Description: Presented at May 1996 Spring Meeting. Who are our customers? What do they value? How do they buy? These are just a few of the questions that must always be considered. This panel discusses the answers to these and other questions as they exist today and as they will develop over the next five years.

Description: The growing aging population presents unique challenges and opportunities, especially for the financial services industry. Presenters will explore the issues with particular focus on demographic challenges, such as age dependency ratios and implications for sovereign debt and public policy. They will also compare and contrast private sector offerings across the globe. In particular, as an example of a super-aging society, presenters will describe how Japanese insurers and pension funds tackle longevity risk.

Description: Presenters gave their projections and analysis on demographic trends and longevity prospects going into the next century in important countries. They analyzed the factors influencing the expected trends and comment on what these trends will mean for the financial services industries and the actuarial profession around the world.

Description: This session from the 1995 SOA New Orleans Meeting discusses what constitutes the senior market, the trends, the needs of seniors, how to access the market and market segmentation. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Vol. 21, No. 1.

Description: Future mortality improvement is an important assumption in the valuation of life insurance and annuities. In this session, presenters will discuss the work of the Mortality Improvement subgroup of the American Academy of Actuaries’ Life Experience Committee and the Society of Actuaries’ Preferred Mortality Oversight Group Valuation Basic Table Team in developing mortality improvement scales for AG-38 and VM-20. In addition, two recent SOA efforts on mortality improvement will be examined. Research on developing a broader framework for modeling mortality improvement assumptions is being developed to enable U.S. actuaries additional ways to follow a consistent approach across a variety of actuarial practice applications. Results from a study on U.S. population mortality by socioeconomic category and how it fits into the broader consistent framework will be presented. Additionally, results of a survey on mortality improvement practices of life insurance companies and reinsurers in Canada and the U.S. will be shared.

Description: Two recent SOA research projects will be discussed. The first covers analysis of the drivers of mortality that shaped trends in US mortality. The second will look at using causes of death to predict future mortality improvements

Description: This session from the 1995 SOA Boston Meeting covers an overview of demographics in the U.S., the impact that population demographics have on sales and product design. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Vol. 21, No. 4b.

Description: This session from the 1976 SOA Fall Meeting is about the recent data collected by the American Council of Life Insurance, and recent data collected from a comprehensive study of the Social Security system. The panel discusses the current and future implications from this data for life insurance, pensions and financial security.

Description: Dr Horvath's research lies at the intersection of aging research, epidemiology, chronic diseases, epigenetics, genetics, and systems biology. He works on all aspects of biomarker development with a particular focus on genomic biomarkers of aging. He developed a highly accurate multi-tissue biomarker of aging known as the epigenetic clock. Dr Horvath developed systems biologic approaches such as weighted gene co-expression network analysis which lend themselves for integrating gene genomic data sets. These methods have been used for a broad spectrum of age-related diseases including neurodegenerative diseases, cancer, cardiovascular disease. Dr. Horvath received a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 1995 and a Doctorate of Science in Biostatistics from the Harvard School of Public Health in 2000.