Description: At this panel discussion with the SOA Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Taskforce members, you will learn about the SOA's plans to partner with key local and global organizations to address societal issues such as health and well-being; decent work and economic growth; reduced inequalities; and climate action. Hear more about thetaskforce's action plan and the next phase of the engagement, which is centered on volunteer activities, namely moving forward with the SOA Innovation Team to launch the SOA SDG Incubator. Lastly, look at creating tangible opportunities for members to apply their current skills, transpose their experiences and add new skills contributing to solving for these critical issues.

Description: Pharmacy prices are top of mind for many consumers, policymakers, and payers. There are many proposals out there about ways to reduce pharmacy costs, almost all of which involve price controls. Is that the right move? What about the unintended consequences of such regulation? Will fewer life-saving drugs be developed including fewer drugs that improve the quality of life? Are better financing alternatives out there? Explore the concept of value-based reimbursement for pharmacy prices, including the lessons learned from applying value-based concepts to hospital and physician value-based financing.

Description: Research demonstrates that agile companies have outperformed others in adapting to COVID-19. This presentation will establish the need for organizational agility to keep pace with industry changes and share research and tools related to psychological safety to help create behaviors that lead to organization agility. Hear the importance of company purpose to motivate, engage and empower a workforce and discuss execution structures that can be put in place to create effective test and learn innovation teams that are creative, efficient and results-oriented.

Description: As data continues to become more robust and readily available, there has been a push in the actuarial field to transition away from Excel to SQL and Python native cloud-based platforms. While these platforms are widely used and powerful, they present their own challenges for the actuarial industry, requiring processes to be production-ready from the onset, technical expertise for integration, and robust requirements documentation. Low-code tools provide a unique alternative solution, which works well when the organizations operating model allows for actuarial and IT to work together, giving actuaries the flexibility they need while maintaining a level of control followed by the organization. Make use of demonstrations to showcase low-code tools (such as Alteryx and Dataiku) and their use case in the actuarial space. Learn how these low barrier-to-entry tools can be leveraged to create robust and controlled processes. Discuss how low-code tools can integrate with coding languages such as Python as well as efficiently prepare data for downstream visualization platforms such as Tableau and PowerBI.

Description: Come discuss how to treat experience that is impacted by COVID (e.g., 2020+), as well as expected experience moving forward in terms of excess deaths related to COVID and non-COVID topics. Expect to also cover how the COVID period has impacted lapse/surrender behavior and trends in recent industry mortality and lapse studies that have been conducted including areas where individual companies typically have limited data. You will learn about various techniques of adjusting experience for the impact of COVID and the considerations in using such experience and setting a best-estimate assumption going forward. For mortality, the discussion will include both base mortality as well as future mortality improvement and the intersection of both of these.Explore an understanding of available data to supplement their experience in areas where they may have limited internal experience

Description: The pension risk transfer market has increasingly expanded to include the complexity of deferred participants whom have additional optionality available to them that does not exist for a retiree already receiving their benefit. Assumptions on the timing of benefit commencement and form of payment elected are highly dependent on specific pension plan provisions and the census population. These assumptions can have significant impact on the reserves and cash flows affecting not only the initial price but the future profitability of the deal and require a balance of both pension experience and annuity pricing. Discover more about pension actuaries working in the PRT market and who specialize in the assumption setting process for deferred lives provide considerations for assumptions fit for purpose.

Description: Modeling teams are getting larger to deal with more complex models and to support more enhancement requests from business and actuarial teams. Actuarial modeling teams can adapt tools and techniques used in the broader IT industry to be more efficient, handle large number of requests while maintaining their quality of work. Explore DevOps tools to track requests, progress made, work assignment and version control systems. See Azure DevOps in action as presenters use it as an illustrative tool to showcase these activities and how they can be beneficial to an actuarial modeling team (regardless of their preferred actuarial modeling system).

Description: After the arduous journeys IFRS 17 filers underwent to implement the standard, it would only make sense for insurers to seek the best return on their investment post effective date of 1/1/2023. Many insurers are now embarking a new phase of the journey that involves wrapping up any unfinished business as they might have taken a minimum compliance route to finish implementation and thinking about the knock-on effects the new standard has on the way they carry out business and perform financial reporting.

Description: The world of climate risk disclosures has seen dizzying levels of change in the last few years. In 2023, many regulators have publicly issued guidance on what insurance companies and other FIs should look to disclose. So what are we seeing in these disclosures and how do we use this information? Join our panel of experts to learn about the evolution of U.S. life insurance industry's climate disclosures and how insurers of all sizes and complexities are responding to NAIC's requirements.

Description: The session is based on an article of the same name featured in the January, 2023 issue of Health Watch. It gives a step-by-step method of how to apply the average paid PMPM method to calculate IBNR with zero run-out, as opposed to current methods, which generally require a three-month run-out period. Methods for obtaining confidence intervals for the IBNR estimates will also be discussed.