Description: Actuaries play pivotal roles in insurance companies, consulting firms, and throughout the industry. With the ongoing accounting and regulatory changes, process and system modernization, and the rapidly changing environment, actuaries frequently find themselves working in multidisciplinary projects with non-actuarial teams. In order to take on broader leadership roles, actuaries are often times expected to partner with and/or lead non-actuarial personnel. How can actuaries work most effectively with non-actuaries? A panel of industry leaders across different disciplines will share their perspectives on actuaries working with and building effective relationships with non-actuarial colleagues. The panelists will cover how actuaries add value in a non-actuarial world, what aspects actuaries can focus on to be more effective across disciplines, and incorporate success stories as well as lessons learned.

Description: The advent of machine learning algorithms has taken predictive analytics and risk scoring to a new level. From gradient boosting machines to k-nearest neighbors regression, the use of these techniques has gained significant traction in healthcare - including health systems like the Cleveland Clinic. This session will discuss the use of predictive analytics to go beyond just assessing the risk of a patient, and instead focus on prescribing a specific intervention of care. In practice, the recommendation of a care plan goes beyond just attributing a score to a patient. It provides physicians and care coordinators the most probabilistic options - e.g. referral to social worker, depression screening, weight-loss program - for positively impacting a patient's future healthcare outcome.

Description: In Medicaid rate development, actuaries have not historically shared models that developed the margin (i.e., underwriting gain) assumption. This is unfortunate, given the margin assumption is one of the most critical components of the rate development in ensuring financial solvency of the Medicaid managed care organizations (MCOs). In this session, we will discuss the primary components of the this assumption and will share working models that help actuaries quantify these components—including the cost of capital and risk (or contingency) margin. We expect a lively discussion as we “open the black box” and discuss these actuarial assumptions in the public for the first time.

Description: A review of strategies for non-ACA products for small employers including level-funded plans, association health plans (AHPs), and multiple employer welfare arrangements (MEWAs). Discussion will focus on market trends, strategy, pricing, and block management. Session will include some audience participation via polling so audience can crowd source information and identify industry trends.

Description: FASB has provided broad guidance for application of long-duration targeted improvements (LDTI) in Actuarial Standards Update 2018-12 for U.S GAAP financial reporting. However, the broad guidance provided leads to several interpretations and technology, data and system implementation challenges. During this session, the presenters will focus on sharing the technology, system and data challenges and insights gathered from their FASB LDTI implementation journey, including lessons learned from collaboration with other discipline areas and stakeholders such as finance, investment and IT. The presenters will also discuss methods to overcome challenges and go beyond compliance.

Description: in the insurance industry, machine learning models are increasingly used to make decisions that affect people's lives. In order to ensure that models are fair, they should be audited for bias. There are no hard and fast rules for bias audit; metrics that can be used to evaluate fairness vary depending on the context in which the model is deployed. The presenters in this session present a flexible framework that highlights key considerations in bias evaluation that can be adjusted to suit your process.

Description: This session meets the needs of life insurance actuaries who are focused on experience studies, assumption setting, and/or product development. The presenters will use industry data to illustrate how policyholders react to product design, such as premium jumps in the PLT period and UL with high interest rate illustration, and trends in the life insurance market, including the introduction of smoking distinguished rates and the shift towards an increasing number of preferred underwriting classes.

Description: This session is based on research sponsored by the Society of Actuaries Mortality and Longevity Strategic Research Program, the Canadian Institute of Actuaries, and the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries to develop new methods and tools to enhance current mortality modeling and measurement actuarial practices. The presentation will discuss research accomplishments to date including a new mortality dataset that subdivides the U.S. population by education level and provides insightful analysis on mortality inequalities and mortality by cause of death. Additionally, research currently being performed or planned will be explained.

Description: The presenters will provide an overview of the Canada Pension Plan (CPP), its financial status, recent changes and trends in utilization of the program.

Description: The insurance industry has a lot to learn from academia's missteps. With predictive analytics assuming an ever-expanding role in risk modeling, carriers would be well-served to establish practices that mitigate the creation of faulty models. Hear practical advice on how to mitigate the risks of overfitting, with a focus on how to translate complex policyholder behavior experience data for long-term products into behavioral models using company- and industry-level data.