Description: This article examines the impact of a changing smoking rate on population-level mortality improvement and the importance of taking this driver into account.

Description: Key excerpts from research recently performed by Milliman consultants for the SOA on the impact of VM-20 on life insurance product development.

Description: This article discusses the potential impact that low interest rates can have on the Life Insurance industry, even if they occur for a short period of time.

Description: Impact of low and negative interest rates on various aspects of insurer operations including product management, investment management and capital management.

Description: A discussion of where insurance companies and their products fit in the retirement asset market and trends over the past few decades. Some historical data on the insurance companies' share of retirement assets is included.

Description: Discussion of January 2008 'Living to 100 and Beyond' Symposia co-sponsored by the Society of Actuaries.

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: Author's views on whether insurers' actuaries should be concerned about impact of life settlements on product experience.

Description: Europe is in a state of financial flux. The ongoing effort to develop an integrated European economic community has led to sweeping changes in accounting regulations and pension systems. These changes will have profound implications for the competitive structure of the European life insurance market.