Description: This article departs from the usual GMWB pricing approach by assuming that the policyholder is always smart enough to act in his/her own best interest.

Description: Life and annuity markets around the world have seen increasingly complex investment-combined products, including universal life, fixed indexed annuities, variable annuities with a wide variety of guaranteed benefits and indexed variable annuities. Insurance companies are facing unprecedented exposure to financial risks in addition to traditional mortality and longevity risks. The risk assessment and modeling for such complex designs by conventional methods often focus heavily on their market competitiveness and profitability. However, there seems to be a lack of quantifiable and systematic approaches to assess investment risks associated with investment combined products. The objective of the proposed work is to develop a framework for quantifying and analyzing various forms of contractual designs and showcase different techniques to assess the trade-off between competitive contractual designs and their practical implications regarding the difficulty of risk management.

Description: This article discusses the problems created by the options in unit-linked annuities in the UK, variable annuities in the US and segregated fund contracts in Canada. Methodology for valuing the guaranteed annuity option is presented.

Description: Important tools used in property & casualty P&C insurance—predictive modeling and data mining—can be applied to more effectively model policyholder behavior risks in variable annuity VA contracts. In this article, a case study is used to demonstrate how a predictive modeling approach can improve upon traditional methods used to model VA lapse behavior.