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Posts feedSweating your data assets
In recent years insurers have looked to making better use of the data they already have. The appeal is simple: if you have already collected the data, then it is like leaving money on the table if it is not being exploited to the full.
A dip in the data pool
In the distant past, individual insurers had relatively modest business volumes and the industry needed to pool its data to get an overall data set of sufficient credibility.
Postcode pricing in 15 minutes!
Just a short post to announce we've revised our overview videos for both Longevitas and mortalityrating.com.
Early retirements
Members of defined-benefit pension schemes can often retire early if they are in poor health. Unsurprisingly, such ill-health retirements exhibit higher mortality rates than those who retire at the normal scheme age.
Accelerating improvements in mortality
In February 2009 a variation on the Lee-Carter model for smoothing and projecting mortality rates was presented to the Faculty of Actuaries. A key question for any projection model is whether the process being modelled is stable. If the process is not stable, then a model assuming it is stable will give misleading projections. Equally, a model which makes projections by placing a greater emphasis on recent data will be better able to identify a change in tempo of the underlying p
Basis risk in mortality projections
In a recent paper Stephen Richards and I discuss the effect of model choice on mortality forecasts. Our approach is quite low key: we look at just three models, all members of the Lee-Carter family. Nevertheless, our findings are quite dramatic: even within this very small family the differences in the forecasts really matter financially. So model choice matters.
Transforming the user experience
We were asked recently whether the rating reports from mortalityrating.com could be extracted into a Microsoft Office format to use in an automated document production process. As the actual reports are in Adobe PDF format, tackling this question head-on wouldn't necessarily be easy.
Mortality shocks
Mortality, and in particular rapidly improving mortality, has shot up the actuarial agenda in recent years. Actuaries have been caught by surprise not so much by the improvement (which has been happening steadily for over a hundred years now) but by the acceleration in the improvement.
Winter mortality
In previous posts we looked at seasonal fluctuations in mortality. Since the UK is about to experience some particularly cold weather again, we will look at winter mortality in more detail.
Concentrate!
One of the challenges in modelling financial portfolios is the concentration of risk arising from the fact wealthier people will usually have significantly higher benefits than the less well-off.