Description: Departing chairman’s column recapping past accomplishments and describing future section initiatives.

Description: Summary of the results of the 2011 Life Reinsurance Survey. Included are US and Canadian individual life results for recurring, portfolio and retrocession reinsurance.

Description: Feature article describing how the Society of Actuaries (SOA) partnered with the Association of Home Office Underwriters (AHOU) and the Canadian Institute of Underwriters to conduct research focused on new medical tests and markers that may have significance and relevance to the life insurance markets to get a sense of where underwriting practices are going in the future.

Description: Life reinsurers have done a relatively good job in competing with banks for market share of structured solutions, yet one might conclude that life reinsurers have not done a good job competing with an even bigger and more powerful competitor- the client company’s own retention limit. This article addresses the question: Is there anything a life reinsurer can do to change its business model to serve the needs of a large-retention life insurance company?

Description: The introduction of social media has changed the way retailers market their products and services, consumers make purchases and, most of all, how people behave.

Description: Find information about the Life Reinsurance Treaty Construction. The report’s purpose is to increase awareness of the importance of many reinsurance treaty terms/provisions; identify common treaty structures, practices, and/or solutions in reinsurance treaty construction and negotiation; and illustrate how treaty terms have evolved over time.

Description: This paper aims to help financial and insurance practitioners better recognize, assess, and respond to large scale, large impact, rare events (LSLIRE’s) which are occurrences currently often wrongly labeled as being unpredictable black swans. A black swan, as Nassim Taleb defines it in his popular book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Random House & Penguin (2007-2010 2nd. Ed.) is 1) an outlier event, which 2) carries extreme impact, and 3) “makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact.” Elsewhere, Taleb says it is unpredictable, which is why people concoct explanations. Other people use the term in many and various ways, to enfold events missed by most people because they are rare, missed by computer models and/or experts, and to include events they simply seem personally to have misunderstood. The paper also discusses building better ways to assess such events’ background characteristics, emergence dynamics, logics, and other foreseeable attributes. A secondary focus is educating practitioners to better respond - whether to limit damage or to take advantage of - the opportunities that arise from what others are likely to miss or misjudge during and after the emergence of LSLIRE (AKA black swan) events.

Description: This year’s Survey, its sixth year, further reflects the impact of health care reform and the resulting prevalence of unlimited lifetime maximums on stop loss coverage. Of surveyed plans, 88% report such coverage –a steep increase from 13% in 2010. About half pair an unlimited lifetime with an interim annual maximum of $5 million or less. Premiums continue to rise (to no surprise)and are 60% to 70% higher than levels reported in our initial Survey in 2007. The primary focus of the Survey, current premium rates, is shown in the following graphs and tables.

Description: Summary of current state of A&H reinsurance business.

Description: Describes the changes in insurance regulation on both an international and US perspective.