Description: Most courses in Excel, Word, PowerPoint or other Microsoft Office products stop just short of teaching you the highly productive things you can do with Visual Basic for Applications VBA, the powerful language that comes free with your purchase of Microsoft Office. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Vol. 30, No. 3.

Description: A review of the book Abundance by Steven Kotler and Peter H. Diamandis.

Description: Actuaries are Known as highly ethical. Data Science poses ethical challenges for our profession.

Description: This article describes in detail how Microsoft Excel spreadsheets can be used to develop and test relational database projects.

Description: Predictive Analytics and Epigenetics are two of the most impactful driving forces for the future of healthcare, precision medicine, and insurance. Learn why this is true, how if will change the way our industry operates, and how you can stay viable and contribute to the betterment of humanity while also protecting the actuarial profession from obsolescence. Learn how personalized medicine keying off genetic testing is saving life insurers big dollars. The only limit seems to be testing access for their insureds.

Description: This session 84I of the 2001 SAO Annual Meeting in New Orleans is about how many insurers are migrating toward Web-based interactive underwriting systems in order to economize and streamline the underwriting process. This requires some radically different techniques well beyond the time-honored traditional approaches. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Vol 27, No. 3

Description: Neural Networks are no longer limited to classification and regression solutions to numeric problems. CNNs add the ability to classify images, and GANs can create new images. Learn how these capabilities can provide competitive advantages to early adopters, how they work, and how to implement them.

Description: Panel discussion from the May 1982 Society of Actuaries meeting in Colorado Springs covering developments in Education and Examination. Topics discussed included: 1. Goals, purposes and objectives of actuarial education in general, and the Society's Education and Examination E & E program in particular. 2. Critique of the current E & E system. 3. Plans for and future directions of actuarial education, including the role of the academic community.

Description: Actuaries of the future have to embrace the ideas and technologies that lie ahead.

Description: Behavioral economics is the alternative to the traditional ways (surveys and focus groups) we've been using to try to understand the drivers of customer behavior in the insurance industry. It merges psychology with traditional economic theory, offering insights into individual decision making behavior that go beyond the purely rational model. Within the sphere of health insurance, there are countless behaviors, not just of customers, but of underwriters, medical professionals and claims specialists which may be better explained by behavioral economics. Applying concepts from behavioral economics in live trials it is possible to bring about benefits such as increasing sales and retention rates, improving claims processing and encouraging more accurate disclosure. Swiss Re's global research team partners with its reinsurance clients to incorporate behavioral economics concepts into their letters, websites, forms and scripts by running A/B tests to understand what is driving customer behavior. The team currently has over 100 tests in progress with more than 40 clients, including many in the United States. The partnerships are producing clear business benefits, increasing sales, renewals, health disclosure and turnaround speed for claims payments. These changes are driven by small, inexpensive changes in communications with customers, and we'd like to share some of our insights with you. We've increased upsell rates, disclosure and email open rates, and reduced lapses, turnaround times and appointment no-show rates, to name just a few examples. Behavioral economics is the topic on everyone's lips with insurers and reinsurers all beginning to talk about it in earnest. Our team has been working hard for nearly 4 years and in that time instead of talking, we've been doing, and now we can share with you what a difference behavioral economics can actually make for insurance.