Description: Measurement of the Volatility Risk of Traditional Actuarial Risks for use in pricing and reserving

Description: The article described two methods for calculating the benefit ratio described in AICPA Standard of Practice SOP 03-1. Method 1 calculates the benefit ratio as the quotient of the expectation of A and the expectation of B where A is benefits and B is assessments. Method 2 calculates the benefit ratio as the expectation of the quotient of A and B.

Description: A discussion of a possible replacement of FASB Statement No. 141 SFAS 141. The exposure draft was referred to in this article as “141R.” “141R” provides guidance for application of the acquisition method, which was previously called the purchase method in the case of business combinations. The draft requires that all business combinations including the merger of mutual insurance companies be accounted for by the acquisition method.

Description: A discussion of European CFO Embedded Value Guidelines

Description: Discusses new thinking in regards to risk margins, in the context of fair value and principle-based reporting.

Description: The use of Other Comprehensive Income OCI is receiving its moment in the sun. It is being considered for housing some of the earnings volatility in the International Accounting Standards Board IASB current approach to measuring insurance contracts’ performance.

Description: The authors envision a data warehouse with information at the policy level or lower, and demonstrate how this data can be used to analyze the sources of earnings. The key to their analysis is the data warehouse, which links each policy, not only to valuation assumptions and results, but also to general ledger accounting amounts and to projections - model output that feeds the financial plan.

Description: Discusses methods to efficiently run stochastic models in light of AG 43.

Description: The article describes the impact of AG 48 to a captive reinsurer for a SGUL product.

Description: On October 30, 2015, the SOA Assumption Development and Governance Group, an informal discussion group consisting of nearly 200 interested actuaries with topics pertaining to actuarial assumption development and governance, organized an industry discussion call on end-to-end assumption documentation practices. The purpose of this call was to generate a large list of ideas for best-practice assumption documentation. More than thirty companies were represented in the call, including direct insurers, reinsurers and consulting firms. This article is the work product of the discussion written by Laurie Li and Alex Zaidlin.