Description: This is the first in a series of articles about accounting for reinsurance under GAAP Targeted Improvements to the Accounting for Long-Duration Contracts (LDTI). It provides an introduction to the topic, giving an overview of what has and hasn't changed. Changes include a few that directly address reinsurance and others that indirectly result from changes to direct accounting and the existing ties between reinsurance and direct accounting.

Description: Performance measurement is not the primary purpose of either GAAP or statutory accounting. This article discusses alternative methods of reporting used by life insurance companies to better measure financial performance.

Description: Introduction to the purposes and roles of “Lifric”, an acronym for the American Academy of Actuaries working group, Life Financial Reporting Committee

Description: This article describes a simple but powerful tool for use by valuation actuaries and auditors when evaluating current assumptions for use in GAAP net premium reserve methods that require retrospective updating for actual experience and assumption changes. As a supplement, this tool can fill some holes left by existing tools. It produces results that can be compared to materiality thresholds at any level of aggregation, from a single reserve cohort up to the combination of all cohorts for all products subject to retrospective net premium reserve requirements. It can also serve as a benchmarking tool for estimated the possible effects of an assumption change or to help in explaining the effects of an actual assumption change.

Description: Accounting Standards Update (ASU) 2018-12, commonly referred to as long duration targeted improvements (LDTI), is the most significant GAAP accounting change impacting the life insurance industry in the past 40 years. This article discusses the impact of LDTI on variable annuities (VA) and fixed indexed annuities (FIA) from a product development and in-force management angle. Detailed discussion topics include hedging and ALM, product strategy and development, and pricing. LDTI will cause many VA and FIA writers to re-evaluate their hedging and asset liability management (ALM) strategy following the move to fair value accounting under the new MRB requirement. Stakeholder appetite for accounting volatility and resulting changes to hedging and ALM may trigger changes in product mix and designs. In addition to updating pricing infrastructure to handle the new requirements, pricing actuaries will need to produce analyses to educate stakeholders on the risks and pricing implications of any changes to designs, hedging and ALM.