Description: Discusses the impact Culture has on a team through review of Daniel Coyle's book "The Culture Code". Highlighting application of Daniel's "Ideas for Action" in the author's work & personal life.

Description: Applying Agile Methodologies to Manage Work and Drive Value is intended as an overview of the SCRUM, Kanban, and Lean methods of managing work in constantly changing environments. The value it provides is to draw awareness to the various methods that exist when the goal is to perform work with agility. There are three main sources of information within this version: scrumalligance.org, kanban.university, and lean.org for reference.

Description: The newsletter outlines the book selected for the book club discussion and summarizes the discussions held during the book club meeting.

Description: This is the first installment of a two-part series that aims to provide valuable insights on how a new (re)insurance company can become an attractive destination for actuaries (Part I) and then how to retain them (Part II), thereby facilitating the company’s long-term growth.

Description: A real-life situation is posed involving a management, leadership, or other business decision, and readers are invited to submit their responses to "What Would You Do?" This issue’s case study found amid-career actuary uprooting his family for a new job that involved promotion to Chief Actuary. Shortly after, he found that the company was in serious financial difficulty, and he felt he'd been deceived during the interview process.

Description: The article discusses the use of the keyword strategy in teaching. The literature with a negative view of keywords is reviewed and responded to by advocating keywords with multiple meanings supplemented with relevant instructional guidance. Numerous examples are presented from the SOA preliminary exams. Additionally, advanced use of keywords to problems not having them are presented.

Description: Adjusted earnings has long been a fundamental KPI for investors to assess the core financial performance of a company. As a non-GAAP measure, there is a divergence in practice of how individual companies define adjusted earnings and what activities management views as “core” to their business. The arrival of US GAAP LDTI has led insurers to revisit their existing adjusted earnings framework as the new standard introduces additional “accounting noise” that if left unadjusted obscures the true underlying drivers of performance. This article provides key insights on the influence US GAAP LDTI has had to the adjusted earnings calculation, highlights changes from the pre-LDTI framework, and showcases key themes observed from public insurers 2023Q1 10-Q filings.

Description: The introduction and effective application of US GAAP LDTI have increased the scrutiny of those reviewing the updated financial results. That is because LDTI has resulted in significant changes in actuarial reserving and deferred acquisition cost (DAC) models for long-duration contracts, including significant changes to data, assumptions and required disclosures. In light of the changes, greater reliance has been put on companies’ model risk management (MRM) teams and model validations to assess the conceptual soundness and accuracy of their companies’ actuarial models and to assess that the underlying data and process utilized are suitable and appropriate. This article covers a brief background on model validation, walk through a sample LDTI-focused model validation framework/test plan, then provide insights on common LDTI-related validation observations based on the authors' prior validation experience.

Description: This interview with Andrés Villegas, an Associate Professor at UNSW Sydney, explores his journey from Colombia to Australia, his research on mortality modeling, and his contributions like the R package StMoMo. He discusses the importance of mentorship, industry-academia collaboration, and the role of actuaries in addressing global issues such as population aging and climate risk.

Description: As an addendum to a July 2022 article, this article restates the formulas then presented for a framework to measure the reinsured portion of a direct loss from capping a net premium ratio or flooring a liability. The article corrects a flaw in one of the original formulas and shows, by example, how the framework can be applied to a specific application of reinsurance accounting.