Description: Award-winning essays on addressing unwanted bias in life and annuity insurance processes.

Description: An overview of the evolution of equity-based guarantees (e.g. VA, FIA, etc.) over the last few years and discussion the current lay of the land as it relates to the regulatory, issues, capital markets environment in which these products are offered.

Description: Initiated by the Financial Reporting Section, this paper explores rising interest rates. Following this path, the paper will look at implications of interest rate changes for the life insurance industry, current stress testing practices, and how a risk manager can proactively prepare for an uncertain future. A paper published in 2014 focused on why rates could stay low, and some aspects of this paper are similar (e.g., description of insurance products). This paper also uses a sample model office to help practitioners look at their own exposures. It includes typical interest-sensitive insurance products and how they might perform across various scenarios, as well as a survey to establish current practices for how insurers are testing interest rate risk currently.

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: We're introducing a new “cutting edge” wealth accumulation predictive framework, the predictive equity analytics (PEA) for life products (annuity, insurance, group employer benefits, retirement plan). PEA enables life insurers and policyholders to avoid market downturns and capture returns from equities (stocks, ETFs and mutual funds) predicted to increase in next one to three trade days via fund prediction advisory by insurers, additionally by individual policyholders. The capability does not exist in insurance markets nor in financial intermediary markets.

Description: Regulatory change and increased focus on internal risk management are driving a renewed interest in model efficiency. In this session, we will review several new and existing tools, that show significant promise for advanced modeling of equity linked products. These include: • Clustering • Use of unique--and potentially a different number of--scenarios for each policy • Semi Monte Carlo (SMC) – this is a proprietary technique that is similar to a combination of Monte Carlo and numeric integration • Using a neural network approach to optimize some of the more complex and manual aspects of clustering and improve the fit of the clustered model • Combining SMC with the use of unique scenarios per policy

Description: Retirees will face the societal issue of inadequate savings with likely insufficient time to rectify the situation. They need immediate growth, but also the disciplines of risk management. They typically do not know how to engage with these two aspects in a harmonious manner on their own. Insurance companies are in the business of providing the solution but regulators have been clamping down in favor of simpler and more transparent products. In addition, the market reality over the last decade has been that insurers have stock betas at a multiple to the general markets with PE ratios well below. A panel of senior professionals from writers of retirement product business will present their vision of how the insurance industry can address the above dilemma, including the risks underlying the writing of the business, impact of financial markets, and regulations in the development of the business.

Description: The Society of Actuaries are once again offering a seminar that investigates all aspects of life insurance, annuity and long term care product tax compliance. Developed by the Taxation Section, participants will be brought up-to-date on recent Internal Revenue Service (IRS) guidance and learn about the newest tax issues related to product design and administration. Legal, IRS and product development experts will provide vital insights into the challenges of developing and administering products within the requirements of the Internal Revenue Code (IRC), and allow ample opportunities for networking, questions and information exchange.

Description: This session is open to all, but targeted to pension actuaries looking to understand the mechanics of how PRT is priced by life insurance actuaries, as well as life insurance actuaries who wish to understand how the stream of expected benefit payments and Accrued Benefits Obligation is calculated by Retirement Actuaries. Pension Risk Transfer involves two distinct disciplines of the actuarial profession. To date, understanding the other side of Pension Risk Transfer has been limited. This session will attempt to clarify the mechanics of the other side of PRT and explain how an actuarial model consolidating the two separate sides can be built. Panelists will include a retirement consulting actuary who helps retirement plan sponsors bring their pension plans to market to purchase PRT, as well as an experienced life insurer who works to price PRT.

Description: This session will address the risk management, reserving and capital issues associated with index-linked annuities including financial reporting considerations for FIAs and RILAs, benefits of combining VA and RILA hedging and reserving under VM-21, current and future challenges with FIA reserving under VM-22, potential capital redundancy for FIAs, RILA interim values under AG 54, NAIC economic scenario reform, asset modeling, fund mapping and more!