Description: Letter from the editor, outlining the theme and providing a brief description of each article within this edition of NewsDirect.

Description: In this Pension Section News article from May 2010, Wendy Weiss reflects on her own clients’ retirement savings practices against the backdrop of major industry surveys and studies.

Description: A summary of the Global Trends 2030 report, the fifth such report produced every four years by the National Intelligence Council. The report is based on the research and analysis of the 17 major intelligence agencies in the US. The summary covers the highlights of the report.

Description: Discusses the market, demographic, and macroeconomic factors that affect actuaries' choices for the assumptions they use in the pricing and valuation of many insurance products.

Description: Join the IAJ (the Institute of Actuaries of Japan) as they deep dive the Japan mortality and morbidity trend impacted by COVID-19. During COVID-19, Japan experienced increasing COVID-19 patients and deteriorated morbidity trend mainly due to deemed hospitalization. This was introduced to regard the treatment under the doctors' supervision outside of the hospital as hospitalization, given shortage of hospital beds, and add accident death benefit payment triggered by COVID-19. Expect coverage on the mortality/morbidity analysis comparison in Japan, US and globally, as well as comprehensively discuss how Japanese insurers identified solutions to respond to the changing market. Also, you'll discuss consumers' needs and how more uncertainty drives them to prepare individual lifetime retirement income.

Description: Mortality Improvement is fundamental to setting your mortality assumptions. Creating your own Mortality Improvement assumption may seem like a Herculean task. The truth is creating a mortality improvement assumption with tools provided by the SOA, or the Continuous Mortality Investigation (CMI) make the process easy. Leaving you with the Herculean task of deciding if the assumption you created fits your product. Expect to learn about the CMI tool and the SOA's Mortality Improvement Model (MIM) tool, how you might get data to use in those tools, and what assumptions you need to make outside of data like what will the MI be in 20 or 30 years? Whether it is the general population, a segment of the general population, or certain causes of death, you will get very different answers.

Description: At the conclusion of the session, attendees will be able to understand the potential for using global population health mortality and morbidity data in actuarial contexts. Using the Global Burden of Disease project as a resource, this session will discuss how novel population health research can be used to complement and fill in the gaps of existing input data sources for actuarial analysis and modeling. Presenters will share the latest academic research on the topics of demography, life expectancy, health-adjusted life expectancy, causes of death and disability, comprehensive disease incidence and prevalence metric, measures of disease burden for patients and populations, modifiable risk factors where there are opportunities to make interventions and improve health outcomes, and disparities between and within populations. This research is globally comprehensive and comparable between different markets and disease areas. The session will cover the motivation and purpose of GBD, a brief description of the models used, and dive deep on some selected use cases in actuarial contexts. Audiences will leave with: 1. Understanding challenges and opportunities in measuring disease burden comprehensively and consistently 2. Understanding relevant health metrics, including the drivers of future mortality and morbidity 3. Ideas for applications of epidemiological research in your work

Description: Insurance companies are substantially transforming their finance operating model. This is mainly trigged by the prevailing changes in the insurance regulatory landscape that are leaning towards principle-based reporting and valuation, which is leading to a significant increase in the effort needed for regulatory and management reporting.

Description: This document is an appendix titled "Respondent Demographic Overview and Survey Questions" to a research report on perceptions of insurance and retirement products across diverse U.S. populations. It provides demographic data on survey respondents and includes survey questions related to various demographic characteristics.

Description: The SOA Research Institute’s Aging and Retirement Strategic Research Program and Canadian Institute of Actuaries are pleased to make available the first of two reports that look at Benefit at Risk (BaR) in lifetime pension pools.