Description: In this article, the authors discuss “tail events,” market dislocations deemed a priori, to be statistically improbable.

Description: Based upon Salim Ismael's keynote address at the SOA Annual meeting in Austin as well as his book Exponential Organizations, this article discusses the disruptive power of two significant trends: the transformative power of new, scalable technology, and the generational shifts caused by Boomers leaving the workforce and Millennials' rise to prominence.

Description: This session will serve as a guide on how to implement a factor-based optimization in the Strategic Asset Allocation process. The session will review a factor-based investing approach and cover the top-down macroeconomic drivers of risk and return for various asset classes. We will then illustrate implementation of this investing approach and determination of an optimal Strategic Asset Allocation through a pension fund case study. There will be an interactive element to the session as the factor sensitivities of various portfolios can be examined in real-time.

Description: Disruptive innovation are revolutionising many indusrties. How will it affect insurance?

Description: The financial sector should provide financial security and allocate capital well. As its preeminent professionals actuaries have particular responsibilities.

Description: Highlight the global life reinsurance industry market size, key players and trends impacting the industry, globally and from a high level regional overview.

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: SOA participation in international meetings in India and Russia.