Description: This article discusses that several ERM characteristics mitigate the effects of bad corporate culture, including: • The whole firm is considered the system in view holistic characteristic. • Peers are empowered to lead in positive ways intensive management characteristic. • Risk taking should be separated from risk management objective assessment characteristic. • Risk management is a key corporate value, second only to profit maximization postmodern characteristic.

Description: Interview with a global leader in life reinsurance. Includes background, thoughts on industry's challenges, trends, opportunities and thought re: leadership

Description: Many retirement actuaries have experience developing, implementing, and monitoring Liability Driven Investing (LDI) strategies for plan sponsors. These strategies typically involve modifying a plan’s investment strategy to remove a significant portion of the investment and interest rate risk now or at some point in the future when specific triggers are met. The tactics often involve the use of fixed income assets to cash flow and/or duration match the liabilities. In the spirit of helping actuaries expand their roles in an evolving defined contribution world, this article explores the application of LDI and derisking strategies within defined contribution and individual retirement accounts. The economic theory behind this approach is called the lifecycle hypothesis, or lifecycle finance. The benefits of the lifecycle finance method are that it provides a safe approach to save for retirement and a secure source of floor income during retirement. Similar to pension plans, each individual has his or her own idiosyncratic needs, wants, and risks that should be considered. Actuaries are uniquely situated to help defined contribution plan sponsors, individuals, and even themselves implement the lifecycle finance approach by developing and distributing tools and methods that focus on income (rather than wealth), LDI strategies, and personalization.

Description: Spark offers a way to get some dramatic speed and scalability advantages over the Map-reduce methodology whenever you are doing iterative data processing and particularly when you want interactive data analysis capability. Find out why “lazy execution” can be a desirable characteristic when dealing with big data.

Description: Recognizing the benefit for actuarial discussions about how COVID-19 will affect our work, the Smaller Insurance Company Section of the Society of Actuaries hosted “COVID-19: What a Smaller Insurance Company Actuary Needs to Know Virtual Town Hall” on April 17, 2020. The following delves into these presentations and discussions.

Description: The purpose of this survey was to gather data on how a sampling of the life insurance industry makes decisions involving lab tests. This most significant conclusions were that protective value was the biggest driving force and the chief underwriter played the biggest role.

Description: As part of the 2019 Disruptions to the Actuarial Profession Contest, this essay posits that the actuarial profession should respond to other fields encroaching on its space, particularly software development and data science, not by a defensive reaction to establish a boundary between fields but instead by a welcoming attitude that seeks to utilize expertise from other fields while maintaining the actuarial role of comprehensive risk management and its hard-earned professional trust.

Description: 1992 SOA Regional Meeting, Anaheim. This session provided an update of topics relating to individual annuity products. Subjects covered included: 1. The marketing and design of variable annuities, fixed interest rate annuities and market-value adjusted annuities. 2. Immediate annuities with participation and liquidity features.

Description: This discussion looks at the approach for applying electronic computers to the operating practices of a company.

Description: There is a lot of focus on GTI and its impact on modeling, methodology and transition. However, given the dependencies that exist on the data infrastructure, the implementation of the guidelines is an ideal opportunity to also streamline and improve data storage, data transformation, and reporting processes to create an efficient, effective and scalable data solution. This session will focus on the specific impacts and possible solutions to the following data processes: In force data Experience studies and assumption setting post model data feeds and subledger processes Data warehouse and reporting systems