Description: This article discusses international proposals for accounting reform that would establish a global common measurement approach for the large majority of life insurance and annuity products.

Description: This article discusses the state of risk management practice in the banking industry in the Middle East. Risk management in the Middle East is complicated by data quality problems and corporate governance issues.

Description: Healthcare risk adjustment methodologies have become increasingly complex, largely due to the belief that complexity enhances accuracy. However, a disconnect exists between how healthcare risk is assessed and how payments are adjusted. This article explores the stark difference between measuring the accuracy of a risk assessment model at a member level, and that of a risk adjustment mechanism at the health plan level. I show that a highly simplified approach that does not use diagnosis codes can have similar accuracy on risk adjusted payments to models that do. These findings suggest that accuracy is not a barrier to developing simpler risk adjustment methodologies, which can improve payment accuracy and reduce the financial incentive for coding diagnoses.

Description: This article is aimed to cover the following: 1) Provides an assessment of income volatility under Long Duration Targeted Improvements (LDTI) for several key types of long duration contracts along with select illustrations, and compares against those under current GAAP, 2) Discuss areas where accounting policies or methodologies can influence income volatility, and 3) Show how a company's management reporting can be adapted to help explain income variances under LDTI.

Description: The introduction and effective application of US GAAP LDTI have increased the scrutiny of those reviewing the updated financial results. That is because LDTI has resulted in significant changes in actuarial reserving and deferred acquisition cost (DAC) models for long-duration contracts, including significant changes to data, assumptions and required disclosures. In light of the changes, greater reliance has been put on companies’ model risk management (MRM) teams and model validations to assess the conceptual soundness and accuracy of their companies’ actuarial models and to assess that the underlying data and process utilized are suitable and appropriate. This article covers a brief background on model validation, walk through a sample LDTI-focused model validation framework/test plan, then provide insights on common LDTI-related validation observations based on the authors' prior validation experience.

Description: The February/March 2014 edition of The Actuary magazine—the Society of Actuaries’ flagship publication.

Description: After nearly a decade of work by ACLI and representatives of its member companies, the Society of Actuaries SOA, the American Academy of Actuaries Academy, and the NAIC’s Life and Health Actuarial Task Force LHATF, on Sept. 24, 2008, the NAIC adopted a new actuarial guideline for applying the method of computing statutory reserves for variable annuity contracts AG VACARVM.

Description: In actuarial work, we are frequently confronted with problems with more than one apparently reasonable answer. This article deals with one of these, where the Federal DAC cost can be applied in an apparently reasonable, but incorrect, manner.

Description: This article focuses on the motivation and trends, rather than mechanics, in Life Insurance Securitization.