Description: Decentralized insurance alternatives is a rapidly expanding sector of Decentralized Finance (DeFi), an emerging and growing financial ecosystem powered by blockchain technologies. The purpose of this report is to review and discuss the business models and operating designs of decentralized insurance alternatives, which may have significant implications for traditional insurance businesses, as well as the actuarial profession.

Description: This article questions the validity of long term market return expectations using macroeconomics and analytical arguments.

Description: Table from an article from The Actuary Magazine entitled Outsourcing of General Account Investments.

Description: The Society of Actuaries’ Committee on Post-Retirement Needs and Risks (CPRNR) commissioned Linda Koco to write this guide that employers can use when considering advice options for a company retirement plan. The guide includes information about the nature and timing of decisions, ongoing decisions after retirement, and advice considerations. The guide is intended to be unbiased toward any particular approach or organization’s product. This guide does not provide advice for specific situations and should not be construed as doing so. It is an information tool for considerations related to advice. The guide is not intended to provide legal guidance or recommendations.

Description: This paper investigates the implications of using the Basel II motivated Advanced Measurement Approaches as a method to assess operational risk capital charges for banks and insurance companies with regard to U.S. regulations. The AMA developed in the paper uses actuarial loss models complemented by the extreme value theory to determine the empirical probability distribution function of the aggregated capital charges in the context of various classes of copulas. From Actuarial Research Clearing House, 2006.

Description: This paper evaluates the current practice of operational risk management in the insurance sector. Operational risk is nothing new in insurance, but, because of regulatory requirements, companies have initiated computation of risk capital for their operational losses. The current effort to manage operational risk is not a naturally evolving phenomenon, and operational risk, in the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision’s Basel II definition, is unlikely to be a significant cause of insurers’ failure. In addition, the current Basel II definition of operational risk is not suitable for the insurance sector. Consequently, the invention of models and tools based on the definition is incomplete and illusionary. My findings are based on the analysis of dozens of interviews with insurance industry professionals. I demonstrate the way operational risk is quantified in practice, show that the result obtained from this computation is of littl e use in managerial decision making and propose a set of policy recommendations illustrating the characteristics of operational risk in insurance. This study can be used as a platform for launching dialogues to initiate fresh thinking about operational risk in insurance beyond the current artificial and narrow boundaries.

Description: The Society of Actuaries (SOA) has partnered with LIMRA and the American Council of Life Insurers (ACLI) to conduct a series of ‘sprint’ surveys on the COVID-19 pandemic and its potential impacts on the insurance industry. Because market conditions greatly impact the value of insurance companies’ assets and liabilities, one of these “sprint” surveys focused on best practices around asset and liability management (ALM). The survey was directed at actuaries, investment managers, and risk managers directly involved in assessing the impact of recent events on ALM. Responses to the survey were collected between August 17-31, 2020. Twenty-six companies responded to the survey.

Description: This article provides a summary of the research paper and Excel-based tool that can be found on the SOA’s website at Regulatory Capital Adequacy for Life Insurance Companies: A Comparison of Four Jurisdictions | SOA.

Description: The Casualty Actuarial Society, the Society of Actuaries Research Institute, the Society of Actuaries Joint Risk Management, Reinsurance and Financial Reporting Sections are pleased to make available key findings from the 2022 Emerging Risks Survey, the sixteenth in the series. Conducted by Max J. Rudolph of Rudolph Financial Consulting LLC, the survey incorporated a set of Emerging Risks defined by the World Economic Forum as the basis for several of the questions. The survey also included questions related to current risk management topics.