Description: Many retirement actuaries have experience developing, implementing, and monitoring Liability Driven Investing (LDI) strategies for plan sponsors. These strategies typically involve modifying a plan’s investment strategy to remove a significant portion of the investment and interest rate risk now or at some point in the future when specific triggers are met. The tactics often involve the use of fixed income assets to cash flow and/or duration match the liabilities. In the spirit of helping actuaries expand their roles in an evolving defined contribution world, this article explores the application of LDI and derisking strategies within defined contribution and individual retirement accounts. The economic theory behind this approach is called the lifecycle hypothesis, or lifecycle finance. The benefits of the lifecycle finance method are that it provides a safe approach to save for retirement and a secure source of floor income during retirement. Similar to pension plans, each individual has his or her own idiosyncratic needs, wants, and risks that should be considered. Actuaries are uniquely situated to help defined contribution plan sponsors, individuals, and even themselves implement the lifecycle finance approach by developing and distributing tools and methods that focus on income (rather than wealth), LDI strategies, and personalization.

Description: How to make the third pillar of the pension system develop faster is a hot topic in the field of social security research in recent years. Its development is facing three dilemmas: cognitive dilemma, economic transformation dilemma and incentive dilemma. According to the order from easy to difficult, four suggestions are put forward: to build the third pillar system by introducing personal accounts; to separate individual accounts from urban and rural residence insurance and put them in the third pillar; to integrate housing funds into the third pillar; to turn short-term bank savings into long-term pension reserve by improving social welfare.

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

Description: The SOA's Competency Framework for Actuaries is a tool to help actuaries make decisions related to their individual professional development and career management plans. It applies systematic, sound approaches to selecting professional development opportunities, focusing on the skills needed to go beyond technical and specific actuarial analysis. This is an Excel file that facilitates that process by providing a personal planning workbook.

Description: Introduces the concept of total risk analysis, a methodology used to answer questions like "what are the chances we will lose more than $1 million"

Description: The Mortality Improvement Model, MIM-2021- V3. Different mortality projection methodologies are utilized by actuaries across applications and practice areas. As a result, the MIM Advisory Group (“Advisory Group”) developed a single framework to serve as a consistent base for practitioners in projecting mortality improvement.

Description: Risk Adjustment continues to be a hot topic in Health Insurance since its emergence. This mechanism came into being as a means of reducing the risk of selection, particularly in marketplaces where underwriting is not allowed, and rating factors are significantly restricted. Risk adjustment serves to adjust premiums to reflect the risk of individual members or overall members as a whole within a particular cohort of a health plan. Risk adjustment is not perfect, as it does not perfectly predict future costs or perfectly adjust for the differences in expected costs. Different marketplaces have different challenges with risk adjustment.

Description: As the insurance industry continues to evolve due to a pandemic and rapidly changing economic and regulatory conditions, the role of data scientists and actuaries has become increasingly important. In an interview with the Atidot data science and actuarial team, we discuss what it is like to work at an InsurTech, how data scientists and actuaries can collaborate, and look at some concrete technical examples of where the innovation is having an impact. This article explores what collaboration can look like and how the role of data science and actuary may evolve in the InsurTech industry in the future.

Description: As China’s population officially ages, the government has now escalated reform of China's social security system to a national strategic level. The report of the 19th National Congress further mentioned construction of an old-age security system and social environment, painting a bright future for development of the pension industry. At the moment, development of China's pension industry is beginning a new journey. Learn about the current status and future development of pillar 2 pension, which is core to China's pension system; framework and operation management overview of Enterprise Annuity and Occupational Annuity; possible evolution paths in contribution payment methods’ investment operation models, and development of professional pension managers.

Description: An overview of the evolution of equity-based guarantees (e.g. VA, FIA, etc.) over the last few years and discussion the current lay of the land as it relates to the regulatory, issues, capital markets environment in which these products are offered.