The Messenger - TransamericaReinsurance.com RSS Feed

Longevity - The Next Growth Market

7/30/2010 12:00:00 AM

EDITOR’S NOTE: Longevity protection – or living benefits – is emerging as a growth opportunity for life insurers. In the following article, Michelle Moloney explores the British market, which has been an early mover in transferring longe...

Useful Tools for Assessing Claims Fluctuation

7/30/2010 12:00:00 AM

As a research actuary, I sometimes am asked if the statistics used in my work have any basis in the real world. Or, in other words, how does applied statistical theory stack up against experience?

A case in point is year-to-y...

Underwriting Audits: Improving Results and Delivery

7/30/2010 12:00:00 AM

Carriers use a number of tools to measure the performance of their underwriting shops, ranging from periodic internal reviews to using third-party consultants to audit operations. In its purest intent, the reinsurance underwriting audit is jus...

Term Life: Understanding Post-Level Experience

4/6/2010 12:00:00 AM
The life insurance industry is beginning to experience the effects of the so-called “shock lapse” as level-premium term products transition into their post-level periods. To understand the mortality implications of these extreme lapse scenarios, it s...

Non-Traditional Mortality Studies

4/6/2010 12:00:00 AM

Using the Social Security Administration’s Death Master File (DMF) provides the opportunity to perform non-traditional mortality studies – non-traditional in that they are not subject to the constraints of policy issue and policy administratio...

Underwriting Technologies: Focusing on Strategic Business Benefits

4/6/2010 12:00:00 AM

New life underwriting technologies have gained ground during the last decade. Recent surveys sponsored by the Society of Actuaries and other industry groups show strong inroads and increased confidence in these new tools. More significantly,...

Variable Annuities: The Lessons of 2009

4/6/2010 12:00:00 AM

The credit crisis of 2008, coupled with the ensuing downturn in global markets, now appears to have stabilized. Governments and central banks have employed various measures to restore calm to financial markets. Financial services firms have ex...

Weathering the Storm: Preparation and Relationships Matter

1/6/2010 12:00:00 AM

As we enter 2010, life insurance companies are in a much more favorable situation than a year ago, when extreme conditions threatened the viability of the entire financial industry. Today the environment is significantly more stable, and opp...

PBA: Preparing for Big Changes in the Way We Do Business

1/6/2010 12:00:00 AM

For quite some time, the efforts to develop a principles-based approach (PBA) to statutory reserves have been led by a small number of key players. While many others have followed their progress closely, the life insurance industr...

Valuation Manual Holds the Details

1/6/2010 12:00:00 AM

The NAIC took an important step toward a principles-based approach to insurance reserving with its September 23, 2009 vote to approve a revised Standard Valuation Law (SVL). The model law represents the core of the NAIC’s new framework for set...

A Glossary of Common PBR Terms

1/6/2010 12:00:00 AM

As the discussion of migrating to a principles-based environment grows, some terms are becoming more prominent in the life insurance lexicon. Below are some of the more common ones and why they are important for managers to consider.
<...

Causes of Death Shed Light on Mortality – Part 2

1/6/2010 12:00:00 AM

Analyzing insured mortality by cause of death (COD) often provides insights that a typical actual-to-expected study may not reveal. In Part 1 of this ser...

Black Swans and Mortality Risk

10/8/2009 12:00:00 AM

In The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Nassim Taleb explains the realm of the black swan. The former Wall Street “quant” turned philosopher describes two worlds: “Mediocristan,” where events far from the ordinary rare...

An Update on the Life Settlement Market

10/8/2009 12:00:00 AM

At the start of the year, many life insurers worried that rising unemployment and declining portfolio values would increase consumer demand for life settlements as a source of cash. Midway through 2009, we’ve seen the opposite. With few exce...

Cause of Death Study - Part 1

10/8/2009 12:00:00 AM

Analyzing insured mortality by cause of death (COD) often provides insights that a typical actual-to-expected study may not reveal. Our proprietary Transamerica Experience Database (TED) provides an excellent resource for examining COD statist...

In the News: Life Settlements

10/8/2009 12:00:00 AM

Editor's Note: The following is a sidebar accompanying the article entitled "An Update on the Life Settlements Mark...

In Times of Low Growth, Preservation is Key

10/8/2009 12:00:00 AM

LIMRA statistics indicate that life insurance sales have dropped across product lines, with a 23-percent drop in premium levels in the first half of 2009 compared to the same period a year earlier (U.S. Individual Life Insurance Sales Tr...

Variable Annuity Guarantees: What Went Wrong & What's Next

10/8/2009 12:00:00 AM

Executive Summary
The broad decline in financial markets worldwide had a significant impact on the insurance industry. Asset-intensive financial products, such as variable annuities with guarantees, have presented vari...

Term Life Pricing and Design: A New Day?

6/30/2009 12:00:00 AM

Life insurers have been taking small steps to address the performance of their term life portfolios for the past few years. They have been tightening underwriting guidelines, raising rates in specific pricing cells and, more recently, increasi...

Preparing for the Low Interest Rate Scenario

6/30/2009 12:00:00 AM
A wise actuary once said that we spend much more time on risks that we understand than on risks we’re not comfortable with. For example, actuaries spend hours calculating mortality and lapse rates, but we typically treat interest rates as a “standard...