Description: Initiated by the Financial Reporting Section, this paper explores rising interest rates. Following this path, the paper will look at implications of interest rate changes for the life insurance industry, current stress testing practices, and how a risk manager can proactively prepare for an uncertain future. A paper published in 2014 focused on why rates could stay low, and some aspects of this paper are similar (e.g., description of insurance products). This paper also uses a sample model office to help practitioners look at their own exposures. It includes typical interest-sensitive insurance products and how they might perform across various scenarios, as well as a survey to establish current practices for how insurers are testing interest rate risk currently.

Description: This report summarizes the results of a 2022 survey examining mortality improvement practices of life and annuity companies in the U.S. and Canada.

Description: Non-guaranteed elements are parameters of life insurance and annuity polices that are not fixed when the policy is issued but may be changed from time to time by the insurance company.

Description: Non-guaranteed elements are parameters of life insurance and annuity polices that are not fixed when the policy is issued but may be changed from time to time by the insurance company. They emerged in the United States and other countries as features of Universal Life and similar products designed to make insurance more competitive in an environment where fully guaranteed products did not have sufficient flexibility to respond to rapidly changing conditions. This overview covers professional guidance, regulations and practical issues with reviewing and revising non-guaranteed parameters.

Description: This appendix II Report on the Life and Annuity Living Benefits Survey provides supplemental information for the Report on Life and Annuity Living Benefit Riders: Considerations for Insurers and Resinsurers. Appendix A gives a list of 34 participants and Appendix B provides a glossary of terms used in the report. The report utilizes a literature review, company survey, company interviews and/or other methods to catalog a listing of common living benefit riders. It was sponsored by the Product Development and Reinsurance Sections along with the Committee on Life Insurance Research.

Description: This report is a summary based on current actuarial practices around the development and use of policyholder behavior assumptions including the use of dynamic modeling approaches. The research team surveyed and evaluated current practices in the industry; and highlighted current thinking on modeling human behaviors outside the life insurance industry. This project was sponsored by the SOA’s Financial Reporting Section and the Committee on Life Insurance Research.

Description: This overview shows considerations for consumers when reviewing the Life and Annuity Living Benefit Riders study.

Description: This report utilizes a literature review, company survey, company interviews and/or other methods to catalog a listing of common living benefit riders. It was sponsored by the Product Development and Reinsurance Sections along with the Committee on Life Insurance Research. This paper has several goals in relation to each living benefit rider type: to define various living benefit riders, to provide historical sales data and general filing requirements, to explore how underwriting and administration is handled, and to comment briefly on the overall level of claims activity experienced thus far compared to pricing expectations. In addition, it includes a review of the direct and reinsurance pricing implications of the riders to the extent they impact policyholder optionality and base plan financial characteristics. This paper includes perspectives developed through the experience of the authors, and includes executive summaries of a survey conducted by the SOA and Milliman of 34 direct writers, and interviews that Milliman conducted with 8 reinsurers.

Description: This discussion looks at steps insurance companies take to regain a greater share of the available savings dollars, developing trends toward a separation of the insurance and investment elements of life insurance contracts, as wells a the feasibility to make endowment and other investment-type contracts more attractive by reduction or redistribution of first year expenses.

Description: The Society of Actuaries and LIMRA have sponsored a Variable Annuity Guaranteed Living Benefit Utilization Study. This study is an annual update of earlier investigations conducted since 2006.