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, indexed variable annuities, etc. 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 approach 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 with regard to the difficulty of risk management.

Description: This paper shows the mortality element can be partially isolated allowing an exact annuity value to be readily obtained at any interest rate. From the Actuarial Research Clearing House 1979, Vol.2.

Description: This paper highlights how the estimation procedure works in regards to annuities, including immediate life annuities.

Description: This article provides a short history of the correction procedures previously developed to address compliance failures and the shortcomings of those procedures under sections 101f and 7702, laying the foundation for a sea change in the correction process.

Description: An overview of guaranteed lifetime withdrawal benefits (GLWB) on registered index-linkedannuity (RILA) products and a stochastic analysis of market risks.

Description: Summary of recent surveys to life actuaries regarding assumptions surrounding policyholder behavior in the tail for universal life with secondary guarantees and minimum guarantees on variable annuities. This information is intended to examine and ultimately give guidance to actuaries on how to set policyholder assumptions in extreme scenarios.

Description: This paper applies the research in Prospect Theory of Kahneman and Tversky to explain why sales of annuities lag sales of life insurance products. The author theorizes that life insurance is easier to sell because customers perceive themselves to be in the domain of losses, while potential annuity customers perceive themselves to be in the domain of gains. Kahneman and Tversky showed us that people are mostly risk averse in the domain of gains and risk seeking in the domain of losses. Purchase of an annuity or life product is a risky investment. Customers will find it easier to take the risk in the life insurance domain of losses than the annuity domain of gains. The author then proposes a hybrid life annuity product that might address both mortality and longevity risk in one product that would allow both products to be more competitive than stand-alone products.

Description: Chairperson’s column describing activities the Product Development section has undertaken to date.

Description: In this article, we collected data from the companies’ roll-forward disclosures related to calendar years 2021 and 2022 on Market Risk Benefit and shared a high-level summary of the Market Risk Benefit volatility that a focus group of companies incurred and summarized the most common ways to mitigate volatility.

Description: Recently, there has been an increase in the product development of simplified issue products in the United States. In the past two years, Gen Re LifeHealth has reviewed over 40 such products, ranging from vanilla direct-marketed products to high-end single premium immediate annuity SPIA paid universal life products. From Small Talk Newsletter, June 2005, Issue No. 24.