Description: Presented at May 2000 Spring Meeting. Discusses common problems in creating a successful merger - such as not incorporating community support, and not achieving economies of scale - and how to avoid them.

Description: 1996 Valuation Actuary Symposium. A panel of actuarial regulators answered the questions: 1. What are the regulatory expectations from asset adequacy analysis? 2. When regulators review a company's opinion and memoranda, what are the things they are looking for? 3. What are the things that haven't been done as well as they like? 4. What do they feel can be improved on in the process? 5. How does the process itself work?

Description: From a session 11 PD at a meeting of the Society of Actuaries held in San Diego, CA, June 22-23, 2000 This discussion presents an introduction to credit derivatives. From Record of Society of Actuaries, Volume 26, No. 1.

Description: 1999 SOA Annual Meeting, San Francisco. This panel expanded on earlier research to examine the potential costs of long-term guarantees, transfer risk modeling techniques, and the formulation of practical strategies to manage investment accumulation products.

Description: 2004 SOA Spring Meeting, Anaheim, CA. This panel discussed asset class/equity sector historical returns demonstrating the need for diversification risk management at the portfolio level and models and assumptions available at investment firms for retirement and education planning.

Description: Presented at May 1996 Spring Meeting. The recent development of a finance track in the Fellowship syllabus allows the student to acquire expertise in financial market, asset valuation, and investment strategies. Panelists discuss actuarial work assignments undertaken by finance actuaries in life insurance companies.

Description: This presentation considers the pricing of European derivatives in a Black-Scholes model with stochastic volatility. The presentation shows how Parseval’s theorem may be used to express those prices as Fourier integrals. This is a significant improvement over Monte Carlo simulation in many cases. The main ingredient in this presentation's method is the Laplace transform of the ordinary [constant volatility] price of a put or call in the Black-Scholes model, where the transform is taken with respect to maturity [T]. The presentation derives these formulas and then applies them to the case where volatility is modelled as a Markov chain in continuous time, the so-called 'Markov regime switching model'. This model has been used previously in stochastic volatility modelling, but mostly with only N=2 states. The presentation shows how to use N=3 states without difficulty, and how larger number of states can be handled. Numerical illustrations are given, including the volatility smile in a three-state model.

Description: This session from the 2005 Life Spring Meeting discusses mergers and acquisitions activity, the factors that may influence the level of M&A activity and the potential opportunities for M&A activity in the marketplace today. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Vol. 31, No. 1.

Description: Panelists discuss the role of an investment actuary. Focus is on the process the investment actuary uses in the job, and on working with the perspectives of the investment professionals and the product actuaries with whom the investment actuary works. From the 2002 Record of Society of Actuaries, Volume 28, No. 3. Session 5PD of the Boston Annual Meeting.

Description: Discussion of the diversification activities of a number of life insurance companies. This includes the formation of, or acquisition of, property and casualty insurers, variable annuity companies, mutual fund management companies, banks, finance companies, leasing companies, real estate development companies, televisions and radio stations, newspapers, software consultants and other corporate enterprises. Discussion includes: 1. Activities really compatible with the llfe insurance product. 2. Activities otherwise compatible with corporate objectives or offering potentially large profit centers. 3. Activities which can be an excessive drain on corporate earnings and executive manpower 4. The actuary's role in these diversification activities. Then the discussion goes into a discussion of corporate planning models