Description: Banks and insurance companies today are addressing many similar issues. Included are product, business unit, and corporate profitability capital requirements and allocation issues reserve adequacy and data development and practical utilizations. Actuaries are uniquely qualified to address these issues.

Description: The author suggests that the optimal use of capital requires one to find a way to strike a balance between the conflicting desires for maximizing long term profit and minimizing short term loss.

Description: In this article the author asserts that issuers of credit default swaps should hold reserves for the liabilities associated with the derivative contracts. This would significantly reduce most of the major problems associated with the trading of these instruments.

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: 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: Demographic changes around the world may present actuaries with an opportunity to tackle product development, risk management and asset allocation challenges involving financial and investment variables.