Description: Critical illness CI products are gaining in popularity in North America. These products have been available for close to 20 years in many countries around the world, including South Africa, Australia, the United Kingdom and most of Asia. Many of the lessons learned in these countries concerning product design, pricing, underwriting and claims adjudication are relevant to the U.S. market. This session reviews the latest trends around the world. Attendees gain insight into the key issues driving the profitability of the product and are better positioned to determine the main considerations in deciding whether or not to introduce such a product in their market. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Volume 29, No. 1, Washington, D.C., Spring Meeting, May 29–30, 2003, Session 60PD.

Description: Highlights of the 1997 International Underwriting Congress with an in depth discussion of 1 critical illness policies and 2 Use of population data where little insurance data exists.

Description: Companies operating in international markets have additional issues to consider from a risk management point of view. Fluctuations in exchange rates, political and sovereign risks, regulatory issues, capital management and human resources considerations are among these. This session gives attendees the opportunity to understand how multinationals currently deal with these issues and how they are functionally structured to handle the risk management process. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Volume 29, No. 1: Washington, D.C. Spring Meeting, May 29–30, 2003, Session 30PD.

Description: This article continues the Passing the Torch Interview Series. Linda Liu and Amanda Jacques invite Simon Curtis, currently president of the Canadian Institute of Actuaries (CIA) and recently joined Deloitte as a partner in their Toronto office after a long career at Manulife. Simon shares with us his career experience and talks about the changes and challenges facing the actuarial profession.

Description: The Lee and Carter LC method is getting widely adopted for long-run forecasts of age specific mortality rates. That popularity is first due to the model simplicity. Moreover, the LC model has given successful results for various countries e.g. U.S., Chile, G7 countries. However, some difficulties arose when using population data from certain countries such as UK and Australia. In the present paper, the LC model is applied to data from four Nordic countries: Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. The Singular Value Decomposition SVD, the Weighted Least Square WLS and the Maximum Likelihood estimate MLE are used. These approaches give satisfactory results. The appropriate fitting period needs, however, to be well chosen. The properties of the model's parameters are studied using a bootstrap simulation.

Description: This article discusses the global capital standards for Global Systemically Important Insurers (G-SIIs) and Internationally Active Insurance Groups (IAIGs) currently being developed by the International Association of Insurance Supervisors (IAIS).