Description: Businesses across the board have been drastically impacted by the effects of COVID-19 over the course of 2020, and insurance was not immune. Perhaps most relevant to this industry’s current capital and liquidity concern is the prevailing low interest rate environment. This has been a global trend in the last decade, and treasury rates in much of the developed world are at or near zero. Reduced investment returns limit an insurer’s ability to achieve their desired return on equity, eliminating previously profitable strategies that depended on the leverage of life and annuity balance sheets. Focus and activity have instead shifted to other methods to counteract the low interest rate markets and accompanying capital strain. Examples include increased mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity within the insurance industry and an increasing focus by private equity firms in the insurance market for asset-intensive products, both of which reflect the goal of increasing yield rates on capital.

Description: This research report examines the ban of the use of genetic testing information in life insurance mortality.

Description: The Individual Life Experience Committee is holding a competition encouraging actuaries and other interested parties to predict 2017 industry mortality based on a data set containg 2009 - 2016 data. The competition is not only about predicting mortality, but also about explaining and presenting the results.

Description: The Society of Actuaries (SOA) is pleased to bring you information about the actuarial career path in life insurance and predictive analytics. We’ll continue to share more about actuaries who are tackling some of the industry's biggest challenges and top employers in life insurance.

Description: Meet Christine Hofbeck. Christine is pushing the boundaries of traditional life and general insurance by finding problems and fixing them with new technology, modeling methods and sources of data. Most recently, she built a predictive analytics team at one of the world's largest financial services institutions to support the pricing team for a $5 billion portfolio covering life, disability, critical illness and more.

Description: A look back over 20 years to see how product topics of the day have changed and remained the same.

Description: This paper concerns policyholder dividends on traditional participating life insurance products in regulatory contexts similar to those in the United States and Canada. This paper also touches on annuity products. It was prepared for use in the educational curriculum of the Society of Actuaries. Dividend actuaries seeking references to writings on policyholder dividends to refresh their perspective may also find it useful.

Description: This report describes the main features of structured settlement annuities in North America and current actuarial practices and issues related to this product. It was prepared for use in the educational curriculum of the Society of Actuaries.

Description: Over the past month, the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic has raised questions on how this outbreak will impact life insurance industry claims. This report pulls emerging U.S. COVID-19 hospitalization data and deaths obtained from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) COVIDView, a Weekly Surveillance Summary of U.S. COVID-19 activity, and compares it to data from past U.S. influenza seasons obtained from the CDC’s Flu Activity and Surveillance webpage.

Description: The Committee on Life Insurance Mortality and Underwriting Surveys of the Society of Actuaries Research Institute sent companies a survey in May of 2019 on mortality improvement practices. Note this survey was completed prior to the onset of COVID-19, so that issue was not addressed in this survey. The purpose of the survey was to examine mortality improvement practices with respect to life insurance and annuity pricing and financial projections in both the U.S. and Canada.