Description: In this talk, we look at two behavioral aspects: from end customers perspective and through the lens of underwriters. We will examine simple rules to improve the insurance underwriting decision to judge whether a risk is insurable and whether they have impact on increasing underwriting decision quality.

Description: Deciding where to spend that next dollar of capital is at the heart of financial management. Executive teams regularly grapple with decisions on whether to purchase a new Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, invest in growing a distribution channel, expand into a new geographic area, or develop a new product, among many. The great news is there is no shortage of sound financial theory and logical rationale for making these transformational decisions. Yet business literature is filled with examples of decisions that did not meet expectations, sometimes materially missing the mark when comparing experience to assumptions. This is particularly the case with mergers and acquisitions, where multiple studies have shown that a sizable majority of such transactions do not achieve their intended outcomes. While some of the disappointing returns are attributable to random chance and unfortunate circumstances, a material number of them can be traced back to cognitive issues that arose during the decision-making process. Mental shortcuts or heuristics taken by individual decision-makers in evaluating information, as well as organizational dynamics such as groupthink both contribute to sub-optimal choices involving significant outlays of money. Being aware of these and having established protocols to mitigate against them can substantially improve decision-making around capital allocation and reduce misallocation of funds. In this session, the panelists discuss several common cognitive biases that can adversely impact the capital allocation decision process, introducing the notions of time, accounting convention, positivity, hierarchy, and social proof in describing them. Historical case examples of sub-optimal capital allocation are then explored, identifying the contributing behavioral factors including the simultaneous confluence of multiple factors. The panelists will close the session with several suggestions for attendees to consider for incorporation into their decision-making processes. At the conclusion of the session, attendees will be able to: - Learn common cognitive biases that impact capital allocation decisions - Differentiate which biases impact different aspects of the capital allocation process - Build awareness of biases affecting capital allocation decision models - Mitigate cognitive biases present in decision making processes

Description: This article describes risk modeling and how to build a risk intelligence system.

Description: Gather with members and non-members in the China actuarial community to discuss recent topics and related issues in areas such as macroeconomic sharing, pension, investment, product strategy, and more.

Description: Come discuss how reinsurers can work side by side with insurer to better develop products, and lift in the areas that reinsurers have more experience, help matching products with distributions (or vice versa) and provide advanced technologies associated with tools and software. The speakers will also present Direct to Consumer plan from various points of view, i.e., distributors, carriers, and reinsurers. Some case studies will also be presented where traditional reinsurers and asset-intensive reinsurers helped insurers bring products to life.

Description: To cope with the historically low-interest rate environment that we recently experienced, there has been a growing trend among life insurers' investment portfolios to allocate to such alternative assets as collateralized loan obligations (CLOs), rated feeder funds, and collateralized fund obligations (CFOs). In this session, you will gain an overview of alternative assets as we work through answering the following: - What are alternative assets? - Why do insurers invest in alternative assets? - What are the risks of alternative assets? - History of alternatives: How did we get here? - What is currently in the portfolios? - What are the concerns within and outside the industry (without a debate about the concerns)? - What should actuaries be aware of and what role do actuaries play in evaluating portfolio risks?

Description: This is the second part of a 2 part series on Real options analysis (ROA). This article looks into the limitations of using financial option theory when doing real options analysis with projects that are long-dated and uncertain, such as: 1. First-degree homogeneity, 2. Uncertainty must derive from Brownian motion, and 3. Risk neutrality.