Description: 1993 SOA Annual Meeting, New York. This session discussion is about asset prepayment assumptions for regulatory cash-flow testing. Topics included: 1. The prepayment characteristics of corporate bonds with embedded options. 2. How much prepayment and redemption activity has taken place within that market. 3. Techniques that corporate bond issuers have used to retire debt prior to maturity. 4. The investment implications. 5. The impact that prepayments have on MBS price and return performance. 6. The challenges of prepayment modeling.

Description: This session from the 1995 SOA New York City Meeting covers the overall trends in the financial market place, the relationship between banks and insurance companies, joint ventures between them and the issues faced by these two distribution systems. From the Society of Actuaries, Vol. 21, No. 2.

Description: Presented at October 1996 Annual Meeting. This session considers the issue of an amalgamation through a case study, addressing: performance results, personnel and organizational issues, corporate culture.

Description: 1996 Valuation Actuary Symposium. Questions asked and answered included: 1. What do regulators expect or want as far as asset adequacy analysis for shorter-term liabilities such as IBNR? 2. What responsibility does the appointed actuary have in verifying reserves for reinsured business? 3. If the assets for the market value adjusted annuity are held in a separate account and valued at market, what rates should be used to present value the projected guaranteed benefits? 4. May a company perform the cash-flow testing based on the low level of reserves held in the domiciliary state rather than the higher reserve actually held in the state with the special state in filing? 5. Have there been any situations where an opining valuation actuary has been held personally responsible?

Description: This session at the 1998 Valuation Actuary Symposium presents a framework for managing surplus based on the knowledge bases of the CFA designation and the SOA curriculum for the finance and investment specialty.

Description: This paper discusses the implications of the use of the fund of unreleased capital gains on common stocks as required surplus. By 'Unreleased Capital Gains' the author is talking about a situation where realized and unrealized capital gains are annually placed in a fund and a percent of that fund is released into income and/or surplus annually. Actuarial Research Clearing House ARCH 1988, Vol. 3

Description: This presentation outlines strategies for optimal return on bonds and presents the advantages of liability driven investing. From the Actuarial Research Clearing House ARCH 1990 Vol. 1.

Description: This is the abstract of the paper Risk Classification by Fuzzy Cluster. In this paper an algorithm for risk classification is proposed. This algorithm is based on the concepts of fuzzy cluster. We test our algorithm with two examples, the results are very promising.

Description: The concept of transformed distributions is generalized in this paper. First the concepts of net premium intensity, loaded premium intensity and load generators arc introduced. Then transformed distributions are identified with premium intensity and hence the loaded premium is calculated from transformed distributions. Finally it is shown that this method of premimn calculation is arbitrage free and it incorporates the strengths of the utility approach.

Description: This article discusses some 'standard' methods of foreign expansions. Strategic decisions for expansion in foreign countries require more than qualitative discussions about foreign expansion. It requires hard numbers on the benefits of such strategic expansion plans and is illustrated here with the example of MetLife's 2002 purchase of Ahisa [Aseguradora Hidalgo]. With that purchase, more than 70% of the Mexican insurance market is in the hand of foreign companies.