Description: Businesses across the board have been drastically impacted by the effects of COVID-19 over the course of 2020, and insurance was not immune. Perhaps most relevant to this industry’s current capital and liquidity concern is the prevailing low interest rate environment. This has been a global trend in the last decade, and treasury rates in much of the developed world are at or near zero. Reduced investment returns limit an insurer’s ability to achieve their desired return on equity, eliminating previously profitable strategies that depended on the leverage of life and annuity balance sheets. Focus and activity have instead shifted to other methods to counteract the low interest rate markets and accompanying capital strain. Examples include increased mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity within the insurance industry and an increasing focus by private equity firms in the insurance market for asset-intensive products, both of which reflect the goal of increasing yield rates on capital.

Description: The Individual Life Experience Committee is holding a competition encouraging actuaries and other interested parties to predict 2017 industry mortality based on a data set containg 2009 - 2016 data. The competition is not only about predicting mortality, but also about explaining and presenting the results.

Description: The Distribution Channels: Part 1 -- Agent Channels provides general information on agent distribution channels covering a high-level perspective of members and the pros and cons to insurers.

Description: An overview of Electronic Health Records and how they will enhance risk assessment and automated underwriting in the US.

Description: The Society of Actuaries (SOA) is pleased to bring you information about the actuarial career path in life insurance and predictive analytics. We’ll continue to share more about actuaries who are tackling some of the industry's biggest challenges and top employers in life insurance.

Description: A look back over 20 years to see how product topics of the day have changed and remained the same.

Description: Meet Christine Hofbeck. Christine is pushing the boundaries of traditional life and general insurance by finding problems and fixing them with new technology, modeling methods and sources of data. Most recently, she built a predictive analytics team at one of the world's largest financial services institutions to support the pricing team for a $5 billion portfolio covering life, disability, critical illness and more.

Description: Accelerated underwriting expert, Ryan Holt, FSA, gives a brief history of the confusion matrix and how its use came into the accelerated underwriting space. An in depth discussion of estimating mortality impact using underwriting audits follows. Three key assumptions that effect mortality impact are discussed. Readers will leave with an understanding of how to estimate mortality impacts using audit results from any new under writing program as well as the considerations that should be taken around key assumptions. Background articles are provided for readers that are less familiar with the subject matter.

Description: This paper concerns policyholder dividends on traditional participating life insurance products in regulatory contexts similar to those in the United States and Canada. This paper also touches on annuity products. It was prepared for use in the educational curriculum of the Society of Actuaries. Dividend actuaries seeking references to writings on policyholder dividends to refresh their perspective may also find it useful.

Description: This report describes the main features of structured settlement annuities in North America and current actuarial practices and issues related to this product. It was prepared for use in the educational curriculum of the Society of Actuaries.