance market for asset-intensive products, both of which reflect the goal of increasing yield rates on capital.

Description: Discusses the market, demographic, and macroeconomic factors that affect actuaries' choices for the assumptions they use in the pricing and valuation of many insurance products.

Description: This article discusses the impact of rising interest rates on annuity writers and life insurers and the risk management challenges it presents. Falling interest rates were addressed as well.

Description: This article gives an overview of the CFO Forum diversification paper. The key points that the CFO Forum made are: 1. The lack of sufficient diversifying strategies for risk management needs to be addressed. Therefore they provided a policy framework that promotes sound risk measurement and management practices in a way that can be implemented and supervised with confidence. 2. The lack of sufficient regulatory over-site needs to be addressed, so they presented a set of core principles to form the basis of European insurance regulation. These core principle incorporate diversification in a consistent manner.

Description: When formulating a personal investment strategy, the application of a disciplined methodology can lead to more rational decision making by the investor. From The Actuary Magazine, April/May 2005

Description: The growing global recognition of the importance of climate-related risks (transition and physical) has triggered a significant demand for research on the interface between climate and actuarial sciences, for example on the impact of risks from climate change on insurance markets and their operations. Furthermore, the systemic nature of climate-related risks underpins actuaries’ need to engage and work with diverse groups of stakeholders, including clients, communities, governments, regulators, boards, and investors. Contributions are invited for a special issue of the Annals of Actuarial Science featuring research on the topic ‘Managing Climate-Related Risks’. This special issue aims to capture leading interdisciplinary thinking, with clear relevance to actuarial problems in pensions and insurance.

Description: This is a notice is a call of papers reflecting actuarial and insurance related themes.

Description: S&P Global released its initial version of proposed changes regarding its Insurer Risk-Based Capital Adequacy methodology and assumptions on Dec. 6th, 2021. Unlike prior guidance notes or criteria releases, the proposed changes comprehensively updated the current S&P rating criteria released in 2010. These updates would directly impact many insurers. S&P Global anticipates that 10 percent of existing ratings in the insurance sector would be impacted and the change would lead to more positive rating implications than negative impact. This article focuses on the proposed changes on the S&P risk-based capital (RBC) vs. the current model, then simulate impacts to a representative U.S. life insurer through an illustrative case study.