Description: On January 12, 2023, the Arizona Blockchain Applied Research Center (AZ BARC) and the SOA Research Institute jointly ran a workshop on the use of blockchain technology in insurance and financial industries. The workshop included presentations focused on academic research in the blockchain space by Arizona State University, AZ BARC and an industry expert panel assembled by the SOA Research Institute. This document summarizes the research highlights and the discussions that occurred during the two-hour workshop.

Description: In the fourth quarter of 2022, publicly traded life insurers reported on their financial and operational activities, which included a downturn in income from alternative investments, the continuing impact of COVID, the impact of equity market returns on variable annuity products, and growth trends related to pension risk transfer transactions.

Description: LIMRA, Reinsurance Group of America (RGA), the Society of Actuaries (SOA) Research Institute, and TAI have collaborated on an ongoing effort to analyze the impact of COVID-19 on the individual life insurance industry’s mortality experience and share the emerging results with the insurance industry and the public. This report documents a high-level analysis of the claims that have been reported.

Description: The Mortality Improvement Life Working Group released a recommendation for a set of improvement factors that vary by gender and attained age to be used in conjunction with the 2008 Valuation Basic table or the 2015 Valuation Basic table for AG-38 purposes.

Description: SOA and LIMRA request mortality data for deferred annuities issued 2015–2024 to support an updated industry experience study.

Description: Seeking proposals to study PBR implementation and its regulatory, operational, and financial impact across the life insurance and annuity industry.

Description: The Society of Actuaries (“SOA”) Research Institute is the research arm of the SOA, providing objective, data-driven research that brings together tried and true practices and future-focused approaches to address societal challenges and business needs. The Institute provides trusted knowledge, extensive experience and new technologies to help effectively identify, predict and manage risks.

Description: In recent years, the domestic insurance brokerage channel has witnessed significant breakthroughs. As a company with multi-channel development strategy, Aviva-Cofco Life also faces the challenge of channel conflicts in the rapid growth of both individual and brokerage channels. The presenter will share Aviva-Cofco's experiences, lessons learnt, gains and losses in product development in response to channel conflict, and introduce some of the practices of foreign markets for reference.

Description: The speakers will discuss the replication of long-term options, including a discussion of issues such as liquidity, transaction costs, slippage, impact of policyholder behavior, and machine learning algorithms to improve hedge effectiveness.

Description: The speaker will discuss the training of neural networks to compute future Greeks of liabilities (or options) without the use of nested stochastics.