Description: Life insurance products have evolved over time from the early mutual aid societies paying benefits when members died to comprehensive products covering a range of financial needs over an individual’s lifecycle. While some life insurance benefit riders have been offered for decades and are well-established, recent years have seen a number of accelerated benefit riders being introduced by carriers for a growing range of covered triggers. Join us as we discuss these acceleration and extended benefit riders, trends and innovations in the space, and discuss challenges and actuarial considerations in designing, pricing, and modelling them. We will also explore issues carriers have experienced, how to consider the interactions between these benefits and the underlying mortality coverage, reinsurance considerations, and more!

Description: There are a variety of regulatory changes that are being contemplated by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) that have the potential to materially impact actuarial, statutory reporting and disclosure requirements relating to reinsurance. This session will provide an introduction to these changes, explaining both the motivation as well as the potential impact these proposed changes may have on US ceding companies. The focus of the presentation will be primarily on changes affecting Asset Adequacy Testing and statutory risk transfer for combination Coinsurance / Yearly Renewable Term agreements. An update will be provided regarding industry responses to proposed changes and the potential timing for implementation of these new requirements.

Description: Speakers representing investment and risk management teams share how they are integrating climate risks into their investment management practices. We will discuss methods to measure and assess climate risks in the investment portfolio, for both transition risks and physical risks. Speakers will also touch on how climate risks can be integrated into the bottom-up investment process. Lastly, we discuss climate-action-oriented programs to decarbonize investment portfolios and their challenges. At the end of this session, participants will be able to: - Understand methods and challenges to measuring exposure to climate risks in their portfolio - Understand methods and challenges in integrating climate risks into the investment process - Understand methods and challenges in implementing decarbonization programs such as Net Zero.

Description: Value of new business (VNB) is being used by many companies for various purposes including: internal and external financial reporting, incentive compensation, pricing, capital management, and comparing products, distribution channels or regions on a consistent basis. Presenters will discuss how and why value of new business is used within their companies including: the various methodologies considered, some of the benefits and challenges related to implementing VNB, integrating VNB within their business as usual processes, and managing to VNB.

Description: Appointed actuaries are facing a number of changes in the regulatory landscape. Some of these occurred in the past few years, such as Actuarial Guideline (AG) 51 (Asset Adequacy Testing for Long-term Care Insurance). Some were very recently put in effect and are evolving, such as AG53 (Modeling and Documentation of Complex Assets). Some are quickly approaching, such as the potential changes to asset adequacy testing requirements for reinsurance ceded by life insurers.

Description: Generally accepted accounting practices (GAAP) reporting frameworks are more involved than ever before. From disclosures to assumption changes, to interest rate movements, uncovering the drivers of income emergence can prove hard to do, and even trickier to communicate. This session will revisit how the updated standards create layers of complexity and offer ways to sidestep these obstacles to generate useful earnings analysis by various drivers.

Description: Even though the 2018 Tax Cut and Job Act significantly simplified the tax valuation methodology, taxation can impact the valuation outcomes and financial decisions. This presentation will start with an overview of the key taxation topics relating to valuation work, and then dive into more complex topics, such as the deferred tax asset/liability handling and reinsurance implications.

Description: Indexed universal life (IUL) continues to be the most popular universal life (UL) product with sales reaching $1B in Q4 2023, according to LIMRA. There is little long-term experience for IUL and many companies value and model IUL just like UL, but there are material potential differences that need to be considered for valuation and projection purposes.

Description: This session will provide an overview of the challenges found in understanding and managing the medical drug benefit based on standard claims data. Participants will learn what makes coding medical drugs challenging and how to navigate some of the pitfalls when conducting analyses on this important segment of utilization and cost trend.

Description: Hot Topics in Setting Pension Return Assumptions is the third in a series, following Mathematics of Pension Return Assumption and Inflation, focusing on Effects, Forecasts, and Role in Pension Valuations. What time horizon is more appropriate for Capital Market Assumption (CMA) forecasts: mid-term or long-term time horizon, or a blend of both? How do we map the asset classes of a plan's own investment policy to the asset classes of investment forecasters' CMAs? If we use asset-smoothing for valuation assets, should we use market-driven expected returns or smoothed/average versions of them?