Chairperson’s Corner

By Yiru (Eve) Sun

Reinsurance News, February 2025

I am deeply honored to have been elected as chair of the SOA Reinsurance Section. During my tenure as a council member from 2023 to 2024, I served as the Marketing & Membership Coordinator and had the privilege of witnessing our section grow from 1,700 members to 3,300 within a year. This rapid expansion underscores the growing interest in reinsurance across the industry—from those actively using reinsurance, to those eager to learn more.

As for myself, I work at Aon, a reinsurance brokerage that represents insurance companies as clients, where my role closely aligns with the Reinsurance Section’s mission: To bridge the gap between insurers and reinsurers. This means helping each side better understand the other’s needs, challenges, and opportunities to create mutually beneficial solutions. Drawing from the first decade of my career as an actuary at New York Life and AIG, I bring insight into the priorities and concerns of direct insurers. As Reinsurance Section chair, I am committed to supporting initiatives that foster collaboration, build connections, and drive meaningful progress.

Industry Survey to Guide Our Work

To identify key areas of focus, we plan to launch an industry survey in the coming months. The insights gathered will help guide us on selecting research projects, arranging fundings, recruiting speakers for conference presentations and webcasts. Based on recent discussions with industry leaders, several topics have already emerged as potential areas of interest:

• The differences and benefits of reinsuring to various offshore jurisdictions
• Regulatory changes on asset adequacy testing for reinsurance
• Captive reinsurers, internal reinsurance, and sidecars
• Management of YRT treaties and rate increases
• Reinsurance counterparty risk exposure analysis
• Mortality studies and accelerated underwriting
• Trends in pension risk transfer (PRT) reinsurance

We believe the survey will provide a clearer picture of the industry’s most pressing concerns and help us focus on the topics that matter most.

Celebrating 40 Years of the SOA Reinsurance Section’s Newsletter

In 2025, we will celebrate the 40th anniversary of the SOA Reinsurance Section’s newsletter. As part of the celebration, we plan to host activities that revisit some of the most engaging articles from the past four decades, showcasing the evolution of the reinsurance industry. This retrospective will not only honor our history but also provide valuable insights for shaping the future.

Enhancing Engagement Through Webcasts and ReView Short Video Series

Our section has successfully sponsored quarterly webcasts in recent years, offering a platform for industry experts to share knowledge and address emerging concerns. We also collaborate with other SOA sections to broaden our reach. For example, recognizing the relatively lower representation of health professionals in our section, we partnered with the SOA Health Section to deliver content relevant to both health and reinsurance. These efforts aim to create valuable resources, attract new members, and foster a virtuous cycle of growth and engagement.

In 2024, we also launched the “Reinsurance Point of View ReView Series,” a collection of short videos featuring interviews with industry leaders. These videos, designed to address key questions, share market insights, and explore recent trends, cater to the growing preference for concise, 2-to-5-minute content. We are continually exploring innovative ways to engage with peers and share information effectively. (You are welcome to view the ReView Short Videos that we already posted.)

Advancing Research Initiatives

Collaboration with the SOA on research initiatives remains a cornerstone of our section’s work. We currently have several ongoing projects focused on offshore jurisdictions, complex assets, captives, etc. The results of our upcoming survey will help us prioritize future research projects to benefit both insurers and reinsurers.

Notably, our section has led a life-side reinsurance survey for over a decade in partnership with Munich Re. However, the absence of a similar survey on annuity reinsurance is a gap we aim to fill. With reinsurance utilization on the annuity side growing significantly—the ceded reserves have surpassed $300 billion, or approximately 20% of gross reserves as of year-end 2023 (see Figure 1) —a dedicated survey on the annuity side could set a milestone for the industry. We encourage input from all stakeholders on the contents to be included in the survey questionnaire, and hope for broad participation to ensure its success.

Figure 1
Reinsurance Utilization in Recent Years

*Data source: S&P

Looking Ahead

As we move forward, I invite all industry peers—whether from insurers, reinsurers, consulting firms, or other areas—to connect with us. Please visit our microsite on the SOA website, and join the SOA Reinsurance Group on LinkedIn to stay informed and engaged. Together, we can shape the future of reinsurance and build on the strong foundation established by our section.

Statements of fact and opinions expressed herein are those of the individual authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Society of Actuaries, the newsletter editors, or the respective authors’ employers.

Yiru (Eve) Sun, FSA, MAAA, Ph.D., is a managing director at Aon. Eve can be reached at eve.sun@aon.com.