Description: It's your first full day of productive learning! Join us for the opening session to celebrate the volunteers, hear from 2023–2024 SOA President and Chair Tim Rozar on the SOA’s strategic plan, and gain insights from the keynote presentation on AI and ethics.

Description: Insurers have long relied on scenario analysis to understand the long-term impacts of potential business decisions, but the advent of rapidly changing market environments and a growing desire to optimize capital has spurred business leaders to leverage new tools in order to explore potential options. Companies are beginning to explore new analytical solutions that trade-off accuracy for speed for a more robust approach to impact quantification. In particular, they are looking at the use of additional what-if scenario models, built from the top down, to support decision-making processes. Actuaries can help take charge in the development of these top-down analyses by leveraging data and actuarial techniques to supplement their existing models. In this way, business leaders can simultaneously rely on the actuarial rigor of typical standalone cash flow projection models, while also receiving support for real-time business decision-making. The potential of what-if scenario modeling can help actuaries unlock a powerful new approach to scenario analysis to enable more rapid decision-making. Learning objectives: In this session we will discuss the fundamental concepts of what-if scenario modeling in an actuarial context, including: - Core principles and components of what-if scenario modeling - Common challenges and considerations around the implementation of what-if scenario modeling - Potential solutions to challenges and their implications

Description: According to Oliver Wyman's 2023 Asset-Liability Management (ALM) survey, long-term care (LTC), universal life, and whole life insurance products have among the longest liability duration profiles, often with material asset-liability duration mismatches. Deploying an optimal strategic asset allocation (SAA) framework for these products is particularly challenging due to their: - Long-tail profile. Liability cashflows for long-duration insurance products often extend beyond the investment horizon of currently available assets (e.g., 30-year U.S. Treasuries) - Liquidity needs. Depending on the type and age of the insurance product, achieving your desired levels of projected liquidity becomes instrumental Solution: A robust liability-driven SAA framework with an emphasis on minimizing cashflow mismatch while considering a company's risk appetite and investment guidelines aims to reduce interest rate and liquidity risks. Case studies: LTC and life-focused case studies will provide insights into hypothetical SAA frameworks, including ways companies optimize their fixed-income assets. We will also explore techniques used to extend asset duration beyond a typical fixed-income portfolio, using derivatives and alternative assets.

Description: Once upon a time, with enough advanced notice and a well-planned out meeting agenda, you could get all the Key Decision makers (KDMs) in the same conference room. Now, many companies have allowed KDMs to move to geographically diverse locations and this is no longer the norm. Has business been impacted? Have productivity and sales been impacted? We will discuss the significant changes that have occurred in our industry when we went from pre-COVID to a post-COVID virtual world. When key contacts and KDM's no longer come into the office 5 days per week, 8 hours each day, how do you visit their office in person? Do all the KDM's still live in close proximity to the office? Are hybrid meetings effective? How do you maintain frequency of contact? In-person, virtual? This will cover learnings, best practices, ways to spur productivity, comradery and new ways of working together more effectively. Sales managers and others can glean helpful insights that will make them more effective in working with and managing their client base.

Description: Mortality Model Selection and Combination in RAlternative approaches for selecting mortality models and forecasting mortality have been proposed. The usual practice is to base mortality forecasts on a single mortality model selected using in-sample goodness-of-fit measures. However, cross-validation and other alternative out-of-sample measures are increasingly being used in model selection, and model combination methods are becoming a common alternative to using a single mortality model. Such methods combine predictions from multiple mortality models to reduce model choice uncertainty and improve forecast accuracy. Explore techniques to select and combine mortality models using the freely available open source R package CoMoMo (https://github.com/kessysalvatory/CoMoMo), which extends the widely used R package StMoMo (https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=StMoMo). We will use data for the USA and other countries to discuss and demonstrate four different model combination approaches including simple model averaging, Bayesian model averaging, model confidence set, and stacked regression ensembles.

Description: "Hear AM Best rating analysts discuss the rating process and the best capital adequacy ratio (BCAR), a quantitative foundation for AM Best’s assessment of carriers’ financial strength. The benchmarking of BCAR scores for various company types (national MCOs, BCBS plans, smaller regional plans) will be discussed. Look at how changes in investment and underwriting environment impacted the results over the past several years. Further, AM Best’s view of the quality of capital and various factors impacting the overall assessment of the balance sheet strength will be discussed. By attending this session, you will: Gain an understanding of AM Best’s building block approach to ratings and how the BCAR results fit into the process. Learn the differences between RBC and BCAR models. Learn how various factors—e.g. liquidity, financial flexibility, financial leverage, the org structure—impact the final AM Best assessment of health companies' capital."

Description: "Living to 100 in the time of COVID-19: A Study of Late –Life Mortality Trajectories, Leonid A. Gavrilov, Ph.D., Natalia S. Gavrilova, Ph.D., Academic Research Centers, NORC at the University of Chicago Swedish Mortality Does Not Decelerate in Recent Cohorts, or Does it? – Roland Rau, Ph. D., Professor, University of Rostock & Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany; Marcus Ebeling, Ph.D., Karin Modig, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Anders Ahlbom, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm Sweden; Kai Kaufhold, Aktuar DAV, Ad Res Advanced Reinsurance Services GmbH, Cologne, Germany; Annika Ziegler, Lukas Stake, Hochschule Koblenz & Ad Res, Germany"

Description: Risk is opportunity! Equipped with skills to analyze risks, actuaries are no longer limited to applying these skills solely within traditional actuarial roles. Listen in as the presenters share their career experience in a non-traditional role and provide insights on how being an actuary can bring additional value to the profession.

Description: With large public filers having adopted LDTI in 2023, company practices are continuing to evolve as it relates to experience monitoring, assumption unlocking, as well as both internal and external communication and disclosures related to assumptions. In this diverse session featuring representatives from both insurance companies as well as industry analysts, we'll explore how companies approach emerging experience in a given year through a case study approach. The moderator will explore various topics such as off-cycle experience monitoring, experience outliers, simplifications and approximations, and materiality considerations. Each 'what-if' scenario will start with a prompt from the moderator, discussion among the industry panelists as to how they would approach the situation within their own organization, followed by commentary from the analysts as to how they might expect companies to respond in each case. Audience participation will be encouraged to explore potential alternative approaches in an engaging, interactive session.

Description: This video from Ben Keslowitz explains the concept of reinsurance, which is a financial arrangement where insurance companies transfer portions of their risk portfolios to other parties, known as reinsurers. This helps insurers manage large or catastrophic claims and optimize their risk components. The video also covers different types of reinsurance, such as proportional liability reinsurance, non-proportional reinsurance, and quota share coinsurance, each serving different purposes in risk management. Additionally, it discusses the reasons insurers might choose to reinsure their business, including liability risk mitigation, investment risk transfer, and entering new markets.