Description: Article provides a brief summary of the highlights from a survey completed in fall 2018 covering Emerging Risks. This is the 12th iteration of the survey and provides trends and qualitative comments from respondents on a variety of ER and ERM topics. Climate change and cyber risks continue to lead the responses.

Description: Mandatory implementation of life principle-based reserves (PBR) is just around the corner and there is no shortage of work to do, as most products have yet to be moved to PBR. Oliver Wyman recently completed its 2019 PBR survey, with more than 40 participants covering 85 percent of the individual life market, including 23 of the top 25 life writers and five reinsurers. This article will expand on the key survey findings, including implementation trends, analysis to date, model robustness and common simplifications.

Description: Staff Fellow introductory column with discussion of the role of actuaries for defined contribution plans and recently released research on generational differences in retirement planning and savings.

Description: What risks should ERM actuaries be working on?

Description: This article, Spreadsheet Controls Add Risk Resilience, spotlights why spreadsheets have stood the test of time and how they help contribute to an actuary’s success. It also discusses common causes of data integrity issues relative to spreadsheets. And, offers insight into controls that can be utilized to helps actuaries solve these issues and ensure the accuracy and consistency of the data on which they base their analysis.

Description: Describes the challenges of using replacement ratios for retirement planning and suggests alternative approaches including spending strategies such as the 4% rule or divide your age by 20 (Feel Free spending) rule. Identifies and prioritizes different types of spending needs including sustenance, lifestyle, health care and bequest. In addition the article provides data showing how spending typically drops as retirees age and discusses how to take this into account when planning when to retire or how much to spend in retirement.

Description: This article Provides a description of an IRS Directive that provides a safe harbor tax reporting position for computing tax reserves for pre-2018 tax years for annuity contracts subject to AG43 and VM-21 and life insurance contracts subject to VM-20 Principal Based Reserves methods. The safe harbor is required to be implemented on the 2017 tax return, with certain spread amounts in some cases to future tax years starting in 2018.

Description: This article defines operational risk, gives some real-life examples of improperly managed operational risks and the consequences thereof, and provides advice on steps necessary to mitigate operational risk.

Description: In this article the author discusses the many hats an actuary wears and how risk management comes to play in each one. The roles discussed: 1. Pricing actuary. 2. Catastrophe modeling actuary. 3. Ceding reinsurance actuary. 4. Corporate actuary. 5. Loss reserving actuary. 6. Predictive modeling actuary. 7. Marketing actuary. 8. Underwriting actuary. 9. Investment actuary.

Description: The focus of this article is that while Economic Capital can be a valuable component of the ERM process for insurance companies, an over-emphasis on EC, to the point of neglect of other steps in the ERM process, can reduce the effectiveness of an ERM program.