Description: Overview of a recent visit to silicon valley and how the learnings from this trip can be applied in an insurance setting.

Description: Income i.e., immediate annuities are insurance products that benefit from mortality pooling, so they can generate the highest level of lifetime “income now” per dollar of retirement assets put to work. Including an income annuity as a portion of a retirement portfolio often results in an immediate increase in the level of income generated by that portfolio while at the same time ensuring that a portion of the total income is payable for a lifetime.

Description: Long-term guarantees place unanticipated burdens on companies because of the degree to which the environment can change. These risks are compounded when combined with estimation of policyholder behavior, especially when solid experience data is not available. When risks are properly reflected, long-term guarantees do not always provide value to the customer in excess of the manufacturing cost. The product development actuary is challenged to compare customer value to company cost and use that measurement to identify novel ways to design products to better serve customers.

Description: The 1990s saw the rise of many types of variable investment products within the life insurance industry. It was only natural that hedging strategies and products would emerge in response to the inherent risk of loss of value in variable life and annuity products. This article explains a 21st-century twist on the concept for annuities, the Enhanced Earnings Death Benefit EEDB Rider.

Description: Discusses Phase 1 survey results from the SOA/RGA post-level term research project.

Description: This paper will show that the result of using the 1975-80 select/ultimate table, as opposed to the more modern 1990-95 select/ultimate table, can be a significant understatement of future mortality and hence anticipated profits may prove to be illusory.

Description: The Product Development Section has recently sponsored research on waiver of premium and waiver of charges riders. Waiver riders are commonly offered as optional benefits or included automatically on individual life insurance policies as an integrated benefit. In the event of disability, a waiver rider may waive future life insurance premium due or contribute an amount to a flexible account, such as the average premium paid over the past year or the cost of insurance charges. Despite the prevalence of these riders, the current valuation standard is still the 1952 Society of Actuaries (SOA) Disability Table.

Description: Recent advances in mortality modeling have enabled applicant-specific quantification of mortality risk in life insurance applicants using laboratory and physical measurements. Relative to more conventional underwriting, this approach identifies a small population of significantly under-priced policy and a much larger, cross-subsidizing group whose risk is presently overestimated. Applicants placed in the highest percentile by this scoring methodology are more than 10X as likely to die in a given period as their demographic peers, and represent approximately 5% of short-term claims. Implications for product design are substantial in both the short- and long-term, as the possibilities for adverse selection grow, and the opportunity for fully individualized pricing raises the more distant prospect of products with as many rate classes as applicants.

Description: As term carriers continue dealing with the implementation of PBR, the 2017 CSO mortality table, accelerated underwriting programs and predictive models, one wonders what the next significant challenge will be for the term market. The implications of these changes are yet to be seen fully, and monitoring of the results will be important in the years to come. ...

Description: Read the February 2020 issue of Product Matters! published by the Product Development Section. Newsletters provide practical information for the working actuary, articles on trends that impact sections and news about section activities.