Description: Learn industry best practices including challenges faced by retirees, such as needing exposure to growth, most exposed to sequencing risk, and the need for smooth returns to avoid poor investor behavior caused by risk aversion. Other topics will include how to set investment objectives which consider the members’ real-world needs and how to build portfolios and implement risk management strategies to meet those objectives. The speaker will provide real-life examples/case studies.

Description: Representing a large indexed annuity writer, the speakers will discuss the growth and evolution of the market for index annuity products. Moreover, the challenges that growth has introduced and how those challenges are being met. While much of the market consists of simple, accumulation-oriented S&P 500 based strategies with 0% return floors, a significant portion of industry sales come from more complex products with highly customized index strategies and other features, such as living benefit guarantees. Attendees will gain a broad understanding of the indexed annuity market, product and features, operational difficulties in risk management arising from product design, and how actuarial and hedge professionals are managing these issues.

Description: The NAIC has adopted revised VM-21 and AG43 for variable annuities, effective Jan. 1, 2020. The panel of presenters will provide background and an overview of the revisions, discuss detailed aspects of the new CTE Amount Standard Projection and prescribed assumptions, as well as discuss implementation considerations and the implications to hedging. In addition, the panelists will share progress on VM-23, principle-based reserves for non-variable annuities.

Description: Insurance commissioners and/or deputy commissioners will discuss a variety of current topics including health care reform, risks in the major medical markets, voluntary products and other topics. At the conclusion of the session, attendees will be able to identify issues that are on the mind of the regulatory agencies and the different approaches used across the country.

Description: This two part session will review some examples of public and population health initiatives and their economic and business case. It will also talk about the work of the SOA's Public Health Task force and how actuaries can get involved in their communities. We will also provide an update on Social Security

Description: One of the Health Section's key focuses in 2019 is Initiative 18/11. Last year the SOA joined forces with the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) and the Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA) to answer the nagging question: “What can we do about the cost of healthcare?” A steering group has been formed to lead a research project as to what managed care companies can do to reduce costs without sacrificing quality. The project [called Managed Care 3.0 in the 18/11 paper] will examine historical models that have worked as well as investigate the impact that new technologies and care models may have on cost and quality, with the goal of better understanding the current environment and identify­ing potential risks and opportunities.

Description: In this session, we will explore investment solutions that aim to maintain the long-term viability of a pension plan, with considerations on hedging interest rates, credit, inflation, longevity and other risks, while accounting for the many particularities associated with underlying liabilities and their corresponding ramifications.

Description: This practical session would provide a technical overview about GLM techniques and describe how GLM can be applied as a business tool in solving business problems in life insurance. The session would also focus on recent real-world case-studies across different functional areas like pricing, fraud detection, underwriting and product development.

Description: The Shiny web application framework by RStudio has become a popular way for data scientists working in R to create interactive data analytics. When the developer is ready to share their application with others, internally or externally, there are a number alternatives and factors to consider. This talk presents the main Shiny application hosting alternatives and considers their advantages and disadvantages. In addition, the steps necessary to deploy an application on Shiny Server, both on-prem and in the cloud using Microsoft Azure as an example, are described.

Description: What is the future of the Actuarial Profession and the Insurance Industry? Is it possible that the Actuarial Profession will become more empowered by adopting emerging technologies?