Description: Many SOA members are familiar with the Actuaries' Climate Index, the result of an early and critical effort by North American actuarial organizations to grapple with the impact of climate change on our constituents. But did you know that the SOA continues to produce research on the nexus of environmental issues and the actuarial profession? And did you know that under its Strategic Research Program Initiative, the SOA has elevated its commitment to research through the development of a Climate and Catastrophe research program?

Description: Over the last few years, many direct companies have started inforce management programs and are now navigating what actions can be taken to optimize the business. At the same time, the legal, compliance, and regulatory environments are also changing. The presenters will explore the development and implementation of programs such as changing non-guaranteed elements or efforts to improve experience while considering the changing compliance environment, including New York Regulation 210, ASOP2 and litigation challenges.

Description: The actuarial profession is marching into the age of Big Data. Increasingly, employers in various actuarial fields are requiring new hires to have sophisticated knowledge in statistics and data science. To meet the new demands from the industry and the profession, one of the key additions to the SOA’s new curriculum is an exam in Statistics for Risk Modeling (SRM) which includes modern statistical and data science techniques. There is also a new proctored project on Predictive Analytics, as a capstone requirement following the completion of the SRM Exam. At the University of Toronto, we recently underwent a major actuarial science curriculum redesign, in order to stay current with new trends and demand from the profession and in line with the new professional curriculum.

Description: Traditionally the SOA formulates pedagogic excellence in terms of the Marzano Taxonomy. For example, the "analysis level" consisting of generalization, specification, classification, contrast, matching, and error identification, is considered superior to the "retrieval level" consisting of rote memorization such as recognition, recall, and using. In this presentation, we first show that pedagogic excellence can be equivalently, but more simply, formulated in terms of executive function and goal-setting. Here executive function refers to problems requiring multiple mental modalities - such as, formal, verbal, computational, and graphical - for their solution. Goal-setting refers to the skillful breakup of a complex problem into a sequence of subgoals each of which is clearly formulated, challenging, but achievable timely. Light examples from the literature illustrate these concepts. Five "challenging FM problems": reinvestment, refinancing, multiple rate/deposit problems, pricing deferred bonds using a term structure, and obscure loan problems, illustrate the following fundamental techniques of goal-setting and executive function: i) a fellowship approach to teaching preliminary exam material, ii) using subgoals to give difficult homework, iii) alternating between different mental modalities to achieve elegant brevity in solutions, iv) goal-setting reflecting familiar vs. new, and v) skillful definition of unit subgoals.

Description: Forming a view on what the tail looks like for various risk factors involves both technical know-how and considerable judgment. The presenters focus on what needs to be addressed when setting financial market risk and insurance risk assumptions, in particular when assessing the question of diversification and the treatment of tail dependencies between risks and lines of business: