Description: The authors introduce an alternative to Tail Contribution Analysis TCA for analyzing business segments and strategies called Economic Profit Analysis EPA. They discuss EPA’s key feature, “volatility replication,” an intuitively appealing process of building investor expectations and capital market information into the risk-and-return measurements used to evaluate strategic decisions. Finally, they illustrate the benefit of using EPA in overcoming the problems of TCA and thereby providing concise reliable information for business decision making.

Description: This article describes some of the drawbacks to the assessment of longevity risk adopted by most practitioners within the UK together with an initiative that provides a platform for an alternative approach that is both (a) more forward-looking in nature and (b) can complement current practices.

Description: Comments on Robert North’s paper, a real case study of disclosing MVL in a public employee retirement system.

Description: Increasing uncertainties and volatility in financial as well as real goods markets increasingly reveal that controlling systems based on deterministic and pseudo-exact values are insufficiently eligible to manage the business activities. This raises the question how management systems can be modified to generate the adequate management impulses in volatile periods. Risk management deals from identifying, evaluating and aggregating chances and risks, which again determine the potential fluctuation range of relevant performance indicators. Everyday corporate life shows that risk management is considered important; but the corresponding processes to identify, evaluate and report chances and risks are seldom part of established decision criteria. This “paradox” lets assume that risks are managed in various differing and unsystematic ways. The combination of traditional controlling methods and risk management is not primarily a methodological challenge. The behavior of the whole organization, practiced over a long-year period, has to be transferred into a new corporate culture of transparent dealing with chances and risks. This paper describes the necessary change management process, which has to come along with necessary methodological modifications.

Description: Using basic actuarial principles to develop a reasonable spending budget and to keep spending/savings on track to meet financial objectives.

Description: Summarizing the session "How to Keep Your Spreadsheets Out of the Headlines", on preventing spreadsheet error, from the 2015 SOA Annual Meeting. Presenters were Alex Cires, Sandra To, and Mary Pat Campbell.

Description: Presented at May 2002 Spring Meeting. Discusses the nature of the risks associated with equity-based and equity-linked products, and how those products can be managed with the use of capital market instruments.

Description: Presented at May 2005 Spring Meeting Panelists examine in detail the subject of annuity risk management and how this can be applied to new product development, as well as in-force product management.

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: Fiduciaries play a vital role in the financial health of a pension plan. How they carry out their duties is a question of increasing interest to beneficiaries, regulators, shareholders and taxpayers. Having a clear, logical and well-documented risk management process in place can make a big difference.