Description: Insurers are struggling to keep pace with rapidly changing economic conditions, customer needs and regulation. We at Oliver Wyman believe there is an opportunity for many insurers to generate more customer value and fuel their growth by rethinking their approach to Product Development.

Description: A follow-up to the article “Comfort Food for an Actuary: Cognitive Testing in Underwriting the Elderly,” published in the May 2006 edition of Product Matters! This article presents the updated results, based upon three more years of data, of the Delayed Word Recall DWR Test mortality study. mortality study.

Description: Full version of Product Matters! August 2005, Issue No. 62.

Description: Future mortality improvement has been a common assumption in life insurance and annuity pricing and forecasting for many years. However, experience over the last decade suggests this might be an assumption that merits reconsideration in the United States. This article will take a closer look at factors that impact mortality improvement trends and discuss why insurers may want to reevaluate product designs to better manage the associated mortality risk. We then introduce a product idea with this in mind, where premiums are based on a life expectancy index and insurers share the risk (and opportunity) or mortality improvement with policyholders.

Description: This article discusses the concept of Conservation of Mortality ("Conservation"). Conservation is the modeling principle that ensures consistency between assumptions of the total mortality of a population and mortality among population subsets. This article discusses the use cases for Conservation and the many ways that one could implement it in a model or an experience study. This article also discusses the potential issues that arise when using Conservation, and how one might solve or alleviate these issues.

Description: The second part of a two-part Canadian Corner article on Segregated Fund Guarantees. Part I ran in the June 1998 issue of Product Development News.

Description: SOA Product Development Section Contest Winning Article. Contest was to provide a creative article on future technology for the life insurance industry.

Description: This article reviews some of the highlights of th 2010 SOA Annual meeting including the impact on pricing resulting from Solvency II, Market Consistent Valuation of New Business - MCVNB, the latest on mortality, Standards of Practice in product development, managing risk in product design and a regulation update.

Description: A discussion on the use of technology in insurance.

Description: A high-level summary of the results of Munich Re's recent Accelerated Underwriting Survey