Description: Letter from the Chair of the Product Development Council. Challenging times bring opportunities. Today's low interest environment is a rallying cry for our industry to transform our products and the way we do business

Description: Combo long-term care insurance products provide a viable option for the insurance industry to offer a sufficient range and supply of private long-term care financing solutions.

Description: New Zealand is about to launch its first variable annuity with guaranteed lifetime withdrawal benefits. The product design is mindful of the lessons from the financial crisis in the United States, Europe and Japan.

Description: The proposed regulations define a class of products known as “qualifying longevity annuity contracts” (QLACs), which are excluded from the account balance used to determine required minimum distributions. By exempting longevity annuities (up to a specified limit) from the RMD rules, it is hoped that it will provide individuals under defined-contribution plans the option to use an “affordable” portion of their account balance to purchase a longevity annuity. The proposed regulations apply to tax-qualified defined-contribution plans under section 401(a), section 403(b), individual retirement annuities and accounts (IRAs) under section 408, and eligible governmental section 457 plans.

Description: This paper considers the risk that actual mortality will be lower than the mortality assumed when pricing life annuities on impaired lives. It develops a method for managing this risk through a Provision for Adverse Deviation PAD.

Description: Improve pharmacy cost forecasting by developing induced demand curves for pharmacy costs.

Description: Article Nathaniel Ingersoll Bowditch by Bartlett in The Actuary, June 1979, Volume 13, Number 6

Description: This article delves into a new line of statistical thinking of the author, that may be useful for product development actuaries. The key concept is how product design can produce products that diversify quickly, meaning that the company can be confident of a profitable product line, based on fewer sales than might be true for other designs.

Description: The article discusses the practical impact of recently Rev. Rul. 2014-7, which modified and supercedes Rev. Rul. 2007-54 by republishing the position of what variable annuity contract reserves are taken into for tax purposes without addressing the issue of how to calculate required interest for separate accounts; Rev. Rul. 2014-7 also obsoleted Rev. Rul. 2007-61, which had suspended Rev. Rul. 2007-54.