Description: Life and annuity markets around the world have seen increasingly complex investment-combined products, including universal life, fixed indexed annuities, variable annuities with a wide variety of guaranteed benefits and indexed variable annuities. Insurance companies are facing unprecedented exposure to financial risks in addition to traditional mortality and longevity risks. The risk assessment and modeling for such complex designs by conventional methods often focus heavily on their market competitiveness and profitability. However, there seems to be a lack of quantifiable and systematic approaches to assess investment risks associated with investment combined products. The objective of the proposed work is to develop a framework for quantifying and analyzing various forms of contractual designs and showcase different techniques to assess the trade-off between competitive contractual designs and their practical implications regarding the difficulty of risk management.

Description: The article discusses PLR 201632004, which addresses the partial annuitization rules of IRC section 72(a)(2) in the context of a deferred income annuity rider attached to a variable deferred annuity contract.

Description: Article Description * “Agile” development is all the buzz in the IT world. You may have heard your IT teams talk about scrums, sprints, and the war room and wondered if they were playing a strange new sport. Or perhaps you are already applying agile techniques in your product development. This article will discuss what agile methodology is, pros and cons, and how you might apply it to insurance product development.

Description: The presenters will review and discuss the recent trend of FIA and Structured Annuities new product development, illustrate the differences and similarities between these two types of products, and discuss how insurance carriers may effectively manage the capital market risk from derivative hedging perspective. Special emphases will be on (1) the performance of customized FIA indices during the recent economic cycles, relative to benchmark equity indices such as S&P 500, and (2) the latest product designs of Structured Annuities and offering rates by insurance carriers.

Description: A review of the development of multi-asset indices and their placement in fixed indexed annuities in the Unites States. This article covers the evolution of indexing and its impact on the annuity marketplace. It also summarizes the key factors underlying the proliferation of multi-asset indices with built-in volatility targets.

Description: This article summarizes key findings from an SOA research report conducted by Milliman on a wide range of living benefit riders with medically related triggers on life and annuity products. The SOA report includes a survey of direct writers, and interviews with many reinsurers. The article focuses on chronic illness accelerated benefit riders, long term care accelerated benefit riders, and the more comprehensive long term care linked benefit products that can pay out benefits that may be much higher than the underlying base plan values. Information on regulations governing these plans, mechanics of the products, sales, and pricing structures is included The intent is to enable the reader to appreciate the issues and opportunities related to these new, innovative designs that help address a range of consumer needs..

Description: Five Insights from the Society of Actuaries Product Development Survey on how to bring products to market.

Description: Provide high level summary of Indexed Variable Annuities.

Description: Between the end of the 80’s and the 90´s, the annuity and universal life market started to develop in Argentina in an environment limited by the volatility of the financial market. As a consequence, plans with Fluctuation Funds were developed and proved to be successful. This paper provides a general overview of this experience and the innovations made in Argentina in this matter.

Description: Read the June 2018 issue of Product Matters published by the Product Development Section. Newsletters provide practical information for the working actuary, articles on trends that impact sections and news about section activities.