Description: A discussion of European CFO Embedded Value Guidelines

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

Description: A discussion of regulatory oversight of PBR with two former regulators to give some insight into how your company should be preparing for new PBR requirements.

Description: Presents a practical solution to some of the distortion caused by a typical application of the retrospective assumption update (unlocking) method.

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 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 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.