Description: 2021 ImpACT Conference - The Win-Win Power of Guaranteed Income Recording

Description: Ensuring employees retire with adequate benefits is an ever-growing challenge. During this webcast, we will highlight key insights from the fields of behavioral economics and data analytics that can be utilized to better equip employees for retirement. Areas of focus will include inherent biases that people exhibit and how employers can use these biases to design plan features that will nudge their employees towards making better decisions for their futures.

Description: Retirees will face the societal issue of inadequate savings with likely insufficient time to rectify the situation. They need immediate growth, but also the disciplines of risk management. They typically do not know how to engage with these two aspects in a harmonious manner on their own. Insurance companies are in the business of providing the solution but regulators have been clamping down in favor of simpler and more transparent products. In addition, the market reality over the last decade has been that insurers have stock betas at a multiple to the general markets with PE ratios well below. A panel of senior professionals from writers of retirement product business will present their vision of how the insurance industry can address the above dilemma, including the risks underlying the writing of the business, impact of financial markets, and regulations in the development of the business.

Description: There is no “industry standard” approach to managing the vega (volatility) risk inherent in Variable Annuity Guarantees, Fixed Indexed Annuities and other equity-linked obligations. In this session, we will introduce and analyze a range of reinsurance solutions, including full vega risk retention, full vega risk transfer and more sophisticated or custom structures that split the vega risk between the insurer and the reinsurer in various ways. We will also explore other approaches in bespoke risk coverage and show the impact of different assumptions on a generic “VA Guarantee Cost Estimate” that has been developed by Munich Re.

Description: With freezing and termination of DB plans, there is a growing void in retirees' retirement planning that can best be solved by annuities. The presenters will discuss different ways that annuities can be used to provide retirement income in DC plans. They will also cover industry trends and the challenges of associated with adding annuities within DC plans

Description: This paper applies the research in Prospect Theory of Kahneman and Tversky to explain why sales of annuities lag sales of life insurance products. The author theorizes that life insurance is easier to sell because customers perceive themselves to be in the domain of losses, while potential annuity customers perceive themselves to be in the domain of gains. Kahneman and Tversky showed us that people are mostly risk averse in the domain of gains and risk seeking in the domain of losses. Purchase of an annuity or life product is a risky investment. Customers will find it easier to take the risk in the life insurance domain of losses than the annuity domain of gains. The author then proposes a hybrid life annuity product that might address both mortality and longevity risk in one product that would allow both products to be more competitive than stand-alone products.

Description: Recently the interest rates have been slowly trending up from the lowest point in August 2020. The focus of this article is on current market trends for long-duration products —including life insurance, annuities, and long-term care insurance —following an extended period of low interest rates, and lessons carriers can learn from similar historical periods of rising interest rates. Innovative and flexible product features will continue to be essential, as the current interest trend may not substantially increase insurers’ portfolio rates. When designing or modifying product features, insurers should consider profitability in a wide breadth of interest rate scenarios and be particularly mindful of the impact that crediting rates and asset durations will have on earnings.

Description: An overview of guaranteed lifetime withdrawal benefits (GLWB) on registered index-linkedannuity (RILA) products and a stochastic analysis of market risks.

Description: The speakers will discuss the replication of long-term options, including a discussion of issues such as liquidity, transaction costs, slippage, impact of policyholder behavior, and machine learning algorithms to improve hedge effectiveness.

Description: The author proposes an annuity clearinghouse to encourage employers to offer annuity accumulation products in their defined contribution plans. This addresses the lack of portability that is associated with, and discourages the use of, defined contribution plans.