Description: Written from a regulatory perspective, the article covers the purpose of regulation and some regulatory expectations. The topics include the appointed actuary's involvement in corporate governance, reasonability of results when compared to prior results, data quality, familiarity with the company's annual statement and applicable statutes, and areas where appointed actuaries can add value though services provided to smaller life insurance companies.

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: New Zealand is about to launch its first variable annuity with guaranteed lifetime withdrawal benefits. The product design is mindful of the lessons from the financial crisis in the United States, Europe and Japan.

Description: Is Risk/Return a sound tool for decision-making? No. It is not consistent, not objective, distorts decision and degrades governance. Why? What shall we do then?

Description: Is Risk/Return a sound tool for decision-making? No. It is not consistent, not objective, distorts decision and degrades governance. Why? What shall we do then?

Description: The author constructed the efficient frontier of new business sales by modeling the embedded value and economic capital against a universe of possible growth rates of the three lines of business in a typical three-year planning horizon. The ERM function can use the efficient frontier of new business to provide a more rigorous analysis of the impact of growth rates on the firm’s overall capital efficiency and value creation, hence forming a feedback loop with the businesses in the planning process to optimize the growth strategy.

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

Description: This paper takes the position that the U.K. actuarial profession has still not come to a single view on financial economics, and the major divisions that remain continue to hamstring its policy development. From Current Pension Actuarial Practice in Light of Financial Economics Symposium, M-RS04-1.

Description: Proposes alternatives for estimating the long term interest returns in Indexed Universal Life products. Defends expected return of 20%-45% on hedge budgets.