Description: Notes the seminars were almost totally revamped this year with a focus on developments towards Phase II of IFRS. These were held in Hong Kong, Manila and Taipei.

Description: Overview of developments leading to IFRS accounting standard IFRS 17.

Description: An update on the Capital Market Assumptions used for asset allocation maybe useful to actuaries given the parallels with the assumptions an actuary uses to measure plan obligations.

Description: Addresses U.K. actuarial discussion regarding “maturity guarantees”, i.e., the reserves necessary to support promises contained in investment-linked contracts.

Description: In this article, we will analyze the recent value investing experience in the Canadian equity market, determine the main macroeconomic variables that drove the value cycle performance in that period, and draw some conclusions about the benefits of style rotation between value- and growth-oriented styles in the management of an investment portfolio.

Description: A discussion of life insurance securitizations and how they can be structured to provide surplus relief associated with onerous reserve requirements.

Description: Comments from Eric Friedman on the paper by David J. Kehler that examines some of the underlying issues associated with public pension plan benefits and financing. It reviews concerns related to intergenerational equity and problems in maintaining the funded status of public DB retirement plans.

Description: Authors’ response to comments by Ryan Labs Asset Management on paper by James J. Rizzo Krzysztof M. Ostaszewski Piotr Krekora.

Description: Comments by Ryan Labs Asset Management on paper by James J. Rizzo Krzysztof M. Ostaszewski Piotr Krekora.

Description: Insurance regulations are undergoing a paradigm shift in determining capital and reserves. With Solvency II in Europe and principle-based reserving in the United States, the old formula-based static approach is being replaced or supplemented by a principle-based dynamic method. This change requires enhanced modeling, stochastic simulation and sensitivity analysis, which pose challenges to insurers whose infrastructure has not been built for big computation. This paper introduces a method of building complicated models with small reusable modules and running them on a many-task computing platform to achieve high performance with simplicity. The paper presents an example of a term life insurance model built to take advantage of computer hardware for parallel computing at the task level.