Description: The Life Meeting, is the result of combining the Life & Annuity Symposium (LAS) and the Valuation Actuarial Symposium (ValAct). The Life Meeting will offer sessions specific to pricing and valuation as well as sessions on emerging issues relevant to both groups. These common themes include InsurTech, diversity, accounting change and the current economic environment.

Description: This year’s Life Meeting was unable to take place in person as planned in New York City. We are looking forward to the Life Meeting returning to New York City in 2024!

Description: While the major market crash subsequent to the widespread contagion of the COVID-19 virus was readily predictable, the rapid recovery and ongoing growth subsequent to it was not. Market dynamics around the recovery resist characterization by most traditional analytical approaches. In examining the circumstances around the emergence of a large retail class of investors, one sees that ingrained human tendencies, particularly optimism bias, have fueled much investor behavior responsible for the recovery. Understanding this makes it possible to predict potential future crashes and develop behavioral interventions for subsequent market recoveries.

Description: Many retirement actuaries have experience developing, implementing, and monitoring Liability Driven Investing (LDI) strategies for plan sponsors. These strategies typically involve modifying a plan’s investment strategy to remove a significant portion of the investment and interest rate risk now or at some point in the future when specific triggers are met. The tactics often involve the use of fixed income assets to cash flow and/or duration match the liabilities. In the spirit of helping actuaries expand their roles in an evolving defined contribution world, this article explores the application of LDI and derisking strategies within defined contribution and individual retirement accounts. The economic theory behind this approach is called the lifecycle hypothesis, or lifecycle finance. The benefits of the lifecycle finance method are that it provides a safe approach to save for retirement and a secure source of floor income during retirement. Similar to pension plans, each individual has his or her own idiosyncratic needs, wants, and risks that should be considered. Actuaries are uniquely situated to help defined contribution plan sponsors, individuals, and even themselves implement the lifecycle finance approach by developing and distributing tools and methods that focus on income (rather than wealth), LDI strategies, and personalization.

Description: This article is part of a 2 part series on real options analysis (ROA). Before you can understand the limitations of ROA, you must first understand the difference between risk and uncertainty. This article goes into detail explaining the vast differences between the two phenomena.

Description: After more than a decade of a prolonged low interest rate environment, long-term Treasury rates have started to increase with higher volatility. While it is generally agreed that a modest increase in interest rates and inflation is beneficial to the life insurance industry, interest rate risk remains a significant challenge for life insurance industry to manage its long duration liabilities, especially under volatile interest rate environments. Learn how to proactively manage interest rate risk and improve capital efficiency through the cash flow based strategic asset allocation (SAA) framework. Discover practical examples of how to combine asset allocation with derivatives to manage tail risk and liability convexity.

Description: This article provides an overview of behavioral economic theory as it relates to health and welfare insurance plans and provides summaries of two sample applications of the theories: enrollment in health insurance exchanges created by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and product design considerations in light of vast health illiteracy.

Description: Learn how modernization of data, models, and technology are influencing workflows. This webcast will address how workflows are changing in response to new regulatory requirements and the impacts the changes have on modeling and end-to-end future state operating models. Industry leading actuaries will discuss: How team collaboration can increase quality and speed of reporting to internal and external stakeholders How to strengthen controls and compliance frameworks across finance and actuarial departments How to modernize actuarial input/output for strategic analysis and insights How to attract and retain top talent by improving opportunities for actuaries There will also be dedicated time to ask questions of those who have made the transition.

Description: Risk management techniques do not include system science. System science requires that the uncertainty of the world is incorporated into the results. The articles explains the difference between risk and uncertainty. Learn how risk practices create an overoptimistic view of future outcomes.