Description: Based upon Salim Ismael's keynote address at the SOA Annual meeting in Austin as well as his book Exponential Organizations, this article discusses the disruptive power of two significant trends: the transformative power of new, scalable technology, and the generational shifts caused by Boomers leaving the workforce and Millennials' rise to prominence.

Description: This article describes techniques and models used to forecast mortality improvement and the considerations that underlie long-term mortality improvement projections in the United States.

Description: Protecting oneself in older age from risks is the sine qua non of retirement planning. But far too many people don’t approach retirement (or retirement planning) well. From a policy perspective, we know about half the senior population will have some sort of long-term care event. We need to recognize that long-term care risk is a component not just of aging but of retirement. Placing long term care solutions in the retirement space is critical to reaching the bulk of the population. Combined with the additional element—recognition of risk—this would be both a powerful protection but also a natural one for individuals to understand.

Description: Why Actuaries Should Welcome Automation

Description: A discussion of the hidden costs of bringing innovative products to market, including the costs of expertise gaps and opportunity costs

Description: This article describes how actuaries can get involved in section research including participation on a Project Oversight Group (POG).

Description: This article deals with enterprise risk management and how the techniques contained within the discipline can help prevent unforeseen large mistakes in strategy, product design, and product management

Description: Summary of the results of the 2011 Life Reinsurance Survey. Included are US and Canadian individual life results for recurring, portfolio and retrocession reinsurance.

Description: This paper aims to help financial and insurance practitioners better recognize, assess, and respond to large scale, large impact, rare events (LSLIRE’s) which are occurrences currently often wrongly labeled as being unpredictable black swans. A black swan, as Nassim Taleb defines it in his popular book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Random House & Penguin (2007-2010 2nd. Ed.) is 1) an outlier event, which 2) carries extreme impact, and 3) “makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact.” Elsewhere, Taleb says it is unpredictable, which is why people concoct explanations. Other people use the term in many and various ways, to enfold events missed by most people because they are rare, missed by computer models and/or experts, and to include events they simply seem personally to have misunderstood. The paper also discusses building better ways to assess such events’ background characteristics, emergence dynamics, logics, and other foreseeable attributes. A secondary focus is educating practitioners to better respond - whether to limit damage or to take advantage of - the opportunities that arise from what others are likely to miss or misjudge during and after the emergence of LSLIRE (AKA black swan) events.

Description: This year’s Survey, its sixth year, further reflects the impact of health care reform and the resulting prevalence of unlimited lifetime maximums on stop loss coverage. Of surveyed plans, 88% report such coverage –a steep increase from 13% in 2010. About half pair an unlimited lifetime with an interim annual maximum of $5 million or less. Premiums continue to rise (to no surprise)and are 60% to 70% higher than levels reported in our initial Survey in 2007. The primary focus of the Survey, current premium rates, is shown in the following graphs and tables.