Description: Wavelet models are used to analyze risk by time and frequency and provide richer information than time series models.

Description: Read the December 2018 issue of Risk Management published by the Joint Risk Management Section. Newsletters provide practical information for the working actuary, articles on trends that impact sections and news about section activities.

Description: Read the December 2018 issue of Risk Management published by the Joint Risk Management Section. Newsletters provide practical information for the working actuary, articles on trends that impact sections and news about section activities.

Description: Read the October 2018 issue of Health Watch, published by the Health Section. Practical information for actuaries, articles impact sections, section activities.

Description: Constant Proportion Portfolio Insurance (CPPI) performance is assessed on realistic assumptions and dynamic strategies to mitigate the so-called ”gap risk”.

Description: Read the August 2018 issue of Risk Management published by the Joint Risk Management Section. Newsletters provide practical information for the working actuary, articles on trends that impact sections and news about section activities.

Description: The article explores the possibility of using the emerging technology for life insurers to build a monitor system for better risk and profitability management.

Description: How Vitality's Shared Value insurance model aligns the incentives of policyholders with insurer to improve health and create and share actuarial surplus.

Description: Applying behavioral-science and shared-value principles to insurance is a win-win proposition for both insurers and clients.

Description: This paper applies GPUs and deep learning to achieve orders of magnitude performance improvement in the valuation of large portfolios of variable annuities.

Description: An introduction to creating Shiny web applications, with sample code available to reproduce the interactive application displayed in screenshots in the article.

Description: Chairperson's Corner

Description: Read the French language version of the March 2018 issue of Risk Management published by the Joint Risk Management Section. Newsletters provide practical information for the working actuary, articles on trends that impact sections and news about section activities.

Description: Read the March 2018 issue of Risk Management published by the Joint Risk Management Section. Newsletters provide practical information for the working actuary, articles on trends that impact sections and news about section activities.

Description: Insurance companies utilize derivatives in a variety of ways to manage and mitigate risks that are inherent in their investment or liability portfolios. They can be characterized by three main features: medium long-term duration; large volumes; and significant market risk exposure. Given the persistent low interest rate environment across the curve since the 2008 financial crisis, large companies need to hedge their liabilities, as illustrated by the significant recent increase from $786 billion as of fiscal year 2010 to $1,885 billion as of FY 2014 by insurance companies.As the Variable Annuities (VA) guarantees embedded within those liabilities hold a strong convex risk profile with respect to the underlying stock, VA carriers need to buy some convex hedge assets such as options to match the liability risk profile to improve hedge effectiveness, implying the growing cost of hedging. Such market impact of the quantity on the cost of hedging is further magnified in the recent period with the short-lived, but sharp transitions from low volatility to high volatility, when market volatility suddenly increases, even when there were no well-known fundamental catalysts. This partially stems from the growing managed volatility funds embedded within VA ($bn 400).VA carriers willing to trade a large quantity of options will see such market impact as an important dilemma, as the cost of placing one large order to close position will be far greater than the sum of infinitely small orders differed in time. In that context, managing market impact requires introducing an explicit market impact function, the influence of which the agent will try to minimize. The effect on hedge asset prices significantly depends on whether there is or not significant delta hedging activity. In case of no significant delta hedging activity, the risk appetite has a significant influence on the optimal execution strategy. If there is significant delta hedging activity, the optimal trading involve

Description: Read the February 2018 issue of Health Watch, published by the Health Section. Practical information for actuaries, articles impact sections, section activities.

Description: This interview article summarizes the work being done by a Health Section Strategic Initiative Committee.

Description: Overview and review of books to teach yourself about deep learning.

Description: Read the Sept. 2017 issue of Small Talk published by Smaller Insurance Company Section. Practical information on trends that impact sections and activities.

Description: Describes a process for identifying relevant industry experience to credibility-weight with relevant company experience to set modeling assumptions and margins.

Description: Describes a process for identifying relevant industry experience to credibility-weight with relevant company experience to set modeling assumptions and margins.

Description: Describes using the new multi-risk scenario generator to create sensitivity tests at moderately adverse probability levels, resulting in margins to use for PBR.

Description: In this paper, we derive three important longevity Greeks on the basis of an extended version of the Lee-Carter model that incorporates stochastic volatility.

Description: Read the June 2017 issue of Health Watch, published by the Health Section. Practical information for actuaries, articles impact sections, section activities.

Description: In this article, we are going to discuss the AR model by making connections to time-dependent ordinary differential equations.

Description: Short descriptions of the various articles in the June issue.

Description: The standard for measuring retirement income adequacy has been the final earnings replacement rate (usually targeted at 70%). But - does it work?

Description: How assumptions like market returns and variable like saving rate should be incorporated into sound financial planning. How to analyze retirement readiness.

Description: Read the March 2017 issue of Health Watch, published by the Health Section. Practical information for actuaries, articles impact sections, section activities.

Description: This is the second article in a two-part series examining the potential value to companies of implementing a company profitability and risk dashboard.

Description: Read the March 2017 issue of Small Talk published by Smaller Insurance Company Section. Practical information on trends that impact sections and activities.

Description: The financial sector should provide financial security and allocate capital well. As its preeminent professionals actuaries have particular responsibilities.

Description: A summary of Modeling Section-sponsored sessions at the 2016 Life/Annuity Symposium, covering model risk management, model governance, and model efficiency.

Description: This article describes how to model variable annuities using a GPU along with some of the stumbling blocks.

Description: This article explores the methods of determining the optimal timing for risk management projects.

Description: Read the December 2016 issue of Risk Management published by the Joint Risk Management Section. Newsletters provide practical information for the working actuary, articles on trends that impact sections and news about section activities.

Description: This article is the first installment of a three-part series and is focused on providing an overview of LTC modeling approaches and considerations.

Description: Discussing impacts of innovation on the actuarial industry.

Description: The article discusses the sustainability of the ACA individual market from a public entitlement standpoint. A key point of measuring sustainability is the reliance on market forces rather than federal budget constraints. The article explains why an actuarial viewpoint of sustainability is necessary to a greater extent than other public assistance and social insurance programs. The article challenges actuaries to be a bold, objective voice in a space that is full of opinionated but often uninformed viewpoints.

Description: Many risk management decisions involve the timing of implementing risk strategies. The cost of hedging, capital raising and securitization changes with the economic environment. The timing of de-risking and investment in new risk management functions affect the cost and benefit of these projects as well. Like investment timing, it is important to consider the timing in risk management decisions to maximize the gain of risk management projects. This paper discusses methods of determining the appropriate timing of implementing a risk management strategy or investing in risk management projects. It explains the human biases that may lead to inferior timing decisions. It also covers the costs and benefits of risk management projects and the impact of new information on the decision-making process. Timing considerations for financial risk hedging, insurance risk hedging and investment in new risk management projects are explained. Factors used for timing decisions include economic conditions, market volatility, credit rating, borrowing cost, capital adequacy and financial resources.

Description: In a very general setting this paper describes a straightforward, non-parametric approach to aggregate "stand-alone" or marginal distributions with desired correlations without imposing additional assumptions on those marginals. We then develop two optimizations for the enterprise, one based on maximizing return on economic capital and the other based on a mean -semivariance efficient frontier from the investor point of view.

Description: Highlights a new research paper on determining discount rates for pension plans, by John Turner. The paper breaks new ground on deciding on the appropriate discount rate for untradeable benefit obligations, with a comprehensive summary of the field.

Description: Read the August 2016 issue of Risk Management published by the Joint Risk Management Section. Newsletters provide practical information for the working actuary, articles on trends that impact sections and news about section activities.

Description: The April 2016 Issue of The Modeling Platform

Description: The article explores impact of resetting cap vs static cap choice for the GLWB rider for a Fixed Index Annuity for a Point to Point. Moreover, analysis of a Monthly Sum Cap is provided showing impacts of particular choices of market models (e.g. Black, Heston, Bates) used to price this deal.

Description: The authors explore a new approach to the premium persistency assumption in universal life products.

Description: Building on the Part 1 article, Introduction to the Representative Scenarios Method, this article describes testing the methodology with respect to four product types, fixed indexed annuities with GLIBs, level term life insurance, universal life with secondary guarantees, and variable annuities with GLWBs. This Part 2 article describes testing results, refinements to the RSM methodology, and next steps.

Description: Metadata for entire issue

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 article provides background on managed target volatility funds and how they can be used for variable annuities and the mitigation of gap risk.

Description: Insurance companies use derivatives to manage and mitigate risks that are inherent in their investment or liability portfolios, including traditional asset/liability matching, dynamic hedging and static hedging. The authors explore how Solvency II will influence life insurers’ hedging strategies.

Description: February issue of The Stepping Stone

Description: Summary of Investment Council sponsored meetings as 2015 annual meeting

Description: The article explores the use of economic capital modeling to deliver value to clients by improving the financial security of many individual lives around the world in a cost-effective way.

Description: Health Watch, Issue 79, December 2015, Health Watch

Description: Looks at free and inexpensive resources for the novice in predictive analytics, covering the data analysis theory as well as the most commonly used languages/software used in the field.

Description: After a summary of FASB decisions in their GAAP Targeted Improvements project, this article describes several issues that will need to be resolved either by the board or in actuarial practice and argues for seeking solutions that provide meaningful results without overly complicating valuation processes.

Description: How predictive analytics techniques can be used in the health practice.

Description: The Stepping Stone issue 60, November 2015

Description: An in-depth look at how actuarial skills and competencies picked up in the field can be applied to topics that aren't traditionally actuarial - with this article focusing on card counting in the casino game blackjack.

Description: Examination of full surrender and benefit utilization industry experience for Variable Annuities with and without Guaranteed Lifetime Withdrawal Benefits. Part 1 of 3 articles focuses on full surrenders and building a dynamic surrender function using predictive modeling tools.

Description: Recaps April 2015 seminar on derivatives use for fund managers and insurers in China. Describes growth in Chinese derivatives market including CSI 300 futures

Description: This article summarizes the presentations by the Society of Actuaries and the Academy of Actuaries at the January 2015 National Academy of Social Insurance (NASI) Roundtables in Washington DC. SOA presented on the 2014 SOA monograph series "The Link between Retirement Security and Long-Term Care."

Description: The article describes a dynamic investment strategy for defined benefit pension funds to de-risk the plan by changing the asset mix based on the funded ratio.

Description: Compares how other industries (in this case, Fast Food) researches and tests new products. Provides examples of how the insurance industry can efficiently research and test new product concepts before going to market.

Description: This paper presents the output of in-house research on an emerging area of risk appetite management and our global implementation best practices. It intends to provide readers with detail implementation of risk appetite framework and assessment across an organization. It provides the conceptual risk appetite framework based model- developed by the author, implementation plan, and global best practices of a risk appetite assessment across an organization. It identifies the challenges and exceptions in the risk appetite assessment with an approach to manage it effectively, and helps organizations with cost-benefit analysis. It also includes an illustrative case study.

Description: This article discussed the NEAT family of neural network algorithms. NEAT automatically determines the number of hidden neurons, as well as their structure. Additionally HyperNEAT can scale to very large problem domains.

Description: The article is a case study of various actuarial concepts invovled in the design and implementtion of the AQC - a global budget provider payment arrangement implemented by Blue Cross Blue Shield of MA.

Description: Abstract: A model for analyzing the probability and severity of default of sovereign entities and banks. The methodology analyzes the risks inherent in the investment of debt of sovereign governments and large financial institutions side-by-side, taking into consideration macroeconomic interactions among the sovereign fiscal and monetary authorities, the financial institutions, and the real economy. The signature aspect of the methodology is that it adapts a Merton-style default model to use explicit measures of sovereign assets and asset volatility.

Description: Global financial crises like the one recently experienced, affected both large and small institutions.Today, when there is heightened need for enhanced risk management tools, some entities are unable to employ sophisticated mechanisms due to limited data availability. Moreover, from the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision’s point of view via Basel II and Basel III, the internal ratings- based (IRB) approach requires that institutions have some reliable estimates of default probabilities of default for each rating grade. Taking the work of previous researches a step further, this paper intends to propose a new dynamic mechanism to for the risk management industry for to calculateing probabilities of default (PD). Through these estimates for the core model, we generate implied probability of default (PD) through actuarial estimation tools and different probability distributions. This mechanism is specialized to work best for low- defa ult portfolios (LDPs). Furthermore, scenario testing is adopted to validate the model against any model- specific bias

Description: This paper demonstrates that extreme value theory (EVT) can be used as a tool to model policyholder behavior in the extreme tail. This paper applies EVT to the study of variable annuity dynamic lapse behavior in the extreme tail. It illustrates a process whereby a company can fully model policyholder behavior, including the extreme tail, with existing data. No judgment about the extremal behavior is necessary.