Description: An excerpt from 2015-2016 SOA President Craig Reynolds’ address to members at the 2015 SOA Annual Meeting and Exhibit, focusing on ideas to explore in the year ahead.

Description: Organic, top-line growth is key to life insurance companies for creating shareholder value and achieving long-term success. Companies that do not position themselves for organic growth risk falling behind as competitors seize market opportunities for expansion.

Description: A dicussion of the Rate Classification Actuarial Standard of Practice, ASOP #12: its purpose, its scope, guidance, and examples.

Description: A compilation of reader responses is presented to a real life situation posed involving a management, leadership, or other business decision. This issue’s case study involved management hiring someone to make changes, then ignoring all suggestions.

Description: Actuarial systems access and change controls are hot topics these days as modeling continues to increase in complexity and as new modeling regulations may begin to crest over the horizon. Many companies are currently in the process of either formalizing their actuarial system access and change control protocols, or are reevaluating and strengthening their existing control processes in response to identified deficiencies or in conjunction with new actuarial system implementations. With these undertakings in mind, this article discusses a number of valuable components commonly incorporated in formal systems access and change control protocols. Also discussed are leading practices identified in the SOA publication “Actuarial Modeling Controls: A Survey of Actuarial Modeling Controls in the Context of a Model-Based Valuation Framework (December 2012)”, and from the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries.

Description: Actuarial modelers need to engage and leverage IT expertise in the design, maintenance, and control of actuarial models.

Description: From 4 to 8 June 2018, the German Association of Actuaries, in conjunction with the IAA, will host the 31st International Congress of Actuaries in Berlin.

Description: The article describes principles for optimal sub-tasking of a project goal. Two experiments each one comparing different approaches are presented. A summary of principles for optimal goal setting presents seven key points: i)levels of outcome goals should be recognizable and lack ambiguity; ii) each subtask should be atomic, i.e. not be capable of being broken up into further subtasks, iii) the subtasks should be uniform, lacking ambiguity, so that any new trainee could master it without the need for further guidance; iv) each subtask should be attainable in a reasonable amount of time; v) mentor feedback should be provided during the initial stages of learning or training; vi) upon mastery of each subtask trainees should be encouraged to maximize their overall score; vii) after mastery of individual subtasks, while attempting to maximize scores, trainees should be provided with a mixture of easy, intermediate, and difficult tasks.

Description: This article studies the syllabus as a dynamic, interactive teaching tool that informs and is informed by both solutions of complex course problems and student difficulties with these problems.