Description: The Emerging Issues in Underwriting Survey was intended for direct life writing insurance companies in the US and Canada. The Survey looked at various trends that could have a significant impact on the process and practices of life insurance underwriting in the future.

Description: This research report examines the ban of the use of genetic testing information in life insurance mortality.

Description: Businesses across the board have been drastically impacted by the effects of COVID-19 over the course of 2020, and insurance was not immune. Perhaps most relevant to this industry’s current capital and liquidity concern is the prevailing low interest rate environment. This has been a global trend in the last decade, and treasury rates in much of the developed world are at or near zero. Reduced investment returns limit an insurer’s ability to achieve their desired return on equity, eliminating previously profitable strategies that depended on the leverage of life and annuity balance sheets. Focus and activity have instead shifted to other methods to counteract the low interest rate markets and accompanying capital strain. Examples include increased mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity within the insurance industry and an increasing focus by private equity firms in the insurance market for asset-intensive products, both of which reflect the goal of increasing yield rates on capital.

Description: The Individual Life Experience Committee is holding a competition encouraging actuaries and other interested parties to predict 2017 industry mortality based on a data set containg 2009 - 2016 data. The competition is not only about predicting mortality, but also about explaining and presenting the results.

Description: The Society of Actuaries (SOA) is pleased to bring you information about the actuarial career path in life insurance and predictive analytics. We’ll continue to share more about actuaries who are tackling some of the industry's biggest challenges and top employers in life insurance.

Description: Meet Christine Hofbeck. Christine is pushing the boundaries of traditional life and general insurance by finding problems and fixing them with new technology, modeling methods and sources of data. Most recently, she built a predictive analytics team at one of the world's largest financial services institutions to support the pricing team for a $5 billion portfolio covering life, disability, critical illness and more.

Description: Over the past month, the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic has raised questions on how this outbreak will impact life insurance industry claims. This report pulls emerging U.S. COVID-19 hospitalization data and deaths obtained from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) COVIDView, a Weekly Surveillance Summary of U.S. COVID-19 activity, and compares it to data from past U.S. influenza seasons obtained from the CDC’s Flu Activity and Surveillance webpage.

Description: This research report discusses simplified issue underwriting in life insurance. It examines recent developments, characteristics, challenges, current practices, assumptions and data elements.

Description: This report provides various summaries of the above listed data and provides observations from these summaries, with a goal to help actuaries understand the emerging trends in mortality due to COVID-19.

Description: After years of discussion and debate, PrinciplesBased Reserving (PBR) is finally a reality. Small insurance companies have a unique opportunity to decide between electing for the company-wide exemption or adopting the PBR methods. This article discusses the benefits and challenges of the options available to small insurers under VM-20 as well as best practices that have been found along the way.