Description: We discuss the challenges of Excel usage in companies, and what needs to be considered in order to develop robust modeling governance.

Description: New International Financial Reporting Standards promise to trigger fundamental changes in the role and significance of actuarial models for insurers.

Description: Comments from Eric Friedman on the paper by David J. Kehler that examines some of the underlying issues associated with public pension plan benefits and financing. It reviews concerns related to intergenerational equity and problems in maintaining the funded status of public DB retirement plans.

Description: Authors’ response to comments by Ryan Labs Asset Management on paper by James J. Rizzo Krzysztof M. Ostaszewski Piotr Krekora.

Description: Comments by Ryan Labs Asset Management on paper by James J. Rizzo Krzysztof M. Ostaszewski Piotr Krekora.

Description: An update on the Capital Market Assumptions used for asset allocation maybe useful to actuaries given the parallels with the assumptions an actuary uses to measure plan obligations.

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: Notes the seminars were almost totally revamped this year with a focus on developments towards Phase II of IFRS. These were held in Hong Kong, Manila and Taipei.

Description: Overview of developments leading to IFRS accounting standard IFRS 17.

Description: Insurance regulations are undergoing a paradigm shift in determining capital and reserves. With Solvency II in Europe and principle-based reserving in the United States, the old formula-based static approach is being replaced or supplemented by a principle-based dynamic method. This change requires enhanced modeling, stochastic simulation and sensitivity analysis, which pose challenges to insurers whose infrastructure has not been built for big computation. This paper introduces a method of building complicated models with small reusable modules and running them on a many-task computing platform to achieve high performance with simplicity. The paper presents an example of a term life insurance model built to take advantage of computer hardware for parallel computing at the task level.