Description: New digital data known as alternative data is everywhere. Our industry has seen the financial, and hi-tech industries leverage new digital data to expand their key offerings and core services. From the lens of the global life and health industry, new digital data is still searching to be further understood. Risk assessment is a current focus area for using alternative data. A key question is even though risk assessment has always been data-driven, can it now move to the next level with the arrival of this alternative data. Can we use alternative data to make the risk assessment process quicker, cheaper, or faster thereby driving more sales and better conversion rates. It is an exciting time! With the increased adoption of health and well-being apps, data such as physical activity, nutrition, sleep, and mental wellness is now readily available. Expanded data such as digital biomarkers, IoT data, electronic health records and many more can also be accessed. However, how to effectively implement alternative data remains a challenge across the industry. We firmly believe it is, and will continue to be, imperative to take a structured approach to alternative data through a set of key considerations and a framework of principles.

Description: A discussion on technology improvements in establishing compliance with sections 7702 and 7702A. The Internal Revenue Code defines life insurance using actuarial tests that limit the investment in a life insurance contract as compared to the death benefit. Inadvertant failures of the actuarial tests can be uncovered by testing in order to enable remediation.

Description: This article is the final installment of our three-part series on economic scenario generators (“ESGs”). Part I and II were published in the November 2019 and August 2020 issues of The Modeling Platform. Part III contextualizes the framework for selecting, building, and validating ESGs and focuses on the Academy Interest Rate Generator (“AIRG”), the most commonly used real-world ESG for US actuaries