Description: Topics will include the tricorder, telomeres and more

Description: This report presents the results of a survey conducted in August and September of 2008 on foreign travel underwriting practices of direct writing companies.

Description: Response to Life Insurance 2020 Foresight – A Call for Essays. An essay stating the author’s vision for the future of the life insurance sector.

Description: A high-level summary of the results of Munich Re's recent Accelerated Underwriting Survey

Description: The SOA, LIMRA and TAI jointly announce a new research project focusing on life insurance impact from COVID-19.

Description: Experts from both the direct and reinsurance side of the table will provide an overview of final expense products and their key features, as well as share experiences that have informed best practices when designing, selling, managing, monitoring and reinsuring these products. Trends in distribution, underwriting tools and other competitive factors will be considered through the lens of managing risk while remaining competitive in the market.

Description: Consumer groups fear that the use of genetic testing information in insurance underwriting might lead to the creation of an underclass of individuals who cannot obtain insurance. Thus, these groups want to ban insurance companies from accessing genetic test results. Insurers contend that such a ban might lead to adverse selection that could threaten their financial solvency. To investigate the potential effect of adverse selection in a term life insurance market, a discrete-time, discrete-state, Markov chain is used to track the evolution of 12 closed cohorts of women, differentiated by family history of breast and ovarian cancer and age-at-issue of a 20-year annually renewable term life insurance policy. The insurance demand behavior of these women is tracked, incorporating elastic demand for insurance. During the 20-year period, women may get tested for BRCA 1/2 mutations. Each year, the insurer calculates profits/losses to date and expected future benefit payouts which determines the following year’s premium schedule. At the end of each policy year, women can change their life insurance benefit, influenced by their testing status and premium changes. Adverse selection could result from differentiated: 1. benefits following test results, 2. lapse rates according to test results, and 3. reactions to price increases. It is concluded that with realistic estimates of behavioral parameters, adverse selection should be a manageable problem for insurers. From Actuarial Research Clearing House 2004, Vol. 1.

Description: This article discusses new tools to underwrite faster, cheaper and better in order to be more profitable and also market to the middle market.

Description: This article provides a summary of “Insurance Coverage for ALL: And How Insurers Can Afford to Provide It”, a session at a recent SOA meeting.

Description: This report presents the results of the Survey on the Business Decision practices of direct companies conducted by the Society of Actuaries Committee on Life Insurance Mortality and Underwriting Surveys. A survey of reinsurers is reported separately.