Description: Certain valuation assumptions are difficult to set with a high degree of accuracy, whether because the underlying experience is in different economic or interest rate environments, in addition to other reasons. Examples include assumptions for long-term care insurance, annuity options, lapsation and premium persistency on ULSG. This session will share how the actuary can use predictive analytics to augment the assumption-setting process. Some of the benefits to the actuary (along with the company and the regulator) include more accurate assumptions with lower margins for adverse deviations. Of possible interest as well is that applications go beyond valuation and include acquisitions, reinsurance and pricing.

Description: This is the third and final article in a series on the Power BI suite of tools available from Microsoft. A high level look at its analytical capabilities.

Description: Explores the open vs. closed systems debate with regards to actuarial modeling and exposes the over-simplification. Valuable for anyone who uses models.

Description: The session from the 2003 SOA Orlando Meeting analyzes statutory and GAAP financial statements, including internal rate of return IRR, return on equity ROE, embedded value, source of earnings analysis, actual versus forecast and trend analysis. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Volume 29, No. 3.

Description: Mindful data visualizations show the end users the end way in how to analyze and interpret your data. More importantly, they can then use this data they see to drive decisions and modeling going forward.

Description: In this paper, we introduce a family of leptokurtic symmetric distributions represented by the difference of two gamma variates. Properties of this family are discussed. The Laplace, sums of Laplace and normal distributions all arise as special cases of this family. We propose a two-step method for fitting data to this family. We develop a statistical test for goodness-of-fit and introduce a test of normality of the data. A simulation study is provided to illustrate the theory.

Description: This article is about why actuaries should have integral roles within nearly every IT and business intelligence company serving the insurance industry.

Description: This session discussed three dramatic shifts in everyday economic relationships: 1 From matter to information, 2 From firms to individuals, and 3 From sellers to buyers. The instructor discussed application service providers and their impact on the economy and the Internet.

Description: This article summarizes IT trends that impact life, health and P&C insurance providers as revealed by Gartner's research.

Description: As commodity markets evolve in tandem with advents in communications technology, the criticality of data management becomes a lynchpin of corporate success or failure. Advanced analysis on market movement can lead to substantive market gains, while an inability to assess risk in a timely fashion can hinder corporate responsiveness, stagnate growth or result in unmitigated risk. In essence, the old paradigm of data flow and management was severely limited by 1 the amount of readily available data, 2 the transmission capabilities for data, and 3 the costs of data storage and maintenance. Presented at 2010 Enterprise Risk Management Symposium, Society of Actuaries, April 12-15, 2010.