Description: The forces of today—expanding technology, tightening capital, regulatory rumblings, mergers and acquisitions—will affect the focus of tomorrow. If we wish to win the day, one to prosper in a changing environment, we need to begin preparing ourselves now for the challenges that lie ahead.

Description: The article is based on a range of industry insights, and provides readers with a broad overview of the emerging markets, industry trends, and challenges.

Description: A discussion of the opportunities opening up for reinsurance providers in Brazil

Description: brief discussion on Solvency II and accounting regimes, and update on Reinsurance Section activity.

Description: This year’s Survey, its sixth year, further reflects the impact of health care reform and the resulting prevalence of unlimited lifetime maximums on stop loss coverage. Of surveyed plans, 88% report such coverage –a steep increase from 13% in 2010. About half pair an unlimited lifetime with an interim annual maximum of $5 million or less. Premiums continue to rise (to no surprise)and are 60% to 70% higher than levels reported in our initial Survey in 2007. The primary focus of the Survey, current premium rates, is shown in the following graphs and tables.

Description: Summary of the results of the 2011 Life Reinsurance Survey. Included are US and Canadian individual life results for recurring, portfolio and retrocession reinsurance.

Description: This paper aims to help financial and insurance practitioners better recognize, assess, and respond to large scale, large impact, rare events (LSLIRE’s) which are occurrences currently often wrongly labeled as being unpredictable black swans. A black swan, as Nassim Taleb defines it in his popular book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Random House & Penguin (2007-2010 2nd. Ed.) is 1) an outlier event, which 2) carries extreme impact, and 3) “makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact.” Elsewhere, Taleb says it is unpredictable, which is why people concoct explanations. Other people use the term in many and various ways, to enfold events missed by most people because they are rare, missed by computer models and/or experts, and to include events they simply seem personally to have misunderstood. The paper also discusses building better ways to assess such events’ background characteristics, emergence dynamics, logics, and other foreseeable attributes. A secondary focus is educating practitioners to better respond - whether to limit damage or to take advantage of - the opportunities that arise from what others are likely to miss or misjudge during and after the emergence of LSLIRE (AKA black swan) events.

Description: Highlight the global life reinsurance industry market size, key players and trends impacting the industry, globally and from a high level regional overview.

Description: An essay suggesting a health care financing system.

Description: This research scorecard will keep section members informed about research projects sponsored or co-sponsored by the Financial Reporting Section.