Description: The cloud inspires awe and fear in equal parts these days. There is a need to learn more, but there’s much information to learn and it may be difficult to know what to learn next. In this session, we’ll carve off a small corner of the cloud and make it your own. Setting up a Data Science Virtual Machine on Digital Ocean will be demonstrated. It’s the fastest way to get a data science development environment setup for your own use. Many of the topics and ideas covered will apply to almost all other cloud offerings. What use cases Digital Ocean is good for, and what use cases you should look elsewhere for, will also be discussed.

Description: In this session, attendees will learn about the state of the developing reinsurance market for Pension Risk Transfer/Group Annuities in the United States. Discover fundamentals of the primary (group annuity) market and evaluate market forces influencing the lack of significant reinsurance volume of the same nature. This will include a compare and contrast to the PRT and PRT reinsurance markets in other regions that have seen material secondary market volume (such as the UK).

Description: Technology is transforming the retirement space and more changes are expected in the future. Join a panel of experts to discuss what are the opportunities, trends and challenges associated with new technologies in the retirement landscape and how it is expected to impact consumers, if we can enable their successful integration.

Description: Today's actuarial teams dedicate substantial time and resources to maintain strong frameworks for risk management and control. Current practices typically endure this as a sunken cost, yielding minimal value beyond SOX/MAR/COSO compliance and basic error prevention. With a small up-front time investment, and a willingness to approach these activities with an open mind, the functionality of existing compliance activities can be completely transformed. Compliance activities, once a sunken time cost, can be elevated to deliver more insightful analysis to stakeholders.

Description: Understanding changing market conditions and various regulatory regimes is important to maximize shareholder value through the use of efficient capital. This session will educate on the solvency requirements for Bermuda, U.S., Canada and the European Union and highlight key differences among the four regimes. The presenters will compare the Total Balance Sheet Requirements for the four jurisdictions for a block of long-duration insurance contracts. The focus will be to compare and contrast the solvency requirements:

Description: Certain valuation assumptions are difficult to set with a high degree of accuracy, whether because the underlying experience is in different economic or interest rate environments, in addition to other reasons. Examples include assumptions for long-term care insurance, annuity options, lapsation and premium persistency on ULSG. This session will share how the actuary can use predictive analytics to augment the assumption-setting process. Some of the benefits to the actuary (along with the company and the regulator) include more accurate assumptions with lower margins for adverse deviations. Of possible interest as well is that applications go beyond valuation and include acquisitions, reinsurance and pricing.

Description: Baseline and what-if/stressed projections of cash flows, financial statements and capital requirements are critical inputs to a range of business purposes, including forecasts, risk management, liquidity management, strategic decision making, etc. Forward looking projections have historically been inefficient and performed in silos making it difficult to scale the process as CFOs and CROs ask for more. In this session we discuss challenges of the forecast process and opportunities to meet desired future capabilities. We will also discuss “what-if” analysis and ways to support production of forward looking projections for “what-if” analysis in an efficient way.

Description: This session will cover lessons learned during the course of implementing PBR by the panelists. It will focus on areas that were difficult to interpret, unexpected issues and managing the process. It will focus on potential stumbling blocks from an implementation, pricing and product development standpoint. There will also be an overview of YRT treatment to date and an update on any emerging best practices.

Description: Regulatory change and increased focus on internal risk management are driving a renewed interest in model efficiency. In this session, we will review several new and existing tools, that show significant promise for advanced modeling of equity linked products. These include: • Clustering • Use of unique--and potentially a different number of--scenarios for each policy • Semi Monte Carlo (SMC) – this is a proprietary technique that is similar to a combination of Monte Carlo and numeric integration • Using a neural network approach to optimize some of the more complex and manual aspects of clustering and improve the fit of the clustered model • Combining SMC with the use of unique scenarios per policy

Description: Investment risk management has become a core competency of insurance companies, and much has been discussed on this topic. This session examines the current investment risk management practices such as product line specific hedging and macro hedging, with a focus on what still remains to be addressed—whether the tradeoff of addition risk management is worthwhile.