Description: Mortality improvements have been a steady tailwind for life insurers for decades, but recent mortality results have experts reassessing their longer-term expectations. In session 2 of our future mortality series, join our esteemed panel as we engage in a lively Q&A around the future of life expectancy. Attendees will get their chance to weigh in on the debate through audience Q&A and real time polling tools.

Description: Hear highlights from recently published and upcoming SOA Research, including work on specialty pharmacy and long-term impacts of COVID-19. You will get an overview focused on the financial impacts of these issues as well as trends and other actuarial considerations.

Description: Insurers have long relied on scenario analysis to understand the long-term impacts of potential business decisions, but the advent of rapidly changing market environments and a growing desire to optimize capital has spurred business leaders to leverage new tools in order to explore potential options. Companies are beginning to explore new analytical solutions that trade-off accuracy for speed for a more robust approach to impact quantification. In particular, they are looking at the use of additional what-if scenario models, built from the top down, to support decision-making processes. Actuaries can help take charge in the development of these top-down analyses by leveraging data and actuarial techniques to supplement their existing models. In this way, business leaders can simultaneously rely on the actuarial rigor of typical standalone cash flow projection models, while also receiving support for real-time business decision-making. The potential of what-if scenario modeling can help actuaries unlock a powerful new approach to scenario analysis to enable more rapid decision-making. Learning objectives: In this session we will discuss the fundamental concepts of what-if scenario modeling in an actuarial context, including: - Core principles and components of what-if scenario modeling - Common challenges and considerations around the implementation of what-if scenario modeling - Potential solutions to challenges and their implications

Description: This session on Innovations in Underwriting will explore the latest advancements in underwriting technology and methodologies. It will focus on how these innovations are transforming the insurance industry, making underwriting processes more efficient, accurate, and customer-friendly. Topics will include the integration of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and big data analytics into underwriting workflows. Additionally, we'll discuss emerging trends in risk assessment, automation of underwriting tasks, and the implications of these changes for underwriters and insurance professionals. Attendees will have the opportunity to learn from industry experts and participate in discussions on how these innovations are reshaping traditional underwriting practices. Learning Outcomes: - Gain an understanding of the latest technological advancements impacting underwriting, including AI, machine learning, and data analytics. - Learn how these innovations can streamline underwriting and pricing processes, improve accuracy, and reduce costs. - Explore new risk assessment methods and discover how automation is changing the underwriter's role. - Identify best practices for integrating innovative technologies into existing underwriting and actuarial pricing frameworks.

Description: According to Oliver Wyman's 2023 Asset-Liability Management (ALM) survey, long-term care (LTC), universal life, and whole life insurance products have among the longest liability duration profiles, often with material asset-liability duration mismatches. Deploying an optimal strategic asset allocation (SAA) framework for these products is particularly challenging due to their: - Long-tail profile. Liability cashflows for long-duration insurance products often extend beyond the investment horizon of currently available assets (e.g., 30-year U.S. Treasuries) - Liquidity needs. Depending on the type and age of the insurance product, achieving your desired levels of projected liquidity becomes instrumental Solution: A robust liability-driven SAA framework with an emphasis on minimizing cashflow mismatch while considering a company's risk appetite and investment guidelines aims to reduce interest rate and liquidity risks. Case studies: LTC and life-focused case studies will provide insights into hypothetical SAA frameworks, including ways companies optimize their fixed-income assets. We will also explore techniques used to extend asset duration beyond a typical fixed-income portfolio, using derivatives and alternative assets.

Description: In this session, we will explore recent industry-wide studies focusing on mortality and policyholder behavior patterns across both Life and LTC lines of business. The Life study analyzes extensive data collected over 2018-2022, providing a unique perspective on trends heading into, during, and emerging from the pandemic. The study covers 2.5 million deaths and over 5 million voluntary surrenders and fund lapses across term and permanent life products. The LTC analysis will focus on the components of policyholder termination, with an additional perspective of total termination patterns prior to, during and post-pandemic periods. The analysis will examine cohorts of policyholders to identify the area of largest deviations from expectation and how that translated into short term results as well as where we are today. The aggregation of experience across participating companies provides insights into areas where a particular insurer’s data is not credible on its own, including: older ages, preferred/standard classes and more. At the conclusion, attendees will have an understanding of how experience emerged and considerations for setting assumptions going forward.

Description: The NAIC continues to move ahead with the GOES (generator of economic scenarios) project for the transition to a new real-world economic scenario generator (ESG) prescribed for principle-based reserve and capital calculations. This session will provide a detailed project update from the regulator and practitioner perspective. An overview of model details and methods that have been decided, what remains to be determined, and the projected timeline for implementation will be discussed. Recent developments such as the industry field test and NAIC model office testing to assess the potential impact on reserves and capital will be discussed as will a review of the implementation of the stochastic exclusion ratio test (SERT). We will also discuss the components of the ESG model and the associated scenario sets the NAIC has exposed with respect to target and acceptance criteria. At the conclusion of this session, attendees will understand the current status of the NAIC GOES project and its projected timeline and will be able to describe the components of the model and how the model has been calibrated and validated. Attendees will also appreciate the remaining challenges in bringing the model to full implementation.

Description: Once upon a time, with enough advanced notice and a well-planned out meeting agenda, you could get all the Key Decision makers (KDMs) in the same conference room. Now, many companies have allowed KDMs to move to geographically diverse locations and this is no longer the norm. Has business been impacted? Have productivity and sales been impacted? We will discuss the significant changes that have occurred in our industry when we went from pre-COVID to a post-COVID virtual world. When key contacts and KDM's no longer come into the office 5 days per week, 8 hours each day, how do you visit their office in person? Do all the KDM's still live in close proximity to the office? Are hybrid meetings effective? How do you maintain frequency of contact? In-person, virtual? This will cover learnings, best practices, ways to spur productivity, comradery and new ways of working together more effectively. Sales managers and others can glean helpful insights that will make them more effective in working with and managing their client base.

Description: This session will discuss basic and advanced hedge modeling concepts. It will explain common hedge strategies used to support guarantees and options embedded within life and annuity products and the materiality of these products within the US. Attendees will learn how Machine Learning acts to reduce the computer processing needed to simulate the dynamic hedging of product liabilities projected in the future across many stochastic scenarios. Actuaries working in consulting, software development, and a large life insurance company will provide a wide range of hedging viewpoints ranging from a broad industry perspective to a hedging practitioner. Attendees will obtain a comprehensive understanding of a novel ML approach to modeling dynamic hedges and the hedge optimization opportunity it presents.

Description: Pre-eminent healthcare actuaries and policy experts present their pitch for how they'd fix US healthcare (whatever they think 'fix' means) if they were supreme policy maker for a day. No idea is too big, and no policy dream is too small! Each candidate will have only a short time to win the audience's approval and will need to survive a grilling after the pitch. The audience will vote on the winner, who will be crowned 'ImpAct Meeting Healthcare Policy Wonk' for 2024!