Description: Article Description * “Agile” development is all the buzz in the IT world. You may have heard your IT teams talk about scrums, sprints, and the war room and wondered if they were playing a strange new sport. Or perhaps you are already applying agile techniques in your product development. This article will discuss what agile methodology is, pros and cons, and how you might apply it to insurance product development.

Description: his article contains a summary of some of the presentations given at the 2015 SOA Annual Meeting & Exhibit, held October 11–14, in Austin.

Description: Read the July 2016 issue of Product Matters!

Description: The world around us keeps changing F.A.S.T. propelling life insurance companies to respond with F.R.E.S.H. product solutions.

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: Six years after the global financial crisis, the reshaped contours of the market for the life insurance industry are coming into focus.

Description: February 2016 issue of Product Matters!

Description: Hot topics and emerging trends in assumption development in US life insurance companies

Description: Target volatility, as an investment strategy, has been used by many funds not only as a way to smooth return but also as a way to manage risks of the VA guarantees. Contrary to existing research which favors volatility targeting over fixed allocation, this article shows that because of the existence of market jump risk, target volatility strategy does not necessarily offer an improved risk profile for VA writers. Further, target volatility coupled with leveraging can significantly increase tail risk for insurance companies.

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.