Description: The importance of financial wellness has been increasingly recognized in the last few years. More organizations are sponsoring programs to assist people in different stages of their life

Description: Many SOA members are familiar with the Actuaries' Climate Index, the result of an early and critical effort by North American actuarial organizations to grapple with the impact of climate change on our constituents. But did you know that the SOA continues to produce research on the nexus of environmental issues and the actuarial profession? And did you know that under its Strategic Research Program Initiative, the SOA has elevated its commitment to research through the development of a Climate and Catastrophe research program?

Description: Apart from their operating environment and the core risks they help others mitigate, organizations are largely impacted by behaviors--particularly those of their policyholders. This session builds on the first session in this series by considering how medical advances might influence policyholders, while also considering how agents/brokers, product design, and the economy can also be influencers. Weigh whether and to what extent behavioral uncertainties have been adequately integrated into the firms' assessments of business performance, both past and future. The presenters will also highlight activities being undertaken by firms to influence behaviors, in part building on the second session in this series by considering these activities through a regulatory lens. This session is for anyone interested in enhancing their understanding of uncertainty due to behavioral factors.

Description: Insurance commissioners and deputy insurance commissioners will discuss current topics including health care reform, life insurance issues, risks in the major medical markets, voluntary products and other topics.

Description: Gender recognition laws in the U.S. take on many forms and several states have either adopted laws or they are considering them. Learn more about how non-binary is defined, how the laws are changing to recognize non-binary gender identities and how insurance companies are addressing questions like: Do underwriting guidelines need to be gender specific? How do we address gender neutrality when gender impacts mortality? A panel of speakers will present their case studies and lead a discussion with attendees to start a dialogue about this emerging issue.

Description: The presenters will explore the roles of mental health and social determinants of health in the management of a population's total health. We will explore how emerging sources of data and information have led to a renewed focus on managing mental health conditions and social determinants of health. Speakers will address current health care programs that utilize this data and information to manage the total care for populations using predictive models to improve the deployment of resources and initiatives to improve the cost of care and health of populations. The presenters will also look at how providers of care are approaching mental health co-morbidities to manage physical health and social determinants of health in the management of patients.

Description: Ever wanted to do a Kaggle data science competition, but didn't know where to start? This presentation meets the needs of actuaries interested in predictive analytics and competitive data science. The presentation will describe the nature of competitive data science, and provide insights into lessons learned by competing in the Airbus Ship Detection Challenge at Kaggle, as well as other Kaggle competitions. The presenters will provide an introduction to neural networks and describe the nature of the Airbus Ship Detection Challenge and other Kaggle competitions, plus a solution approaches that can be used to obtain top scores using Convolutional Neural networks (CNNs), random forests and boosted trees.

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.