Description: The rapid evolution of life insurance underwriting has created pricing and operational challenges and raised new questions about established approaches to assumption development, both of which demand a fresh perspective. As underwriting methods evolve, we find ourselves navigating uncharted territory. In this session, we delve into accelerated underwriting, focusing on two critical areas. First, we explore assumption setting in this new world, where numerous interaction effects can make it feel like we’re asked to consider everything, from every angle, all at once. Considerations for assumption setting must encompass early performance indicators—what signals inform our assumptions? Additionally, we address novel underwriting approaches and how to adapt assumptions for these paradigms. Furthermore, in the context of post-COVID claims experience, we discuss distinguishing meaningful insights from noise. Second, we examine declinable risks and their impact on mortality. In this new world ushered in by accelerated underwriting, previously excluded risks—low-frequency, high-severity declinable cases—are now part of the landscape. Quantifying their mortality impact challenges us, as historical data lacks systematic tracking. To quantify declinable risks, we draw upon research findings from analyzing 27 million life insurance applicants, providing valuable insights for attendees to navigate this dynamic landscape and make informed assumptions for pricing and risk management.

Description: This webinar is a panel discussion covering the technology behind blockchain and digital assets as well their uses, implications and risks. Investment considerations for both tokens and fund structures, along with a variety of other topics in the space will be addressed.

Description: Increasing cyber incidents and emergent characteristics of cyber threats have become significant concerns for organizations, governments, and the insurance sector. The growing cyber risks, whether catastrophic risks that an entire town, country, or even world may face due to cyber-attacks, or smaller scale cyber risks such as right where you live with smart home technology, can impact technological infrastructure, public health and safety, economic security, and even political stability. The SOA Research Institute has been conducting several research projects in the area of cyber security risks and the impact of those on insurance companies. Discover these research projects meant to inform actuaries of the ways in which risks can be incorporated into their models, product design, and risk management frameworks. Also, explore research reports that explore new technologies and the development of tools which can aid both practitioners as well as other researchers.

Description: As the speed of technological innovation increases, actuarial leaders are trying to determine how to use emerging technologies to unlock more business value and improve competitive positioning. This includes enabling new capabilities, improving process efficiency, and increasing the effectiveness of human capital. The session will discuss what we are hearing from clients who are in the process of transforming their business, how they are approaching these transformations, and what they are focusing on. This will include different aspects of transformation, including visualization dashboards, data science applications, no-code platforms, automation, data, and the cloud. Find out how organizations are thinking of human capital and collaboration between actuaries, IT, and other professionals.

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: This session is an in-depth interview of two actuaries turned Artificial Intelligence (AI) experts. We aim to have a conversation that gleans into each of their journeys and what led them to the path they are now on. We will open up the last ten minutes for audience questions. At the conclusion of this session, attendees will know Eric and Joe much better, have an understanding of what AI/machine learning/data scientist work is like for actuaries, and, for those who are curious to get more involved with AI, some encouragement to pursue their interests.

Description: We're introducing a new “cutting edge” wealth accumulation predictive framework, the predictive equity analytics (PEA) for life products (annuity, insurance, group employer benefits, retirement plan). PEA enables life insurers and policyholders to avoid market downturns and capture returns from equities (stocks, ETFs and mutual funds) predicted to increase in next one to three trade days via fund prediction advisory by insurers, additionally by individual policyholders. The capability does not exist in insurance markets nor in financial intermediary markets.

Description: Biases can creep up in models in numerous ways. After discussing various forms of bias, presenting a framework useful to manage bias in models, and contextualizing this effort in the current environment, this session will focus on practical issues faced by the industry.

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: 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).