Description: This article highlights the findings of a recent SOA survey on accelerated underwriting (AU) practices, including the amount of AU business ceded, the results of three opinion questions, and an estimate of mortality slippage among AU programs.

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: This session will look into life insurers’ anticipated business impacts as a result of the implementation of the new accounting standard for insurance contracts, IFRS 17. What will be the financial impact as of day one as a result of transition? How will embedded value for common life insurance products change? How will costs of reinsurance be affected? Will products have to be re-designed and/or re-priced? IFRS 17 may have more ramifications into the way insurers are doing business than we have anticipated so far. While we are working on the implementation of this new standard, we should not lose sight of the business impacts that will follow. At the conclusion of the session, attendees will be able to: Understand key impacts of the transition to IFRS 17; See illustrative examples of the impact on embedded value; and Understand key impacts on product design and pricing Country Relevance: US and Canada

Description: The presenters will explore the current state of the North American mortality baseline and long-term improvement assumptions and determine what we can learn from the UK's approach. They will share research done by the Society of Actuaries and other organizations to describe how to build a better model, plus show the impact socio-economics and other factors have on longevity expectations. The presenters will offer suggestions for how U.S. and Canadian pension plan and insurance actuaries--and the industry itself--can best use this research to develop a better model for the risk management of pension plans and group annuities

Description: Description and welcome to the 2020 Canadian Reinsurance Conference including highlight of the key note speaker

Description: This article gives examples of how an actuary can live by the actuarial motto of substituting facts for appearances. The specific examples given are setting the mortality for table shaved individual life business and setting late duration lapse assumptions for level term business.

Description: Medical insurance today is more like pre-paid medical payments. Medical insurance should be bought for protection, but rarely used, like auto insurance.

Description: The rapid pace of change within the reinsurance sector over the past few years has given way to the permutations of a “new reality” that is being shaped by abundant capacity from traditional and alternative sources.

Description: Significant consolidation has occurred in the U.S. reinsurance market over the last five years. The number of companies operating in ordinary life reinsurance has continued to decline—13 primary companies excluding retrocessionaires contributing to the Munich American Reassurance Survey in 2004, compared to 20 companies in 1999. Table 1 and Table 2 indicate the change in market share as well as the change in the composition of the leading participants in the U.S. market for 2004 versus 1999.