Description: Summary of industry practices on assumption governance, trend, challenges, and opportunities.

Description: The first preliminary results on international experience studies on mortality and persistency for the pilot countries of Taiwan, Mexico and South Korea are discussed and future expansion of the studies are explained.

Description: Description of methods for extracting and reformatting the existing mortality tables using R. Methods and formats for storage are discussed in the second article. Intent is to generate discussion regarding the format of our stored mortality tables. Value is in the demonstration of task automation in R and in the reduction of duplicate work across companies related to reformatting tables.

Description: In this article, the author comments about an exposure draft of a proposed revision of Actuarial Standard of Practice 23 dealing with data quality.

Description: Actuaries can empower their understanding of policyholder behavior with third party data. Modeling policyholder behavior should start from developing knowledge of who they are, instead of actuaries assuming what a rational behavior should be.

Description: This is an article about The SOA’s Committee on Life Insurance Company Expenses CLICE and its completion of its fourth inter-company study of expenses for individual life and annuity business issued in the United States.

Description: Highlights from the 2002 Inter-Company Expense Study of U.S. Individual Life Insurance and Annuities.

Description: An announcement of the roster of the newly reconvened Health Section Research Committee, and an invitation to propose, participate in, and read about the committee's projects. informal RFP to solicit research project ideas, invitationto join project oversight groups and

Description: This article provides a very high level overview of accelerated underwriting programs and their history in the US marketplace. It then discusses setting up an actuarial control cycle for such products and some items related to risk management that are helpful in this setting. Pros and cons of retrospective studies, random holdouts, targeted holdouts and post issue analysis are discussed. A mathematical example of how to estimate the mortality impact of such programs from early emerging experience is provided.

Description: The SOA has developed a new “tool” using Microsoft Access/Excel for international actuaries to conduct mortality and persistency studies in conjunction with the SOA’s international experience study initiative. Professionally programmed, this new tool facilitates the work of international actuaries.