Description: As of September 2021, there are 8 recorded webinars available for free to Modeling Section members. Each of the 8 are described, as well as how to access them. There are other Modeling Section-related materials also pointed out (podcasts & newsletter)

Description: Call for essays on catastrophe modeling for life & health insurance focusing on impacts of the L.A. wildfires. Topics include risk modeling, insurability considerations, catastrophe event management, and AI's role. Submissions open until June 2025, offering up to $10,000 in awards for selected essays. Publication will follow with author attribution.

Description: Life and annuity markets around the world have seen increasingly complex investment-combined products, including universal life, fixed indexed annuities, variable annuities with a wide variety of guaranteed benefits and indexed variable annuities. Insurance companies are facing unprecedented exposure to financial risks in addition to traditional mortality and longevity risks. The risk assessment and modeling for such complex designs by conventional methods often focus heavily on their market competitiveness and profitability. However, there seems to be a lack of quantifiable and systematic approaches to assess investment risks associated with investment combined products. The objective of the proposed work is to develop a framework for quantifying and analyzing various forms of contractual designs and showcase different techniques to assess the trade-off between competitive contractual designs and their practical implications regarding the difficulty of risk management.

Description: While many know that machine learning is a big deal and even have a general idea of what it is, many do not know what machine learning can do for them. As an alternative to citing achievements or explaining algorithms, this article outlines the challenges that occur in statistics and the solutions that machine learning offers. Some of those challenges include correlated predictors, missing data, data interaction, and prediction intervals. Corresponding solutions include regularization technics, missing value imputation with KNN, tree based models, and cluster analysis for backtesting.

Description: Discount rate curve construction has been a topic of renewed interest following recent changes in financial reporting standards. Interpolation is a key component of curve construction and can be conducted via an assortment of methods. This article explores six popular interpolation techniques and assesses how they perform with regards to desirable features of such methods: continuity of forwards, stability and locality, simplicity, and market consistency.

Description: Article discussing how geospatial imagery and high-resolution image technology are transforming property insurance.

Description: A brief discussion on the importance of governance and documentation being in place. The article provides some resources to assist in the development, and the reasons behind having it in place.

Description: Life and annuity markets around the world have seen increasingly complex investment-combined products, including universal life, fixed indexed annuities, variable annuities with a wide variety of guaranteed benefits, indexed variable annuities, etc. Insurance companies are facing unprecedented exposure to financial risks in addition to traditional mortality and longevity risks. The risk assessment and modeling for such complex designs by conventional methods often focus heavily on their market competitiveness and profitability. However, there seems to be a lack of quantifiable and systematic approach to assess investment risks associated with investment combined products. The objective of the proposed work is to develop a framework for quantifying and analyzing various forms of contractual designs and showcase different techniques to assess the trade-off between competitive contractual designs and their practical implications with regard to the difficulty of risk management.

Description: This is the first of a two-part article introducing and elaborating an “Adaptor” strategy for ERM. Such a strategy is intended to fulfil two purposes: first, switching among four styles of risk-coping strategies in order to track qualitative changes in a business’s risk environment; and, second, to support the business in navigating with resilience through all the seasons of a business-economic cycle, i.e., of boom, bust, moderate, uncertain. This latter requires careful study of the nature of resilience, the familiar idea of bounce back, and the less familiar idea of bounce forward. Part I of our article is underpinned therefore by a supplementary document (available from https://riskviews.wordpress.com/adaptor-exceptionalism/), which addresses the issue of structural change in a business or economy. It draws heavily on ideas taken from the discipline of control engineering, as well as some from ecology, social anthropology, and economics. The entire two-part article is thus an exercise in cross-disciplinary Systems Thinking.

Description: The SOA Research Institute has been publishing its annual Getzen Model of Long-Run Medical Cost Trends for the past decade. The Health Care Cost Trends Strategic Research Committee is looking for a researcher to build on the legacy of the Getzen model and provide annual updates to the SOA’s long-term health care trend projections.