Description: Understanding Asian Capital Regimes

Description: In this SOA e-course, you'll learn how to develop an enterprise risk management (ERM) framework and help fulfill your SOA CPD requirement at the same time.

Description: Actuaries today have unique opportunities to analyze, understand and use data for strategic decision making. With nearly unlimited computing power and a broad spectrum of data sources at our fingertips, we are enabled to support our actuarial judgment with comprehensive findings backed up by deep data analyses.

Description: Duration matching is a risk management strategy, commonly used in the insurance industry, where the duration (price sensitivity to a yield curve movement) of an asset portfolio is adjusted to be made equal to the duration of the liability. However, this approach has flaws. In this essay, I note some key failures of duration matching and offer a potential alternative.

Description: As actuaries in health care, we spend most of our time focused on reviewing claims, enrollment and clinical data. That information is captured while patients are in health care facilities. Yet most people spend only a small fraction of their time in these facilities. This article explores what types of data are available to actuaries the provide a more holistic view of the member so that a members physical and emotional needs, the social determinants of health can be taken into consideration along with their clinical needs. Two uses cases are presented so actuaries can see how these types of analyses can be leveraged to improve clinical, operational, and financial performance of risk bearing health entities. Understanding the customer (member) not just the patient enables actuaries to provide new insights and values to our stakeholders across a wide range of business and risk applications.

Description: Lifetime pension pools convert a lump sum into lifelong income, periodically adjusting benefit payouts based on mortality and investment experience. Volatility-targeting strategies can enhance benefit stability by dynamically adjusting the investment portfolio’s exposure to risky assets in the context of these pools, demonstrating superior performance compared to traditional static asset allocation methods.

Description: The article provides a summary of key issues presented at the 2023 U.S. Living to 100 Symposium focused on the interests of retirement professionals and retirees. It provides an overview of the subjects covered. The discussion focused on the well-being of retirees and the development of the retirement system. It is focused on late-in-life issues and having the best life possible during that period. It balances technical and lifestyle issues, with an emphasis on mortality and longevity trends and influences. Some of the topics discussed include the impact of COVID, climate, housing, and age-friendly communities. The Elder Tech Symposium was merged into Living to 100 and includes discussion of a variety of technology approaches to improve lives and simplify support. The symposium recognized that the decisions needed and concerns during retirement are different later in life, particularly as people decline.

Description: When designing and pricing a healthcare product, it is not only important to know how to model frequency and severity, but it is essential to understand human behavior. Of course, the issue of anti-selection in medical insurance is well known as individuals know more about their health and prior expenditures than an insurer does. This type of behavior is certainly rational, and to be expected.

Description: Inspired by other financial savings products available to Canadians, this article describes a potential solution for financing future health expenses with the creation of a Registered Health Savings Account (RHSA). This solution has been thought on the basis of four premises : 1- Individual Accountability for Health Expenses; 2- Early Savings Leads to More Accumulation; 3-PreferredTax Treatment for Personal Health Savings; 4- Complementing current public and private health systems; Main elements of the RHSA are described (Contributions, Accumulation, Utilization of account, Management by financial institutions).RHSA'S expected balances and some other results under three scenarios (a person in good health, one in poor health, and one with unexpected death at age 45) are summarized in a table. Health expenses deducted yearly from RHSA's balance were estimated using total, per capita, provincial government health expenditures by age-band for Canada, in 2020, from the Canadian Institute of Heath Information’s (CIHI), which account for 71.8% of total expenditures, that is public + private. Thus 28.2% of total expenditures were used for private health expenditures, then forecasted to 2024 and projected using a 4% annual trend. Some objections to the solution explored were anticipated as well as some refutations to these objections.

Description: Our previous article, “Introduction of Cashflow Matching Strategic Asset Allocation (SAA) Framework,” introduced the concept and included a real-world case study that developed a liability-driven investment strategy for a single line of business (LOB) for a life insurer. This article expands the framework and the case study from a single LOB to simultaneously optimize asset allocation across multiple LOBs. It discusses how this multi-line SAA framework can enable an insurance company to efficiently tag its asset holdings to each LOB, identify opportunities in the public and private asset markets to enhance risk-adjusted returns, and develop a deeper understanding of the trade-off between the degree of cashflow matching and risk-adjusted returns across LOBs.