Description: Last year, the COVID pandemic significantly increased the pace of change in the life insurance industry, particularly in Accelerated Underwriting (AU). In the past, underwriting process changes occurred relatively infrequently and over a matter of years. Now, with new data sources and predictive models constantly evolving, the frequency of underwriting enhancements and decisioning changes, particularly in AU programs, is occurring every few months. With so much change occurring quickly, how can a company effectively monitor and understand the effects of these changes to make continuous adjustments with confidence and agility? Well-designed data visualizations allow a reviewer to navigate and comprehend detailed results quickly because our brains can process data in a picture format more than 15 times faster than text. Today’s advanced BI tools can make AU program monitoring more efficient and help companies adjust quickly to the results from program changes.

Description: At the end of December 2020, Congress enacted the Consolidated Appropriates Act, 2021, which included revisions to Section 7702. Effective for policies issued after December 31, 2020, the fixed 4% and 6% minimum annual effective rates under these tests were changed to refer to a market-based rate called the “insurance interest rate”. For contracts issued in 2021, the insurance rate was set to 2% - defined as the lower of the Section 7702 applicable federal interest rate based on the 60-month period ending December 2019 (2%) and the Section 7702 valuation interest rate in effect for 2020 (3.5%). This reduction in the rates used for compliance testing required significant product, operational, and technology changes for companies to reach product compliance. After 2021, the insurance interest rate is redetermined annually with a minimum change floor.

Description: For actuaries, finance and IT professionals, the long-duration targeted improvements (LDTI) implementation has been a career milestone. These projects were often the most significant undertaking of individuals’ careers, with respect to scale, complexity and duration. Join this session and participate in small groups, with consideration given to ensure each group has representation from both 2023 and 2025 filers., with moderators presenting questions to encourage small group discussion.

Description: How do you go about designing a new product? Behavioral Science is an often overlooked tool in enhancing product design and using a Discrete Choice Experiment (DCE) can give you insights to customer preferences and their willingness to pay for features. The result of this work is a product explicitly designed with your customers and market in mind.

Description: Leveraging the research papers "Emerging Technologies and their Impact on Actuarial Science and Top Actuarial Technologies," the presenters of this session will highlight current and emerging actuarial technology trends, discuss how these trends will impact the day-to-day work of actuaries, and explain what actuaries can do to adapt.

Description: Eager to learn more about what an InsurTech is, how they operate in the insurance ecosystem and how actuaries can participate in this ecosystem? Join actuaries, InsurTechs and participants in the ecosystem to discuss the recent research report on InsurTechs by the SOA. At the conclusion of the session, attendees will be able to: • Know more about InsurTechs and how they operate • Understand how insurers work with InsurTechs • Discover how actuaries can participate in this ecosystem • Learn practical lessons from both InsurTechs and actuaries This session is presented by the Entrepreneurial & Innovation Section.

Description: 2021 ImpACT Conference - Session 4C: Technological Barbarians at the Gate: Learning from Upheaval in Other Industries 10.26.21 Recording

Description: Is your development team or IT staff growing tired of last-minute requests to include additional functionality? Have you strained to explain challenging actuarial topics to non-actuarial staff for implementation? Do your teams find themselves revisiting deadlines & timelines when building solutions? During this interactive panel discussion, three technologists (two software engineering managers and one data scientist) along with three actuaries will discuss real world problems and approaches using experience from previous projects. Although the challenge of running efficient software teams is not unique to actuarial science, this webcast will discuss best practices on how to organize teams to reduce friction and context switching. Presenters will also explore unique actuarial challenges and concepts including how to address standards on data quality when building software, how to build intuitive software that meets actuarial standards and how test-driven development makes it easier to meet actuarial standards of practice.

Description: Level funded products often target the small group market (2-50) and can result in many manual and tedious processes for underwriting to perform risk assessment. Learn how a carrier used technology to help automate risk assessment without the need for paper medical questionnaires, and exposed a risk engine for broker quoting to enable near real-time of pricing for risk-based products. The approach reduced labor and allowed underwriting to focus solely on fallout cases while also improving pricing consistency. Discuss broader trends in the health market for risk assessment, including new machine learning cost predictions that can be used for automation and better predictions of future costs. Discussion topics will include underwriting guidelines, business rules, risk scores, and machine learning. By attending this session, you will have a better idea of new trends in risk assessment for small groups where no claims experience is available. And, better understand business rules that are common in underwriting for flags for review as well as how risk scores and machine learning can be used during the underwriting process.

Description: Data visualization is a hot topic within the industry. This session will showcase business use cases of data visualization models to build, for example, a claims trend story from outlier analysis to root cause in real time. There are many different ways to assemble pie, bar, or other types of charts, but critically understanding the business questions and following visualization best practices can accelerate the pace of identification to actionable result. Additionally, moving up the analysis continuum from busy Excel files with thousands of numbers to automated Tableau dashboards highlighting only the most impactful numbers with full drill-in capabilities improves both efficiency and communication to non-technical audiences.