Description: Book review of A Whack on the Side of the Head, which has lots of ideas for thinking creatively.

Description: Feature article discussing the impact of health care reform on the direct insurance market and the reinsurance market.

Description: New regulation that substantially modifies the Argentine reinsurance market, favoring the larger international reinsurers.

Description: Discussion and Opinion on how randomness affects measurement of provider contracting risk-sharing agreements

Description: This addresses the changing role for property-casualty actuaries as companies are looking toward actuaries to play a bigger role in moving the business forward.

Description: In 1986, the Society of Actuaries identified a number of external trends that could have a substantial impact on future retirement patterns. An analysis of demographic trends clearly indicated that more people would be reaching older ages and that they would live longer.

Description: An Overview of Stochastic Simulation modeling techniques and usages

Description: This article provides a summary of the research paper and Excel-based tool that can be found on the SOA’s website at Regulatory Capital Adequacy for Life Insurance Companies: A Comparison of Four Jurisdictions | SOA.

Description: Duration matching is a risk management strategy, commonly used in the insurance industry, where the duration (price sensitivity to a yield curve movement) of an asset portfolio is adjusted to be made equal to the duration of the liability. However, this approach has flaws. In this essay, I note some key failures of duration matching and offer a potential alternative.

Description: This article looks at how the underwriting process has transformed from a paper process to become fully online. Not only has the process been digitized, there has been various innovations incorporating technology thus enabling large volume process automation, better customer experience as well as higher closing ratio. Other than improvement on speed and efficiency, various smart solutions are being explored to refine risk management through data mining and analysis of underwriting data.