Description: 1994 SOA Spring Meeting, Orlando. This panel described the less obvious financial exposures and qualitative issues affecting an insurance company's financial strength. In addition, panelists discussed risk-based capital as a means of solvency assessment.

Description: 1993 SOA Spring Meeting, Boston. This session is about trends in life company impairments and insolvencies. Topics included: 1. Recent insolvencies - are there similar situations waiting to be discovered? 2. How meaningful are current financial statements? 3. What do rating agencies say? How much confidence is there in their ratings? 4. The role of cash-flow testing, AVR/IMR, and risk-based capital formulas.

Description: This session from the 1995 SOA New York Meeting covers securitization of insurance liabilities. Securitization of insurance risk is an alternative risk transfer other than reinsurance based on the idea that investors participate directly in the insurance risk. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Vol. 21, No. 2.

Description: This session from the 1995 SOA Boston Meeting covers the dollars-at-risk, or value at risk, system for risk management in the banking industry and the applicability of this system in the insurance industry. It also covers a practical example of using dollars-at-risk at an insurance company. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Vol. 21, No. 4b.

Description: Investment risk management has become a core competency of insurance companies, and much has been discussed on this topic. This session examines the current investment risk management practices such as product line specific hedging and macro hedging, with a focus on what still remains to be addressed—whether the tradeoff of addition risk management is worthwhile.

Description: This report covers credit risk loss experience during the period 2003 through 2015 on non-Rule 144A private placement securities (and, with limited exceptions, some specific types of Rule 144A bonds) held by participating companies of the life insurance industry.

Description: A critical step in valuing a company for the purpose of financial reporting is the computation of the market value of economic surplus (MVES). This article provides a novel approach to the valuation of MVES that is stable and reasonably immune to “market noise.” Current approaches to the calculation of economic surplus of an insurance company generally define such surplus as the market value of the assets (MVA) supporting the liabilities less the market value of liabilities (MVL). While MVA is observable in the market, MVL is typically computed directly, without regard to the underlying supporting assets. Subtracting MVL from any value of assets that changes with market movements results in an unstable surplus. Consequently, a surplus that is not fully reflective of market sentiment has been rejected by many. This same approach is further used in the calculation of market consistent embedded value (MCEV) when a balance sheet approach is used .

Description: The COVID-19 pandemic infection has greatly affected the economy, resulting in volatile market conditions. Because market conditions greatly impact the value of insurance company’s assets and liabilities, the fourth survey in this series focused on best practices around asset and liability management (ALM). The survey was directed at actuaries, investment managers and risk managers directly involved in assessing the impact of recent events on ALM. Responses to the survey were collected between April 22-28, 2020. Thirty-two companies responded to the survey.

Description: This paper proposes a combinatoric approach to express higher moments of the quadratic variation process in terms of higher order variations of the original process and autocorrelations of the original process.

Description: Read the September 2020 issue of Risks & Rewards published by the Investment Section. Newsletters provide practical information for the working actuary, articles on trends that impact sections and news about section activities.