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

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

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: 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: From a session at a meeting of the Society of Actuaries held in San Diego, CA, June 22-23, 2000 This session provided an update on the progress of the American Academy of Actuaries task force charged with developing a long-term strategic approach for marketing the profession to future users of actuarial services and to strategically position and strengthen the profession.

Description: The author proposes an annuity clearinghouse to encourage employers to offer annuity accumulation products in their defined contribution plans. This addresses the lack of portability that is associated with, and discourages the use of, defined contribution plans.

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

Description: The NAIC has adopted revised VM-21 and AG43 for variable annuities, effective Jan. 1, 2020. The panel of presenters will provide background and an overview of the revisions, discuss detailed aspects of the new CTE Amount Standard Projection and prescribed assumptions, as well as discuss implementation considerations and the implications to hedging. In addition, the panelists will share progress on VM-23, principle-based reserves for non-variable annuities.