Description: Session 9B: Actuaries and Technology: Perspectives on Actuarial Workflow Automation The life insurance industry has experienced unprecedented growth in modernization efforts, with special attention paid to automating actuarial workflows. Companies are creating processes that are more scalable and maintainable, helping actuaries meet strict deadlines and deliver meaningful information to stakeholders. Discuss practical examples of automation, potential compositions of the modern actuarial toolkit, and different ways actuaries and technology teams interact during implementation and production states. Examine how automation can help actuarial teams shift from a quarterly to a monthly valuation process by overcoming challenges in traditional actuarial processes-long run times, the need for highly specialized legacy software skills, and inadequate control. Shifting to a monthly schedule can increase alignment on company objectives, deepen insurers' understanding of their business, and improve strategic decision-making. Leave with new ways of thinking about technology, from day-to-day best practices to full-scale actuarial transformation. By attending the session, you will: - Explain and understand the benefits of automating actuarial workflows with the purpose of operating on a monthly, rather than quarterly basis. - Describe the categories and purposes of several kinds of automation and supporting tools that might be used to accomplish this. - Understand different actuarial IT operating models and consider the application of such strategies at your organization. - Identify best practices for implementing automation based on the presented case studies.

Description: Volatile interest rates, repositioned investment portfolios, and stress in the banking sector are driving insurers to manage market risk and counterparty credit risk. Our experts in investments, derivatives, and hedge accounting will discuss this new market environment and its impact on hedging. The conversation will include practical case studies, including hedging future bond purchases, hedging floating-rate CLOs, and counterparty credit risk management.

Description: Open source programming languages have become a common part of the actuarial toolkit over the years. Using tools like R and Python, highly technical actuaries can automate onerous processes, easily work with massive amounts of data, create models and generate reports. Although these tools excel at turbo-charging analysts, it can be difficult for benefits to inure to the rest of the organization given the learning curve (“Can’t you just put this in Excel?”), control risks (“So your entire process could break overnight if some random person in Nebraska changes something?”), and internal IT environments. Listen in on a panel discussion where presenters share their personal stories of working with open source in a production setting. Hear about real world business problems, how open source tools were used, what risks were present, how they were overcome and the final business result.

Description: Electronic health records (EHRs) are one of the fastest-growing digital health data categories, with over 90% of carriers using or evaluating EHRs for underwriting, according to a recent Munich Re survey. This session brings you up to speed on the current (and future) state of EHRs.

Description: The famous 80/20 rule in data science states that only 20% of your time working with data is spent driving insightful business analytics. The rest of your time is spent trying to query, clean and organize your data. Even with this knowledge, the majority of actuarial training/focus is on the 20 percent. This session takes a different approach, focusing solely on speeding up your work on the other 80 percent. Practical examples will be part of a code walkthrough in R.

Description: Data science, predictive analytics and AI are certainly the buzzwords these days. They are heavily used and developed in underwriting and marketing but for most actuaries, they might/may as well be science fiction. The presenters will demonstrate how a normal actuary can utilize data science techniques in their daily job function without forming an official data science team within a company. It can be done in a gradual fashion so that normal business is not disrupted and improvements are made over time. The usage of data science techniques will include demonstrations of the following areas: - Regression analysis - Economic scenario generator - Experience study - Data quality checks - Inforce compression for explicit hedging

Description: Last year, the COVID pandemic significantly increased the pace of change in the life insurance industry, particularly in Accelerated Underwriting (AU). In the past, underwriting process changes occurred relatively infrequently and over a matter of years. Now, with new data sources and predictive models constantly evolving, the frequency of underwriting enhancements and decisioning changes, particularly in AU programs, is occurring every few months. With so much change occurring quickly, how can a company effectively monitor and understand the effects of these changes to make continuous adjustments with confidence and agility? Well-designed data visualizations allow a reviewer to navigate and comprehend detailed results quickly because our brains can process data in a picture format more than 15 times faster than text. Today’s advanced BI tools can make AU program monitoring more efficient and help companies adjust quickly to the results from program changes.

Description: Learn more about the predictive modeling that was applied to industry data for the lapse and mortality experience in the post-level term period. Novel approaches were taken to model the shock lapse, subsequent lapse, and mortality experience. Observe a demonstration of the Tableau tool, which was built to allow users to analyze data on their own.

Description: Every patient leaving the hospital has personal life-context circumstances that impact their chances of successful recovery and complications can be costly. Complex care management impacts over 50 percent of health care spend, with the admitted commercial population driving 37 percent of spend or $177M per 100,000 lives and the Medicare population driving 53 percent of spend or $600 million per 100,000 lives. The stakes are high, but existing care management solutions are mostly clinical and navigation call centers provide fragmented and outdated patient management systems, and do not address individual life-context. Discharged patients therefore remain underengaged and undercompliant, leading to costly complications. Innovative technology can help enable and integrate systems and existing infrastructure to leverage evidence-based contextualized care that will enhance care management, improve efficiency, and drive a better experience and outcomes for patients. This technology helps codifies life context, dynamically stratifying and engaging members digitally and telephonically helping virtual care teams to be more effective and efficient. In a recent randomized clinical trial, this technology and approach has shown a 50 percent reduction in the total cost of care, cutting the average and total cost of readmission, increasing virtual care team impact and member engagement and trust.

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.