Description: Feature article discussing how ERM needs to expand to cover the many different attitudes toward risk.

Description: 1997 Valuation Actuary Symposium, Session 35 discusses ALM and how company management needs to be involved and understand the value of ALM.

Description: This presentation from the 1995 SOA Vancouver Meeting presents the results of risk adjusters' research in health insurance including risk adjustment in various states, the effect of community rating, biased selection and risk adjustment and methods of risk adjustment. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Vol. 21, No. 3a.

Description: Presented at June 1996 Spring Meeting. Inability to quantify the volatility in individual disability income insurance is one of the key reasons for loss experiences in the industry. Discussion covers: volatility measures for reserving, application of reserve adequacy criteria under various plan designs, application of volatility measures to pricing, and a test of the effectiveness of volatility measures.

Description: Presented at June 1996 Spring Meeting. A panel of experts discuss risk management and capital management issues for disability insurers and the potential role of reinsurance.

Description: Presented at May 2002 Spring Meeting. This session provides an overview of the various methods used to manage the risks from guarantees of equity-based life and annuity products. Discussion includes the use of reinsurance, self-insurance and static/dynamic hedging.

Description: Risk management techniques such as stress testing and setting capital targets are fairly well established for life insurers; however, the implementation of these techniques can vary considerably. A fundamental question is how to manage multiple valuation perspectives, and the list of possibilities keeps growing. Companies can potentially consider some or all of the following: U.S. reporting measures (Stat, GAAP), internal measures (EV, VNB, economic capital), international reporting measures (IFRS), rating agency models or other developing standards (ICS, NAIC group capital). This session will begin with a quick overview of the defining characteristics of different valuation frameworks. We will then provide more focused and practical considerations for managing risk and capital under different frameworks, using specific examples to highlight key trade offs.

Description: Regulatory change and increased focus on internal risk management are driving a renewed interest in model efficiency. In this session, we will review several new and existing tools, that show significant promise for advanced modeling of equity linked products. These include: • Clustering • Use of unique--and potentially a different number of--scenarios for each policy • Semi Monte Carlo (SMC) – this is a proprietary technique that is similar to a combination of Monte Carlo and numeric integration • Using a neural network approach to optimize some of the more complex and manual aspects of clustering and improve the fit of the clustered model • Combining SMC with the use of unique scenarios per policy

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: For most of the last forty years, corporate defined benefit pension plan assets have been managed to balance risk versus reward in more or less the same way that a risk averse individual would do with his own portfolio. Recently liability cognizant strategies have been developed, but these also attempt to balance risks and rewards. But pension plans are not individuals; they, much like their widely-held corporate sponsors, are pass-through institutions. The economics of such entities are found in the corporate finance literature rather than in the literature of portfolio choice. The corporate finance (and thus the pension finance) objective is economic value added rather than return for risk. Enterprise risk management is a corporate finance activity too and its goal should also be value added rather than return for risk. The intersection of enterprise risk management and pension finance leads to a value-based discipline with two startling results: • Widely-held corporations can increase shareholder value by hedging away their own systematic risk (e.g., CAPM β). • Very many corporate defined benefit pension plans should define their liabilities and manage their assets to develop a net short equity exposure (negative β).