Description: The February/March 2014 edition of The Actuary magazine—the Society of Actuaries’ flagship publication.

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.

Description: This article is the first installment of a three-part series that aims to provide an overview of ESGs and will focus on the general motivation for stochastic modeling, its advantages and its limitations. Future articles will further break down the key factors of ESGs and the application of these factors to better understand the Academy Interest Rate Generator (AIRG).

Description: After 23 years, the new guidelines for insurance contracts have been released, which describe life insurance economic behavior and show its operating results in an unprecedented and complex accounting language. The management of the insurance industry, as well as accounting and actuarial professionals, will face new challenges. This speech started from the basic logic of accounting and the framework of the standards, combined with the insurance industry's operating rules and accounting characteristics, to illustrate the orientation of the new insurance contract standards. From the internal and external perspectives of life insurance operation, this paper used common management language to discuss the understanding of the new insurance contract standards, the focus issues of the industry and the key issue of the effective implementation of the new standards -- the deep integration of accounting and actuarial.

Description: The proposed revisions to the variable annuity statutory framework and the FASB targeted improvement for long duration contract, motivate life insurance companies to re-evaluate their hedging strategy. Recently proposed revisions of AG 43/VM-21 and C3 Phase II, reward companies that have a clearly defined hedging strategy, if the companies can demonstrate that the valuation model and capital model can estimate real hedge performance accurately. The speakers of this session will discuss the hedging implication of the proposed AG 43/VM-21 and C3 Phase II framework. Additionally, methodology computational requirements, back-testing results under different economic scenarios and the resulting hedge credits of different hedging strategies will be compared, including explicit dynamic hedge and implicit dynamic hedge. The speakers will also touch on the impact of rebalance frequency on the performance of dynamic hedge. Case studies will be presented to provide guidance on practical implementation.

Description: In recent years, China's aging population is worsening, the fertility rate is decreasing year by year, the dependency ratio is increasing day by day, the people's diversified pension needs are increasing day by day. In order to actively participate in the construction of multi-level and multi-pillar pension insurance system, steadily promote the reform and development of pension finance, and serve the people's diversified pension needs, commercial pension insurance, as the third pillar, is in urgent need of rapid development. This speech analyzed the future prospect and strategic position of pension from three dimensions of industry development, company development and continuous demand of customers. It also discussed how to develop the third pillar pension insurance rapidly from three aspects: national policy, individual pension consciousness and channel cognition.

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.

Description: This chapter focuses on creating practical models that aid in the prediction of the risk of readmission to a specific hospital within 30 days of discharge for Medicare patients, to aid in the identification and stratification of at-risk patients for hospitals considering building an intervention program in a cost-effective manner. For readers who wish to develop their own predictive model, a dataset is provided on the Actexmadriver.com website, and R code is provided in the appendix to this chapter.

Description: This article, Spreadsheet Controls Add Risk Resilience, spotlights why spreadsheets have stood the test of time and how they help contribute to an actuary’s success. It also discusses common causes of data integrity issues relative to spreadsheets. And, offers insight into controls that can be utilized to helps actuaries solve these issues and ensure the accuracy and consistency of the data on which they base their analysis.

Description: This article describes how to externalize code of Moody's Axis platform to Visual Studio, so that all the actuarial calculation code run through corporate DevOps pipeline. This article gives specific examples of the author has used in his job to accomplish automated model governance.