Description: The Actuarial Innovation and Technology Steering Committee of the Society of Actuaries is sponsoring this competition to encourage contestants to find innovative usages for data visualization software. This contest seeks to give actuaries and non-actuaries the chance to showcase their ability to tell a story by creating data visualizations for one of two standard datasets that have been created for this purpose.

Description: The Society of Actuaries released research in 2007, performed by Jim Toole, that develops a model for a U.S. individual life insurance company to consider its potential liability exposure as a result of a pandemic. Sponsored by the Mortality and Longevity Strategic Research Program Steering Committee, this paper updates several model assumptions including mortality in light of COVID-19.

Description: The Society of Actuaries (SOA) published its first COVID-19 research brief on March 10, 2020, followed by regular updates and expansions through June 12, 2020. The comprehensive report included a section of statistics that highlight the pandemic’s impact on economies in the U.S. and Canada. This report shows updates through September 30, 2020, to selected graphs from the Economic and Asset Impact section of the comprehensive report.

Description: This report is prepared to provide a comprehensive overview of the professional financial advice industry including the strengths and weaknesses of currently available approaches to providing (and receiving) financial advice, particularly as part of an employer-sponsored employee benefit. Financial advice is broadly defined to include traditional methods as well as alternative methods to providing personalized guidance. This report is also designed to provide guidance for retirement plan sponsors in making decisions regarding the role, scope, and delivery models of financial advice to plan participants. As appropriate, the report differentiates between investment advice, which includes investment management and asset accumulation decisions, and retirement advice, which includes retirement preparation, security, and planning decisions, and is built upon a thorough understanding of an individual’s personal values and goals. Rather than provide an actionable list for plan sponsors to implement, this report is designed to raise awareness of the issues that are worth considering.

Description: This paper is intended to be a resource for actuaries and other professionals interested in learning more about longevity risk. It summarizes the results of the literature review by discussing observed trends and outlook on mortality, development of retirement markets, ways to mitigate risk, summary of products with risk exposure and quantification and management of the risk.

Description: Describes substandard annuities and discusses the market opportunity for them, the associated risk management issues, and the issues companies need to address when competing in the substandard annuity market - underwriting, pricing, sales, administration, financial reporting and risk management practices.

Description: Survey results for 2008 produced by the Policyholder Behavior in the Tail Risk Management Section Working Group in which insurers were asked about assumptions used with respect to policyholder behavior in universal life policies with secondary guarantees.

Description: This report identifies and reviews relevant literature with respect to the valuation of private placement debt [PPD] and real estate, develops a case study examining the effectiveness of an actuarial valuation methods for PPD, and proposes guidelines regarding the valuation of illiquid assets.

Description: The purpose of this analysis is to provide a practical set of changes to the incidence rate modifiers of the 2013 Individual Disability Income Valuation Table to reflect recent industry individual disability income (IDI) claim experience trends from 2005 through 2015. The goal is to have resulting 2005-2015 experience-based incidence modifiers in a workable format to facilitate its use.

Description: This report was prepared to provide an overview of pension risk transfer for use in the educational curriculum of the Society of Actuaries. It presents general principles and highlights major differences between Canada and the U.S. from a life insurer’s perspective. The focus is on group annuities, which are the most common solution for pension risk transfer.