Description: This article discusses how insurers that focus on their core competencies and astutely outsource other functions will become more competitive and improve their performance.

Description: This report studies the various benchmarks for analyzing the option-adjusted spreads of the major fixed income asset classes of life insurance companies. In addition, this report analyzes the historical benchmark performance against default rates for the asset class being benchmarked.

Description: Panelists at this session of the SOA 2003 Washington, DC Spring Meeting discuss how changes in interest rates affect the assets and liabilities of a life insurance company and what a company can do to prepare. This session examines historical trends in interest rates and how companies have reacted to both sudden and gradual changes.

Description: 1996 Valuation Actuary Symposium. In this teaching session on liability modeling, the panelists discussed the key aspects of identifying and gathering the data required to construct models, the model building process including objectives and considerations, and the modeling process from the standpoint of policyholder and company behaviors.

Description: This paper develops a new method of determining long-range interest rate assumptions. Followed by discussion papers submitted by 2 authors

Description: This paper explores the use of linear programming as a tool to guide policyholders in getting the most value out of their combined insurance and investment programs. Concentrating on flexible premium universal life within the tax environment of the United States, several linear programming models are developed that can be used at the point of sale, to select the most cost effective policy from those available in the marketplace, and after issue to maximize the present value of future cash flows on the policy of an insured who is in ill-health. From Actuarial Research Clearing House 1991, VOL. 3.

Description: This discussion, of the same topic previously published in Vol. 12, No. 32, deals primarily with the Canadian aspects of investment policies and inflation. From Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1960, Vol. 12, No. 33.

Description: This session at the SOA 1990 San Francisco Spring Meeting is about the various factors to be considered in determining the interest margins for interest-sensitive life insurance, annuities and GICs, i.e. the difference in earned and credited rates including practical considerations. Valuing embedded options in assets and liabilities is also discussed.

Description: This discussion focused on looking at the immediate uses of the 1951 Impairment Study for the smaller company, the use of new technology such as punch card machines in an effort to reduce cost, methods of budget procedure, use of interim financial reporting and attendant issues such as interim period reserve computations, and problems with underwriting, commission accounting, or conflict with interests of own agents when small companies accept business from agents or brokers of other companies.