Description: The Inflation Reduction Act represents the most significant changes to the Part D program since its inception 20 years ago. The implications will not only alter the benefits offered by Medicare Advantage (MAPD) and Prescription Drug Plans (PDP) but will alter the Part D cash flows and the seasonality of such amounts for interim reporting periods. In this session, we will provide a brief overview of the IRA changes and dive into how the changes could impact the 2008 Medicare Part D Accounting Practice Note.

Description: Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming the investment landscape. From natural language processing and large language models to physical AI applications like robotics, autonomous vehicles, and drones, the evolution of AI is reshaping both how we analyze data and where we find opportunity. We’ll begin by exploring the evolution of AI, which is already driving disruption across industries such as coding, customer service, and marketing. However, the future of AI is physical AI (drones, AVs, robotics). With valuations already stretched, and growing concerns about the “circular economy” and bubble risks, investors should focus on high-quality tech companies that generate free cash flow and deliver strong returns on invested capital. We'll explore examples of interesting companies across the globe: Meta, Alphabet, and Uber in the US; ASML in Europe; Tokyo Electron in Japan; TSMC in Taiwan; and BYD in China. The session will also examine how natural language processing and large language models are reshaping the way quantitative and fundamental managers extract insights from raw data. We’ll highlight how these tools are being deployed to enhance understanding of risk and return, and how they’re increasingly supporting collaboration between quant and fundamental teams.

Description: Join us for this popular annual webcast covering the latest considerations for the year's U.S. statutory financial reporting work. Always informative and occasionally entertaining, this webcast offers a chance to hear from three expert speakers, who will discuss asset adequacy testing and this year's New York and California holiday letters, the impact of recent interest rate changes, potential changes to statutory financial reporting due to climate change, and recent proposal(s) impacting asset adequacy testing for reinsured business.

Description: This session will examine bias from a social science perspective. It will discuss the three types of systemic biases using the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) model. The NIST model details the three types as historical bias, societal bias, and institutionalbias. The session will also provide several examples of each type to provide a framework for identifying the social structure of bias.

Description: This webcast will explore hedge strategies that can take advantage of synergies with existing business, improve liquidity and collateral management, incorporate opportunistic design-making, and reflect a company’s appetite for certain risks where excess returns can be earned.

Description: Disability and group life products can pose challenges for the valuation actuary due to the long-tail runout of traditional disability and group life waiver of premium claims, and due to the sensitivity of the reserves to small changes in assumptions. This session addresses a number of issues of interest to actuaries who work with these products, including recent experience trends and the new 2023 Group Life Waiver Valuation Table. Attendees will learn about best practices in the valuation of these products.

Description: The session will discuss key areas of statutory reserving that contain some ambiguity or areas where there are simplifications being used in the industry. The content will be based on current practices used in the industry and possibly accompanied by an industry survey to be completed prior to the session. The focus will be heavily on CRVM, AG38, and PBR statutory frameworks and will include a Q&A portion for audience participation. Some potential topics will be reinsurance modeling, DBO3/ROP treatment, segmentation, deficiency reserves, system differences and multi-tiered designs

Description: Analyze the market volatility behavior in context with historical extreme events during this webcast. There will be a focus on understanding volatility clustering and relationships, both contemporary and temporal, in addition to key economic and capital market variables. You'll also learn from a comprehensive attribution analysis, which uses economic data, asset data, retail investor data and event data as explanatory variables. Dive into investment-related Reddit comments used to capture features of retail investors and tree-based models, including Random Forests and Gradient Boosting Machines to justify changes in volatility modeling. Expect this webcast to end with an example of liability-driven investment optimization that illustrates the potential impact of increased volatility assumption, how to adopt stochastic volatility models, how to reflect volatility clustering and return jumps.

Description: Model design is an important part of being an actuary, and the SOA highlights the importance of the actuarial control cycle of model design, evaluation and monitoring. What tools are at our disposal for these steps? When should we be concerned or excited about model performance? Can we, and should we, use machine learning tools to assist with model improvement or development?

Description: Session 1D: Meeting the Mark - Predicting MA Stars Outcomes with Monte Carlo Simulations