Description: The academy generator is widely applied in actuarial practice. Initially confined to regulatory reserving, companies are increasingly using the AAA/SOA generator over an ever widening range of applications testing the limits of the academy generator's intended function. The session will give a brief overview of the academy generator and the asset classes it can be used to model. It will also analyze the statistical properties of the academy scenarios and discuss the scenarios relative to standard validation criterion. Some of the challenges that actuaries face in using this framework will be reviewed and options for addressing these challenges will be offered.

Description: Catastrophic insurance futures are being traded, albeit thinly, at the Chicago Board of Trade. This paper examines the broad context for trading insurance risk. The motivation for trading insurance risks, specifically to increase the capacity to cover risk, is discussed. From Securitization of Insurance Risk: The 1995 Bowles Symposium, M-FI97-1.

Description: This paper evaluates the current practice of operational risk management in the insurance sector. Operational risk is nothing new in insurance, but, because of regulatory requirements, companies have initiated computation of risk capital for their operational losses. The current effort to manage operational risk is not a naturally evolving phenomenon, and operational risk, in the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision’s Basel II definition, is unlikely to be a significant cause of insurers’ failure. In addition, the current Basel II definition of operational risk is not suitable for the insurance sector. Consequently, the invention of models and tools based on the definition is incomplete and illusionary. My findings are based on the analysis of dozens of interviews with insurance industry professionals. I demonstrate the way operational risk is quantified in practice, show that the result obtained from this computation is of littl e use in managerial decision making and propose a set of policy recommendations illustrating the characteristics of operational risk in insurance. This study can be used as a platform for launching dialogues to initiate fresh thinking about operational risk in insurance beyond the current artificial and narrow boundaries.

Description: 1999 SOA Annual Meeting, San Francisco. This panel expanded on earlier research to examine the potential costs of long-term guarantees, transfer risk modeling techniques, and the formulation of practical strategies to manage investment accumulation products.

Description: Discusses the optimal consumption strategy in the presence of default risk. It highlights the Regime-Switching model, which indicates that the market situation may change and the distribution of an asset's return will change over time.

Description: This article highlights the significant steps being taken by the UK actuarial profession to establish a more focused role in risk management.

Description: This research paper explores an insurer's surplus needs and its cost of equity capital for mutual life insurance companies.

Description: We derive formulas for calculating the premiums that should be charged on policies in a discounted cash flow model with tax reserves and required assets that are determined by regulation. We also determine the unique division of required assets into “reserves” and “capital” that allows the product profitability to be correctly evaluated. That is, the profit after capital charges is zero if the product achieves the return assumed in pricing. We illustrate the concepts using whole life insurance and guaranteed minimum death benefit examples.

Description: This paper examines the financial management of assets backing a Guaranteed Investment Contract [GIC] portfolio. Immunization and dedication have been the traditional approaches used in financial management. Using interest rate futures in pricing and in balancing the asset portfolio duration is presented as one more variation of traditional immunization. From Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1985, Vol. 37.

Description: This is a compilation or risk management terms garnered from a survey of risk professionals supplemented with analysis of firm-level information on significant risks as reported in 10-K financial statements. Results indicate the existence of significance differences in terminology. The dominating pattern observed is a dichotomy between internal and external perceptions. Also observed is a difference between terms used by actuarial professionals and traditional risk managers.