Description: Recently, joint teams of SOA and American Academy of Actuaries (AAA) volunteers have been busy on several such projects, including individual annuity mortality basic, individual annuity reserve, valuation basic table, preneed insurance, and more. This article provides a summary of their work.

Description: View the complete issue for the August 2014 Reinsurance News newsletter.

Description: Summary of the ReFocus 2018 Conference, jointly sponsored by the American Council of Life Insurers and the SOA.

Description: Recent advances in mortality modeling have enabled applicant-specific quantification of mortality risk in life insurance applicants using laboratory and physical measurements. Relative to more conventional underwriting, this approach identifies a small population of significantly under-priced policy and a much larger, cross-subsidizing group whose risk is presently overestimated. Applicants placed in the highest percentile by this scoring methodology are more than 10X as likely to die in a given period as their demographic peers, and represent approximately 5% of short-term claims. Implications for product design are substantial in both the short- and long-term, as the possibilities for adverse selection grow, and the opportunity for fully individualized pricing raises the more distant prospect of products with as many rate classes as applicants.