Description: Expanding Horizons recently had the opportunity to interview Wenjun Zhu, the winner of the Society of Actuaries’ (SOA’s) third Actuarial Science Early Career Award.

Description: Legacy may seem far away, but for entrepreneurial actuaries, legacy is now. This article shows entrepreneurial actuaries how they can think of their legacy as the breadcrumbs they leave with their teams, their clients, and their community.

Description: This article outlines Georgia State University’s (GSU) innovative approach to actuarial science education in response to the evolving demands of the profession, including data science, AI, and climate risk. It highlights a comprehensive pipeline that supports students from early career exploration through high school outreach, into personalized undergraduate academic paths, and onto professional readiness. Key features include project-based learning integrated into core actuarial courses, hands-on technical training in R and Python, and industry-aligned case studies.

Description: Winner of the Most Unique Vision of the Future award in the SOA’s 2022 Speculative Spectacular Fiction and Art Contest.

Description: This is a continuation of an article published for the speculative future contest in 2023. It mentions how the collapse of China would cause a global recession in 2029 due to the current and predicted geopolitical climate in 2023.

Description: An introductory article describing how Bayesian statistics has evolved over the past 20 years and why it offers the actuarial discipline powerful tools to better understand and manage risk. Compared with traditional (frequentist) and black-box (machine learning) approaches, Bayesian analysis provides explainable models focused on distributions of estimates instad of simply point estimates.

Description: The Federal funds rate increased by 4.25% in 2022 with further increases in 2023, which have already resulted in a liquidity crisis for a few banks. As the rapid increase of the interest rates pushed the new money rates above the yields of many life insurers’ investment portfolios, insurance companies are facing a dilemma between compressed margins from peer pressure and the concern with liquidity shortfalls and realized capital losses should mass surrenders happen. This paper discussed main emerging risks under rising interest rate environment, and several ways to mitigate these risks.

Description: There will be inflection points in the value of an instrument when interest rates change. These inflection points could materially impact the approximation of value change using ALM metrics. In this part of the seven-part series, I will highlight: • How to identify the inflection points; • the range of rate changes where ALM metrics may be relied upon i.e., the “validity” range, outside of which recalculation of the ALM metrics is required and the potential that one needs to rebalance the portfolio; • a technique to improve on the approximation of value change beyond the validity range; and • a technique to convert non-linear change on the yield curve to be used with duration and convexity.

Description: The 2024 Dangerous Risks survey shows respondents react to recent increases in "old favorite" risks as technology evolves and the environment moves away from the pandemic.