Description: Hear highlights from recently published and upcoming Society of Actuary (SOA) Research Institute reports, Including work on specialty pharmacy and the long-term impacts of COVID-19. Join us as we focus on the financial impacts of these issues as well as trends and other actuarial considerations.

Description: For insurers to preserve and create value, they must understand their exposure to carbon and climate risks and develop decarbonization strategies. Transition plans facilitate this by encouraging organizational thinking and disclosure to the market. 2023 is a crucial year for progress on these initiatives amid evolving regulatory expectations. This session will provide an overview of the transition planning process, value creation and drivers identification, and how to incorporate these into transition and resiliency strategies. As part of climate risk mitigation strategies during transition and beyond, we will present a data and technology framework for insurers to more effectively manage climate risk. In particular, we will discuss dynamic climate risk management (DCRM) solutions which use data and technology to inform adaptation and resilience. Emerging technologies such as AI, IoT, and blockchain can also help insurers manage risks related to climate change more effectively. By attending the session, attendees will learn how to develop transition plans, adopt DCRM solutions and leverage emerging technologies to build resilience against the challenges caused by climate change.

Description: Mortality Improvement is fundamental to setting your mortality assumptions. Creating your own Mortality Improvement assumption may seem like a Herculean task. The truth is creating a mortality improvement assumption with tools provided by the SOA, or the Continuous Mortality Investigation (CMI) make the process easy. Leaving you with the Herculean task of deciding if the assumption you created fits your product. Expect to learn about the CMI tool and the SOA's Mortality Improvement Model (MIM) tool, how you might get data to use in those tools, and what assumptions you need to make outside of data like what will the MI be in 20 or 30 years? Whether it is the general population, a segment of the general population, or certain causes of death, you will get very different answers.

Description: Life insurers have been allocating to alternative investments (private credits, real assets, private equities) in the past decades, searching for higher yields. Examine the macro trend in insurer's investment allocation, definitions of alternative investments, benefits of investing in them as well as consideration of regulatory complications involved. Come learn about alternative asset classes, best practice in ALM and regulatory trends in insurance asset management.

Description: Statutory and GAAP metrics are useful for external audiences such as regulators and investors since they provide a consistent framework for viewing and comparing multiple companies at a point in time. However, their uses are more limited for managers who require more real-time information in making strategic decisions. Many insurers are developing internal metrics such as Value of New Business (VNB) for better profitability insights at the point of sale, to understand how new business profitability changes over time and to allow for quicker decision making. By leveraging existing models and reporting processes, insurers can reduce the additional effort involved in applying VNB toward applications such as pricing, capital allocation and risk management. Find out more about key considerations for developing and using VNB.

Description: Human longevity is one of the great success stories of the past century, and there is growing consensus that there are further gains to come. What will these future gains look like, where will they come from and how likely are they to happen. Furthermore, how do we as actuaries deal with the uncertainty when trying to predict future long-term mortality improvements more than 20 years into the future. This is one of the most important assumptions on the balance sheet that insurers and reinsurers make, so it is important to have a strong perspective on it. Our presentation will give attendees a view into some of the core components of how to assess long-term mortality improvements by looking at the cyclical nature across different countries of life expectancy. It will also deep dive into the different drivers of life expectancy over the past cycle driven largely by improved diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular disease (CVD) and cessation of smoking, which ended in about 2010. It will then discuss how population mortality improvement has slowed and plateaued in many major countries.

Description: The frequent use and complexity of today's actuarial projection models have increased the importance of efficient models. Model optimization can reduce both cloud costs and overall end-to-end clock times. This, in turn, enables companies to do more with less, such as reducing close times, increasing controls, enhancing analysis, doing more complicated calculations, and/or improving employee workloads during the close. From design and data to execution and audit, join us to explore techniques that can be applied throughout the actuarial modeling process to optimize actuarial models for improved run-time, accuracy, and reliability. We will focus on techniques that don't rely on model compression.

Description: What learnings and challenges did 2023 Long Duration Targeting Improvement (LDTI) adopters experience? What's ahead for 2025 adopters? And how do companies leverage LDTI to improve data and analytics and benefits operations? Join the session for a deep dive into what's next on the horizon.

Description: Modifiable risk factors stand out today as significant contributors to diseases, and yet we as an industry haven't tackled this. Instead, we sit by almost passively as obesity, diabetes and hypertension rates continue to skyrocket. In fact, obesity and overweight is now over 70% of the US population and has turned into the forgotten pandemic. Globally, no country in the world has improved their obesity percentage rates during the past 15 years. Insurers are starting to explore health interventions which have the potential to reduce claims and change people's behavior.

Description: The Canadian Institute of Actuaries (CIA) and Society of Actuaries (SOA) engaged RGA Reinsurance Company (RGA) to undertake a research project on level premium term life insurance products with a particular focus on the magnitude and impact of the “shock lapse” at the end of the level premium period. This project is similar to the SOA-sponsored research completed by RGA in 2014 for USA business.