Description: In 2020, the Korean insurance regulator, Financial Services Commission (FSC), introduced a coinsurance structure allowing for full risk transfer—including investment risk, interest rate risk, insurance risk, and policyholder lapse risk—as a permitted practice. Expanding use of coinsurance in the Korean insurance market brings a suite of potential benefits to Korean insurance companies including increased financial flexibility, options to improve policyholder protection and shareholder value through optimization of business strategies. As such, FSC’s initiative and intention to introduce coinsurance opportunities to the market is commendable.

Description: The SOA is interested in understanding how companies are performing scenario analysis, thinking through how various stakeholders (regulators, general public, competitors) could be reacting to a large-scale large-impact event over a multi-year period.

Description: Learn how modernization of data, models, and technology are influencing workflows. This webcast will address how workflows are changing in response to new regulatory requirements and the impacts the changes have on modeling and end-to-end future state operating models. Industry leading actuaries will discuss: How team collaboration can increase quality and speed of reporting to internal and external stakeholders How to strengthen controls and compliance frameworks across finance and actuarial departments How to modernize actuarial input/output for strategic analysis and insights How to attract and retain top talent by improving opportunities for actuaries There will also be dedicated time to ask questions of those who have made the transition.

Description: The insurance industry hinges on accurate actuarial assumptions. This session explores how insurers can leverage AI/machine learning (ML) to unlock greater accuracy and granularity in assumption setting, while effectively managing risks, implementing strong governance frameworks, and meeting validation expectations from regulators.

Description: This is report summarizes the results of a Joint Risk Management Section sponsored study on negative interest rates and the insurance industry.

Description: The introduction and effective application of US GAAP LDTI have increased the scrutiny of those reviewing the updated financial results. That is because LDTI has resulted in significant changes in actuarial reserving and deferred acquisition cost (DAC) models for long-duration contracts, including significant changes to data, assumptions and required disclosures. In light of the changes, greater reliance has been put on companies’ model risk management (MRM) teams and model validations to assess the conceptual soundness and accuracy of their companies’ actuarial models and to assess that the underlying data and process utilized are suitable and appropriate. This article covers a brief background on model validation, walk through a sample LDTI-focused model validation framework/test plan, then provide insights on common LDTI-related validation observations based on the authors' prior validation experience.

Description: Part 2 of a six-part series on the evolution of risk management continues with this article on dynamic financial analysis.

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: Organizations representing the actuarial profession in Canada and the United States have applied an improved methodology to the Actuaries Climate Index® starting with newly released ACI data for fall 2018, and the latest data show the previously reported upward trend in the key five-year moving average ACI metric continues.

Description: Enterprise risk management (ERM) has grown fast in the 21st century, thankful due to a variety of extreme yet unfortunate risk events and regulatory changes. However, challenges continue with many other initiatives competing with ERM for resources within an organization. In this month’s newsletter, we revisit this old yet still important topic and bring a few relevant reports to your attention.