Description: Almost half of recent FDA approvals have been for orphan drugs. This trend is expected to continue in 2023. Orphan drugs are priced more than 30 times higher than non-orphan drugs, therefore their cost burden in aggregate has the potential to overwhelm the budgets of payers, especially that of smaller health plans. Hear how the cost impact analysis for smaller health plans require different considerations than for a larger health plan when modeling the impact of rare diseases.

Description: Reunite with members and non-members in the China actuarial community to discuss recent topics and related issues in areas such as macroeconomic sharing, IFRS 17, product strategy, cross-border communication and discussion, and more. Advance your career through learning and networking opportunities, and share your experiences in the finance and insurance industries, as well as other fields related to actuarial science.

Description: The Society of Actuaries (SOA), in a joint project with the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA) and the Canadian Institute of Actuaries (CIA), are creating research projects and education materials on Modeling and Management of Longevity Risk.

Description: Discover the rapidly developing health and wellness industry during the Use of Health and Wellness Data in L&H Risk Assessment webcast. Our discussion includes the maximization of data usage through several different means, including current risk selection, creation of a dynamic ongoing assessment offering or substitution of traditional underwriting information to shorten the underwriting process. Come explore these different approaches as they affect the health and wellness industry. We will express the importance of a constantly changing data usage environment in order to better prepare insurers to maximize their data and drive health and wellness forward.

Description: In this Determining Appropriate Sensitivity Tests webcast, explore sensitivity testing effectiveness, the important difference between sensitivity and stress testing and more. Understanding sensitivity testing is critical to actuarial work, especially in order to properly assess and evaluate risk factors. Come explore approached to sensitivity tests and effective evaluations of sensitivity test results in order to elevate your knowledge within the actuarial science field.

Description: Insurance carriers are continually challenging to innovate and evolve emerging underwriting toolswisely. A growing number of new tools continue to emerge. Uncover insights and gaina technical understanding on two models from validation studies recently conducted. Find out more information on ways to evaluate models for bias an fairness. Perspectives will be shared from both a direct carrier and reinsurance standpoint. By attending the session, you will: Gain more insight into emerging underwriting tools and methods to evaluate them.

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: In this article we examine the benefits and drawbacks of using a global surrogate of a black-box model. Are surrogates a comfortable middle ground that provide insurers high predictive power as well as model explainability?