Description: New Zealand is about to launch its first variable annuity with guaranteed lifetime withdrawal benefits. The product design is mindful of the lessons from the financial crisis in the United States, Europe and Japan.

Description: This article talks about longevity risk and reinsurance and its global challenges.

Description: We analyze how volatility management techniques in VAs affected policyholders and insurance companies

Description: Chairperson’s column discussing the state of the world today and how that influences investment strategies and describes to seminars the section sponsored to keep members apprised of changes.

Description: View the complete issue for the August 2014 Reinsurance News newsletter.

Description: Recent advances in mortality modeling have enabled applicant-specific quantification of mortality risk in life insurance applicants using laboratory and physical measurements. Relative to more conventional underwriting, this approach identifies a small population of significantly under-priced policy and a much larger, cross-subsidizing group whose risk is presently overestimated. Applicants placed in the highest percentile by this scoring methodology are more than 10X as likely to die in a given period as their demographic peers, and represent approximately 5% of short-term claims. Implications for product design are substantial in both the short- and long-term, as the possibilities for adverse selection grow, and the opportunity for fully individualized pricing raises the more distant prospect of products with as many rate classes as applicants.

Description: Written from a regulatory perspective, the article covers the purpose of regulation and some regulatory expectations. The topics include the appointed actuary's involvement in corporate governance, reasonability of results when compared to prior results, data quality, familiarity with the company's annual statement and applicable statutes, and areas where appointed actuaries can add value though services provided to smaller life insurance companies.

Description: The author constructed the efficient frontier of new business sales by modeling the embedded value and economic capital against a universe of possible growth rates of the three lines of business in a typical three-year planning horizon. The ERM function can use the efficient frontier of new business to provide a more rigorous analysis of the impact of growth rates on the firm’s overall capital efficiency and value creation, hence forming a feedback loop with the businesses in the planning process to optimize the growth strategy.

Description: This paper takes the position that the U.K. actuarial profession has still not come to a single view on financial economics, and the major divisions that remain continue to hamstring its policy development. From Current Pension Actuarial Practice in Light of Financial Economics Symposium, M-RS04-1.

Description: Introduction and table of contents of essay collection.