Description: Representing a large indexed annuity writer, the speakers will discuss the growth and evolution of the market for index annuity products. Moreover, the challenges that growth has introduced and how those challenges are being met. While much of the market consists of simple, accumulation-oriented S&P 500 based strategies with 0% return floors, a significant portion of industry sales come from more complex products with highly customized index strategies and other features, such as living benefit guarantees. Attendees will gain a broad understanding of the indexed annuity market, product and features, operational difficulties in risk management arising from product design, and how actuarial and hedge professionals are managing these issues.

Description: Accounting Standards Update (ASU) 2018-12, commonly referred to as long duration targeted improvements (LDTI), is the most significant GAAP accounting change impacting the life insurance industry in the past 40 years. This article discusses the impact of LDTI on variable annuities (VA) and fixed indexed annuities (FIA) from a product development and in-force management angle. Detailed discussion topics include hedging and ALM, product strategy and development, and pricing. LDTI will cause many VA and FIA writers to re-evaluate their hedging and asset liability management (ALM) strategy following the move to fair value accounting under the new MRB requirement. Stakeholder appetite for accounting volatility and resulting changes to hedging and ALM may trigger changes in product mix and designs. In addition to updating pricing infrastructure to handle the new requirements, pricing actuaries will need to produce analyses to educate stakeholders on the risks and pricing implications of any changes to designs, hedging and ALM.

Description: 1998 Valuation Actuary Symposium. The panelists discussed product design of Equity Indexed products, interest crediting strategies, investment risks, hedging issues, and internal controls and risk management for companies getting started in the derivatives market.

Description: This session from the 1995 SOA Boston Meeting provides an update on developments in the fixed, variable and market-value-adjusted annuity markets, including product trends such as compensation, bailouts, guaranties, return-of-premium benefit and roll-up benefit. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Vol. 21, No. 4b.

Description: These products effectively provide policyholders access to an equity index with an option pass-through. This new direction blurs the line between more traditional variable annuity and fixed indexed annuity products. This session will discuss these and other similar product innovations, including some interesting regulatory, accounting, and risk management considerations.

Description: The purpose of this paper is to help practitioners and regulators more accurately quantify the potential impact of market risk on insurance products with equity-linked guarantees. To this end, this paper examines time series model selection and assessment based on residuals, with a focus on regime switching models. Also it discusses the difficulties in defining residuals for such processes and propose several possible alternatives. We determine that a stochastic approach to defining the residuals is the only way to generate residuals that are normally distributed under the model hypothesis.

Description: This article discusses a variety of new developments in the annuity market.

Description: Proposes an approach to develop dynamic assumptions for living benefits using a combination of available experience data and predictive modeling techniques.