Description: Read the April 2020 issue of Risk Management, published by the Joint Risk Management Section. Newsletters provide practical information for the working actuary, articles on trends that impact sections and news about section activities.

Description: An introductory article describing how Bayesian statistics has evolved over the past 20 years and why it offers the actuarial discipline powerful tools to better understand and manage risk. Compared with traditional (frequentist) and black-box (machine learning) approaches, Bayesian analysis provides explainable models focused on distributions of estimates instad of simply point estimates.

Description: The Federal funds rate increased by 4.25% in 2022 with further increases in 2023, which have already resulted in a liquidity crisis for a few banks. As the rapid increase of the interest rates pushed the new money rates above the yields of many life insurers’ investment portfolios, insurance companies are facing a dilemma between compressed margins from peer pressure and the concern with liquidity shortfalls and realized capital losses should mass surrenders happen. This paper discussed main emerging risks under rising interest rate environment, and several ways to mitigate these risks.

Description: Many ERM programs fail to include an active step of actual risk treatment and are therefore rightfully characterized as Entertainment Systems. Real ERM will use risk assessment to drive decisions about risk acceptance and risk mitigation. Entertainment systems use risk assessment to create reports and to hold discussions. No actions are taken often because ERM is not empowered to do anything.

Description: While COSO describes guiding principles for a comprehensive and robust ERM framework, it is anything but prescriptive. This article describes one path toward the realization of a framework consistent with COSO and highlights several challenges and solutions.

Description: The mismatch between how interest rate impacts the value of assets and liabilities could have material negative impact to companies’ earnings and surplus. To quantify and mitigate the impact of such mismatches, companies have used matching a combination of duration and convexity. I will review these measurement techniques and their limitations.

Description: This paper applies the research in Prospect Theory of Kahneman and Tversky to explain why sales of annuities lag sales of life insurance products. The author theorizes that life insurance is easier to sell because customers perceive themselves to be in the domain of losses, while potential annuity customers perceive themselves to be in the domain of gains. Kahneman and Tversky showed us that people are mostly risk averse in the domain of gains and risk seeking in the domain of losses. Purchase of an annuity or life product is a risky investment. Customers will find it easier to take the risk in the life insurance domain of losses than the annuity domain of gains. The author then proposes a hybrid life annuity product that might address both mortality and longevity risk in one product that would allow both products to be more competitive than stand-alone products.

Description: How can actuaries innovate solutions to the challenges posed by policyholder behavior risks?

Description: There will be inflection points in the value of an instrument when interest rates change. These inflection points could materially impact the approximation of value change using ALM metrics. In this part of the seven-part series, I will highlight: • How to identify the inflection points; • the range of rate changes where ALM metrics may be relied upon i.e., the “validity” range, outside of which recalculation of the ALM metrics is required and the potential that one needs to rebalance the portfolio; • a technique to improve on the approximation of value change beyond the validity range; and • a technique to convert non-linear change on the yield curve to be used with duration and convexity.

Description: The cyber insurance market looks like it’s growing—rapidly, in fact. However, there’s more to the cyber insurance market than the outward appearance of strong growth. Worldwide aggregate premium’s upward trend may even be cause for alarm. The increase in premium against a flat rate of insured exposure is a key sign that the market could turn from growth to constriction if a solution isn’t found in the near future. If the cyber insurance sector hopes to reach such lofty goals as exceeding $30 billion in global premium by 2028, it’s going to need more capital. Whether directly into the insurance sector or via support from reinsurance and retrocession, fresh capital should help insurers achieve greater market penetration, build a broader foundation for ongoing expansion, and chart a course for long-term sustainable profitable growth. The same sources capital insurers have used since the early days of the market won’t be enough, though. Thankfully, the insurance linked securities (ILS) market seems poised to help, particularly with several promising recent transactions. New sources of capital could bolster the foundation for future cyber re/insurance growth.