Description: This article provides a very high level overview of accelerated underwriting programs and their history in the US marketplace. It then discusses setting up an actuarial control cycle for such products and some items related to risk management that are helpful in this setting. Pros and cons of retrospective studies, random holdouts, targeted holdouts and post issue analysis are discussed. A mathematical example of how to estimate the mortality impact of such programs from early emerging experience is provided.

Description: In this article the author discusses the many hats an actuary wears and how risk management comes to play in each one. The roles discussed: 1. Pricing actuary. 2. Catastrophe modeling actuary. 3. Ceding reinsurance actuary. 4. Corporate actuary. 5. Loss reserving actuary. 6. Predictive modeling actuary. 7. Marketing actuary. 8. Underwriting actuary. 9. Investment actuary.

Description: This article is about the annual call for ERM-related research papers that present the very latest in ERM thinking and move forward principles-based approaches. The call discussed in this article was issued in October 2005 and attracted nearly 30 entrants, from which there was one winner and eight more that were selected for presentation at the 2006 ERM symposium. They were listed in the article and can be found, along with the 20 other entrants on the ERM Symposium Web site at: www.ermsymposium.org.

Description: The focus of this article is that while Economic Capital can be a valuable component of the ERM process for insurance companies, an over-emphasis on EC, to the point of neglect of other steps in the ERM process, can reduce the effectiveness of an ERM program.

Description: This article provides background and key results of the Risk Premium Project of the Committee on Theory of Risk [DOTOR] of the Casualty Actuarial Society [CAS]. The project is intended to gather research on risk issues and encourage further development.

Description: This article argues that wealth managers should advocate dynamic spending in proportion to survival probabilities, adjusted up for exogenous pension income and down for longevity risk aversion. The authors criticize the rule of thumb of spending a fixed 'x' percent of assets for retirement planning purposes.

Description: The predictive analytics application growth in the Asia-Pacific region has been gaining momentum.

Description: This article introduces a non-traditional type of economic scenario generator that relies on dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models are complex macroeconomics models and have been increasingly popular in central banks for analyzing monetary policies.

Description: This article from A Year in the Life of the Strategic CRO series explains how to enhance the risk appetite to better support business planning discussions.

Description: This paper applies the research in Prospect Theory of Kahneman and Tversky to explain why sales of annuities lag sales of life insurance products. The author theorizes that life insurance is easier to sell because customers perceive themselves to be in the domain of losses, while potential annuity customers perceive themselves to be in the domain of gains. Kahneman and Tversky showed us that people are mostly risk averse in the domain of gains and risk seeking in the domain of losses. Purchase of an annuity or life product is a risky investment. Customers will find it easier to take the risk in the life insurance domain of losses than the annuity domain of gains. The author then proposes a hybrid life annuity product that might address both mortality and longevity risk in one product that would allow both products to be more competitive than stand-alone products.