Description: FASB's Statement of Financial Accounting Standards No. 97 contains wide-sweeping changes to the preparation of GAAP financials for insurance companies. The focus of this article will be on the ramifications of the interest rate FASB has decided to use to amortize deferred acquisition costs.

Description: In this article, we explore key insights from Oliver Wyman's 2020 Life PBR Emerging Practices Survey, which provides a broad industry perspective with more than 50 companies participating representing 95 percent of the individual life market (by written premium). Insights include the impact of PBR on reserves and profitability in addition to emerging practices related to product design, assumption development, and methodology decisions.

Description: The article discusses the continued popularity of indexed UL insurance and possible reasons why a company's actual indexed UL earnings may be below their original pricing expectations for the product. The article discusses several key items that may be the source of that underperformance (e.g., hedge ineffectiveness, policyholder behavior) and the need to monitor earnings and perform analyses to better understand those potential sources.

Description: 1988 Valuation Actuary Symposium. The speakers in this session addressed the relative volatility of participating whole life versus universal life and the annual-premium versus single- premium basis.

Description: This article is aimed to cover the following: 1) Provides an assessment of income volatility under Long Duration Targeted Improvements (LDTI) for several key types of long duration contracts along with select illustrations, and compares against those under current GAAP, 2) Discuss areas where accounting policies or methodologies can influence income volatility, and 3) Show how a company's management reporting can be adapted to help explain income variances under LDTI.

Description: 1988 Valuation Actuary Symposium. In this session the speaker described the attributes of a UL policy, how his company invested the cash that was built up, valuation of the product, modeling in general, the specific model structure for Universal Life, problems encountered in the modeling process, and some of the more interesting aspects of the results.