Description: Outlines a generic business model for a life insurance company and concludes with thoughts on future trends and prospects.

Description: Article discusses the mechanics of index-linked annuities and the growth of RILAs

Description: Life and annuity markets around the world have seen increasingly complex investment-combined products, including universal life, fixed indexed annuities, variable annuities with a wide variety of guaranteed benefits, indexed variable annuities, etc. Insurance companies are facing unprecedented exposure to financial risks in addition to traditional mortality and longevity risks. The risk assessment and modeling for such complex designs by conventional methods often focus heavily on their market competitiveness and profitability. However, there seems to be a lack of quantifiable and systematic approach to assess investment risks associated with investment combined products. The objective of the proposed work is to develop a framework for quantifying and analyzing various forms of contractual designs and showcase different techniques to assess the trade-off between competitive contractual designs and their practical implications with regard to the difficulty of risk management.

Description: Since the last installment of the biennial WTW North America Life Insurance Pricing Methodology Survey in 2018, the market has been coming to terms with the prospect of “lower for even longer” interest rates and been confronted with the economic and social impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. This article examines what effects these and market-specific factors have had on profit targets and pricing and reserving strategy. The survey looked at the profit objectives and assumptions used in pricing 2020 new issues of individual life and annuity products, with a focus on past practices, not future plans.

Description: Insurers are struggling to keep pace with rapidly changing economic conditions, customer needs and regulation. We at Oliver Wyman believe there is an opportunity for many insurers to generate more customer value and fuel their growth by rethinking their approach to Product Development.

Description: In this article, we collected data from the companies’ roll-forward disclosures related to calendar years 2021 and 2022 on Market Risk Benefit and shared a high-level summary of the Market Risk Benefit volatility that a focus group of companies incurred and summarized the most common ways to mitigate volatility.

Description: In the past decade, U.S. life and annuity insurance companies’ utilization of asset-intensive reinsurance internal reinsurance has grown significantly. Many reinsurers and insurers have set up entities or affiliates in Cayman, with many more in the pipeline. Here we will discuss Cayman’s reinsurance market growth momentum, and the main benefits that Cayman offers.

Description: This article gives a comprehensive overview of how a bank can establish a broader financial services program. Areas reviewed included the types of insurance products, the people, training and compensation, and the management structures.

Description: This article examines the changes in U.S. regulatory reserve and risk-based capital requirements that will significantly impact the insurance industry and practicing actuaries. It summarizes activity related to principles-based reserves and risk-based capital initiatives during 2005.

Description: This article presents the idea that a New Product Notebook, which contains all of the aspects of a product's development and is accessible to all involved, can make the product development process more efficient.