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Chairperson's Corner

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By Christopher Teh

I am honored to be elected chairperson of the Society of Actuaries (SOA) Retirement Section Council (RSC) for 2024–2025. I am grateful for the opportunity to serve our members in this capacity. I am excited to lead the RSC in continuing its mission to support retirement actuaries and retirement systems through research and continuing education.

RSC Membership

This year's RSC membership includes three new members: James Stewart, Mark Shemtob and Joel Albers. Our six returning members include Alicia Traviss, Jamie Sloat, Jeff Passmore, Jeff Williams, Grant Martin, and me. Grant Martin has been elected as our vice chairperson, James Stewart as secretary, and Mark Shemtob as budget manager.

We will miss Greg Hawes and David Rosenblum's invaluable contributions and extensive retirement practice experience. We thank them for all their service and hope that each will continue to serve as a Friend of the Council.

The RSC is grateful for the continued support of the SOA’s engagement specialist Carla Eisenberg and senior research actuary Steven Siegel, who provide us with updates on SOA policies and other programs.

RSC Annual Plan

In October 2024, we held our RSC annual meeting in the newly opened SOA headquarters in Chicago where we were shown around its beautiful and modern workspace. In addition to hearing from our Communication, Research, and Continuing Education subcommittees, led by Hal Tepfer, David Cantor and Andre-Claude Menard, respectively, we received an update on the MP-2021 mortality projection scale (including why the SOA has yet to release an updated version and how the COVID mortality experience from 2020 to 2023 is making its analysis of the SOA's current mortality projection scale more difficult).

Looking forward, we brainstormed innovative ideas for 2025 and decided to focus on the following:

  • Various methods of offering income solutions in defined contribution plans, a critical need for our evolving retirement system;
  • Alternative ways to increase a defined benefit plan’s hedge ratio to reduce the plan’s interest rate risks without compromising the plan's expected return on assets—including the potential use of derivative products and how to implement and explain such products to clients; and
  • Development of an annuity settlement yield curve (currently produced by large consulting firms) to be accessible to the broader retirement practice community for pension risk transfer analysis.

We also discussed the possibility of expanding the research project "What Retirement Plan Features Do Employees Really Want?" which was started by Lee Gold, one of our former RSC members.

Closing Statement

We welcome new volunteers to assist us with our various projects. If you are interested, please get in touch with me or any other SOA RSC leadership team member. Please watch for the quarterly RSC publications and SOA webcasts throughout 2025. More information can be found in the SOA Retirement Section on the RSC website.

I would like to thank the RSC members again for giving me the opportunity to lead the SOA Retirement Section Council for the coming year. I believe that we can accomplish amazing things together.

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

Christopher Teh, FSA, CFA, EA, FCA, MAAA, is a director and consulting actuary at Gallagher’s Benefits and HR Consulting practice (formerly Buck Global LLC) in New York. He can be contacted at christopher.teh@buck.com or christopher_teh@ajg.com.