This technical note highlights the functioning of the profit sharing mechanism of life insurance products using the example of classical German life contracts. The profit sharing and guarantee features of these contracts are potentially very costly from a capital requirements perspective, making...

For variable annuity policies, management fees for the most standard guarantees are charged at a constant rate throughout the term of the policy. This creates a misalignment of risk and income - the fee income is low when the option value is high, and vice versa. In turn, this may create adverse...

The purpose of this article is to value some life insurance contracts in a stochastic interest rate environment taking into account the default risk of the underlying insurance company. The participating life insurance contracts considered here can be expressed as portfolios of barrier options...

Variable annuities, as a class of retirement income products, allow equity market exposure for a policyholder's retirement fund with electable additional guarantees to limit the downside risk of the market. Management fees and guarantee insurance fees are charged respectively for the market...

We analyze the benefit to the insured of newly traded, innovative life insurance contracts. On a sequence of yearly reference days, the insured can choose between a guaranteed return (linked to the insurer's asset result) and a capped index participation. The cap is adjusted at the beginning of...

Complex insurance risks typically have multiple exposures. Options on multiple underliers with a short maturity are employed to hedge this exposure. Hedges are illustrated for GMWBVA accounts invested in the nine sector ETF's of the US economy. The underliers are simulated risk neutrally by...

Guarantees embedded variable annuity contracts exhibit option-like payoff features and the pricing of such instruments naturally leads to risk neutral valuation techniques. This paper considers the pricing of two types of guarantees; namely, the Guaranteed Minimum Maturity Benefit and the...

We propose new Unconditional, Independence and Conditional Coverage VaR-forecast backtests for the case of annuity pricing under a Bayesian framework that significantly minimise the direct and indirect effects of $p$-hacking or other biased outcomes in decision-making, in general. As a...