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: Feature article from the newsletter Product Matters discussing variable annuities and principle-based approaches to reserve and capital requirements.

Description: Panelists provide background and updates on a number of statutory issues relating to life and annuity products, including statutory codification implementation, Actuarial Guideline MMMM, Actuarial Guideline AXXX and implications of the movement to the 2001 CSO table. Changes to federal reporting requirements, through the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, are briefly discussed relative to the recent accounting problems in the news. From the 2002 Record of Society of Actuaries, Volume 28, No. 3. Session 78OF of the Boston Annual Meeting.

Description: New Zealand is about to launch its first variable annuity with guaranteed lifetime withdrawal benefits. The product design is mindful of the lessons from the financial crisis in the United States, Europe and Japan.

Description: This paper demonstrates that extreme value theory (EVT) can be used as a tool to model policyholder behavior in the extreme tail. This paper applies EVT to the study of variable annuity dynamic lapse behavior in the extreme tail. It illustrates a process whereby a company can fully model policyholder behavior, including the extreme tail, with existing data. No judgment about the extremal behavior is necessary.

Description: An exploration of drivers, cohorts and dynamics for policyholder behavior for VA and FIA based on industry experience data, including changes in recent years and the emergence of long-term data in key areas. We will also discuss critical elements to developing a sustainable and coherent framework to translate this complex experience data into assumption models.