Description: This essay advocates for the consideration of risk in an interdisciplinary framework. An "effective resilience" metric is introduced as a way to reflect an organization's exposure and response to an adverse event, and to measure the ability of the organization to mitigate and recover from the resulting reduction in its operating level. Part of the essay collection "Risk Metrics for Decision Making and ORSA"

Description: Response to David Kausch’s comments on the paper.

Description: Increasing uncertainties and volatility in financial as well as real goods markets increasingly reveal that controlling systems based on deterministic and pseudo-exact values are insufficiently eligible to manage the business activities. This raises the question how management systems can be modified to generate the adequate management impulses in volatile periods. Risk management deals from identifying, evaluating and aggregating chances and risks, which again determine the potential fluctuation range of relevant performance indicators. Everyday corporate life shows that risk management is considered important; but the corresponding processes to identify, evaluate and report chances and risks are seldom part of established decision criteria. This “paradox” lets assume that risks are managed in various differing and unsystematic ways. The combination of traditional controlling methods and risk management is not primarily a methodological challenge. The behavior of the whole organization, practiced over a long-year period, has to be transferred into a new corporate culture of transparent dealing with chances and risks. This paper describes the necessary change management process, which has to come along with necessary methodological modifications.

Description: “Non-traditional” guarantees refer to guarantees that are in addition to traditional mortality, expense, and interest guarantees. Examples of such types of guarantees are death and living benefits on variable annuity contracts and no-lapse guarantees on universal life or variable universal life products. The purpose of this paper is to offer practitioners an overview of the various issues concerning the pricing of these guarantees, the many other issues which need to be analyzed and addressed in the determination of risks and the management of the block of business, and the results of a company survey of practices. This paper is based on the working knowledge of the authors, a broad compilation of literature and the company survey results. At the end of most sections of the paper, we have provided a list of resources which we have selected as some of the best sources available for those practitioners interested in researching the subject matter further.

Description: The purpose of this article is to discuss potential issues and considerations that may be encountered with the implementation of VM 20. Crucial considerations include the modeling software used, validation effort, assumptions used, complexity of the process, documentation, and run time. A key takeaway is that an integrated modeling platform with solid automation and asset-liability capabilities is imperative for addressing the issues and considerations encountered.

Description: A discussion of some of the economic advantages of Offshore Life Reinsurance

Description: This article addresses issues of importance to HMO excess reinsurance purchasers when negotiating a reinsurance treaty.

Description: The ORSA (Own Risk and Solvency Assessment) for ERM frameworks and processes is continuing to be implemented by organizations.

Description: Read the French language version of the December 2016 issue of Risk Management published by the Joint Risk Management Section. Newsletters provide practical information for the working actuary, articles on trends that impact sections and news about section activities.