Description: In 2018, the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) adopted significant revisions to the U.S. GAAP insurance accounting literature, via Accounting Standards Update (ASU) 2018-12. The title of ASU 2018-12 is “Targeted Improvements to the Accounting for Long-Duration Contracts,” and as a result, a common acronym for ASU 2018-12 is LDTI (long-duration targeted improvements).

Description: In 2018, the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) adopted significant revisions to the U.S. GAAP insurance accounting literature, via Accounting Standards Update (ASU) 2018-12. The title of ASU 2018-12 is “Targeted Improvements to the Accounting for Long-Duration Contracts,” and as a result a common acronym for ASU 2018-12 is LDTI (long-duration targeted improvements).

Description: As an addendum to a July 2022 article, this article restates the formulas then presented for a framework to measure the reinsured portion of a direct loss from capping a net premium ratio or flooring a liability. The article corrects a flaw in one of the original formulas and shows, by example, how the framework can be applied to a specific application of reinsurance accounting.

Description: In this article, we collected data from the companies’ roll-forward disclosures related to calendar years 2021 and 2022 on Market Risk Benefit and shared a high-level summary of the Market Risk Benefit volatility that a focus group of companies incurred and summarized the most common ways to mitigate volatility.

Description: Performance measurement is not the primary purpose of either GAAP or statutory accounting. This article discusses alternative methods of reporting used by life insurance companies to better measure financial performance.

Description: This is the first in a series of articles about accounting for reinsurance under GAAP Targeted Improvements to the Accounting for Long-Duration Contracts (LDTI). It provides an introduction to the topic, giving an overview of what has and hasn't changed. Changes include a few that directly address reinsurance and others that indirectly result from changes to direct accounting and the existing ties between reinsurance and direct accounting.

Description: The actuarial profession is faced with a problem of determining delta-ized reserves on a basis which will include appropriate provision for adverse deviations in mortality, lapses, interest rates, and expense rates. This paper describes briefly a method which could be used to solve this Followed by papers submitted by 2 authors problem in a flexible manner.

Description: This article highlights the fact that new requirements for disclosure of average liability duration and interest rates could lead to diversity in practice. It also recognizes that elements of the new disclosure requirements will enable financial statement users to perform their own crude estimates of these averages in ways that could help them to better understand the liabilities and to compare companies using consistent methods. Finally, the article describes how companies might also find value in such crude estimates.

Description: Baseline and "what if"/stressed projections of cash flows, financial statements and capital requirements are critical inputs for a range of business purposes: forecasts, risk management, liquidity management, strategic decision making, etc. Forward-looking projections have historically been inefficient and were performed in silos, making it difficult to scale the process as CFOs and CROs ask for more. The presenters discuss challenges of the forecast process and opportunities to meet desired future capabilities. They will also discuss "what if" analysis and ways to support production of forward-looking projections for "what if" analysis in an efficient way.

Description: This article describes a simple but powerful tool for use by valuation actuaries and auditors when evaluating current assumptions for use in GAAP net premium reserve methods that require retrospective updating for actual experience and assumption changes. As a supplement, this tool can fill some holes left by existing tools. It produces results that can be compared to materiality thresholds at any level of aggregation, from a single reserve cohort up to the combination of all cohorts for all products subject to retrospective net premium reserve requirements. It can also serve as a benchmarking tool for estimated the possible effects of an assumption change or to help in explaining the effects of an actual assumption change.