Description: How do we take a Minimum Viable Products (MVP) approach to launch new insurance products? Join this moderated discussion and focus on three key development aspects: Distribution, Systems, and the design and pricing of the Insurance product itself. Come discuss reasons to choose an MVP approach and how it solves many of the product launch challenges.

Description: The Mortality Improvement subgroup of the American Academy of Actuaries’ Work Group and the Society of Actuaries’ Mortality and Longevity Oversight Advisory Council released a recommendation for a set of improvement factors that vary by gender and attained age to be used in conjunction with the 2008 Valuation Basic table or the 2015 Valuation Basic table for AG-38 purposes. This recommendation has been adopted by the NAIC’s Life Actuarial Task Force.

Description: Mandatory implementation of life principle-based reserves (PBR) is just around the corner and there is no shortage of work to do, as most products have yet to be moved to PBR. Oliver Wyman recently completed its 2019 PBR survey, with more than 40 participants covering 85 percent of the individual life market, including 23 of the top 25 life writers and five reinsurers. This article will expand on the key survey findings, including implementation trends, analysis to date, model robustness and common simplifications.

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.

Description: This article helps companies better understand the currently proposed upcoming VM-22 regulation by comparing the VM-22 measurement model to LDTI MRBs. The article highlights key considerations as companies plan for adoption of these two measurement models. These considerations should help inform a company’s strategy related to the business impacted by these standards.

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: "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: Feature article discussing how the insurance industry can better serve the middle income sector. The author cites LIMRA's latest study on personal ownership of life insurance which reveals an under-served and poorly served market. Improvements in marketing, distribution, and the issue process are the keys, in the author's opinion to improvement.

Description: description of theme of the 2017 Canadian Reinsurance Conference

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.