Description: Chairperson’s Corner: SOA Plans New Risk Management Section

Description: This article examines the emphasis that is currently being placed on assessing, monitoring and managing credit concentration risks.

Description: This paper introduces actuaries and others to dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models, a type of macroeconomic model. Authored by Kailan Shang, the paper illustrates how DSGE models can be used in economic scenario generation to reflect the cause and effect relationships that occur in the economic system.

Description: This paper focuses on business risks rather than market, credit and operational risks. The author proposes a bottom-up approach for modelling and measuring business risk where the dynamic of the underlying earnings is described in a continuous-time model.

Description: Are you interested in alternative investments and their role in professionally managed institutional portfolios? Join us for an engaging discussion that delves into the nature of alternative investments, the reasons behind their increased utilization, and the benefits and considerations of their use. Our speakers, representing both the insurance and pension sectors, will cover various asset classes and provide valuable insights.

Description: Lifetime pension pools convert a lump sum into lifelong income, periodically adjusting benefit payouts based on mortality and investment experience. Volatility-targeting strategies can enhance benefit stability by dynamically adjusting the investment portfolio’s exposure to risky assets in the context of these pools, demonstrating superior performance compared to traditional static asset allocation methods.

Description: We will discuss how climate change risk represents radical uncertainty and the challenges this presents in integrating climate risk analysis and traditional investment risk analysis. The session will then explain and illustrate why deterministic, narrative-based, scenarios form a suitable basis for analyzing the potential impact of climate change on investment portfolios and strategies. At the conclusion of this session, attendees will understand deterministic and stochastic approaches to integrating climate risk with economic scenarios and how these can be applied in investment management. Attendees will also understand the challenges in creating a realistic integration of climate and economic scenarios.

Description: This discussion will cover regulatory changes in the US and Bermuda insurance industry. A regulator will discuss the motivations behind these changes, how the industry has responded, and their outlook on insurance regulation in the coming years. An industry professional will then analyze the investment implications of regulatory changes and how insurers can adapt their investment strategies to take advantage of the new landscape. The discussion will provide insight into recent regulatory developments and their impact on insurer operations and investment opportunities.

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 report covers credit risk loss experience during the period 2003 through 2015 on non-Rule 144A private placement securities (and, with limited exceptions, some specific types of Rule 144A bonds) held by participating companies of the life insurance industry.