Description: This paper provides actuaries with background and scientific knowledge to understand global climate change and climate model projections for the 21st century.

Description: The COVID-19 pandemic has had an impact on all aspects of daily life and its impact extends to how disability incidence may play out in the future. Product profitability will be shaped by how morbidity patterns, interest rate levels and other key drivers will play out into the future. In this session, our panel will discuss COVID’s impact on IDI morbidity experience as observed over the past 18 months, offer comparisons and insights in light of other insurance lines of business, and share emerging information on the on-going effects of Long COVID. Highlights will also include how regional differences and implications for insurers as the industry moves further into the COVID vaccine era.

Description: With seemingly unending demands on life & annuity companies for more intense and complex calculations, as well as greater sophistication around analytics, and all of this done at speed, never before has it been so important to seek out maximum efficiency in constructing models. In this session the panelists examine how the combination of various model efficiency approaches, pulling in many different facets of modeling and making it flexible enough to dial up or down various modeling components, can bring about incredible results. Not only does it become possible to produce and expand upon financial risk metrics via a building block approach, but also enables life insurers to produce analytics and dashboards to support strategic decisions that were simply not possible or cost effectively viable before.

Description: 2021 ImpACT Conference - Session 5D: Data Science: The New Frontier for Evaluating Digital UW Evidence 10.26.21 Recording

Description: Python has become the fastest-growing major programming language in the world. It has surged in popularity over the last decade, following the development of its industry-leading capabilities in data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence, and it is now one of the most globally popular and widely used languages. In this article, I discuss some of the reasons for its popularity and explain why many actuaries and insurers have started using Python.

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 and indexed variable annuities. 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 approaches 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 regarding the difficulty of risk management.

Description: In this article we examine the benefits and drawbacks of using a global surrogate of a black-box model. Are surrogates a comfortable middle ground that provide insurers high predictive power as well as model explainability?

Description: The Society of Actuaries (SOA), in a joint project with the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA) and the Canadian Institute of Actuaries (CIA), are creating research projects and education materials on Modeling and Management of Longevity Risk.

Description: The Individual Life Experience Committee is holding a competition encouraging actuaries and other interested parties to predict 2017 industry mortality based on a data set containg 2009 - 2016 data. The competition is not only about predicting mortality, but also about explaining and presenting the results.