Description: An overview of the articles in the November 2019 issue of The Modeling Platform, and a plea for submissions! Please! Send us articles!

Description: This article provides an overview of the commonly used structural credit risk modeling approach that is less familiar to the actuarial community.

Description: This article talks about the role that models played in the subprime meltdown and the subsequent crisis in the financial markets in general. The models failed to provide information about the magnitude of potential 'black swans'. Extreme Value Theory [EVT] is described as a potential solution to this error.

Description: Python has become the fastest-growing major programming language in the world. It has surged in popularity over the last decade, following the development of its industry-leading capabilities in data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence, and it is now one of the most globally popular and widely used languages. In this article, I discuss some of the reasons for its popularity and explain why many actuaries and insurers have started using Python.

Description: Life and annuity markets around the world have seen increasingly complex investment-combined products, including universal life, fixed indexed annuities, variable annuities with a wide variety of guaranteed benefits and indexed variable annuities. Insurance companies are facing unprecedented exposure to financial risks in addition to traditional mortality and longevity risks. The risk assessment and modeling for such complex designs by conventional methods often focus heavily on their market competitiveness and profitability. However, there seems to be a lack of quantifiable and systematic approaches to assess investment risks associated with investment combined products. The objective of the proposed work is to develop a framework for quantifying and analyzing various forms of contractual designs and showcase different techniques to assess the trade-off between competitive contractual designs and their practical implications regarding the difficulty of risk management.

Description: Article from The Actuary, December 1972 – volume 6 - Issue 10 provides a recap of The Society's Committee on Research and the Department of Statistics of the University of Waterloo jointly sponsored seventh annual Research Conferences. The topic, Time Series Analysis, covered the more recent advances in statistical analysis of time series, particularly in economic data.

Description: This article describes the financial modelers’ manifesto. Focus is on how difficult it is to model financial instruments when there is a human element involved.

Description: This article discusses the reliance the banking industry placed on sophisticated mathematical models.

Description: The author summaries several reports from the IBM Symposium on operations research techniques and their future outlook 1968.

Description: There is widespread acknowledgement in the insurance industry that cyber risk remains an untamed and seemingly ever-growing beast. It is also unique in the family of risk exposures faced by insurers in that it is both an emerging risk and an emerged risk. What are companies doing to keep on top of this risk? What are actuaries doing to contribute to cyber risk management, and what can we learn from other industries and disciplines?