Description: This article discusses how companies can best manage the post-level term (PLT) for level premium term life.

Description: Discussion of events of a the June 2009 NAIC/LHATF meeting.

Description: Long-term guarantees place unanticipated burdens on companies because of the degree to which the environment can change. These risks are compounded when combined with estimation of policyholder behavior, especially when solid experience data is not available. When risks are properly reflected, long-term guarantees do not always provide value to the customer in excess of the manufacturing cost. The product development actuary is challenged to compare customer value to company cost and use that measurement to identify novel ways to design products to better serve customers.

Description: This article describes the opportunities for providing financial services for the near- and post-retirement market, particulary for the insurance industry if willing to retool product, market and or distribution. The article gives an example of retooling a life contingent annuity.

Description: This article provides a summary of the results from a recent Milliman survey. Survey results provide UL/IUL carriers with a benchmark to evaluate their practices relative to those prevalent in the industry.

Description: Organic, top-line growth is key to life insurance companies for creating shareholder value and achieving long-term success. Companies that do not position themselves for organic growth risk falling behind as competitors seize market opportunities for expansion.

Description: Income i.e., immediate annuities are insurance products that benefit from mortality pooling, so they can generate the highest level of lifetime “income now” per dollar of retirement assets put to work. Including an income annuity as a portion of a retirement portfolio often results in an immediate increase in the level of income generated by that portfolio while at the same time ensuring that a portion of the total income is payable for a lifetime.

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: Overview of a recent visit to silicon valley and how the learnings from this trip can be applied in an insurance setting.

Description: Recent advances in mortality modeling have enabled applicant-specific quantification of mortality risk in life insurance applicants using laboratory and physical measurements. Relative to more conventional underwriting, this approach identifies a small population of significantly under-priced policy and a much larger, cross-subsidizing group whose risk is presently overestimated. Applicants placed in the highest percentile by this scoring methodology are more than 10X as likely to die in a given period as their demographic peers, and represent approximately 5% of short-term claims. Implications for product design are substantial in both the short- and long-term, as the possibilities for adverse selection grow, and the opportunity for fully individualized pricing raises the more distant prospect of products with as many rate classes as applicants.